(A/N: This essay was written some weeks ago, before the Cultural Appropriation discussion turned into RaceFail '09 and also into OutingFansFail '09.  Much more has been said at much greater length across the 'Net, and you can find most of it here thanks to rydra_wong's patient link-keeping.  There are even links to quick summaries for people who want the short version.)

If you've been in a hole for the last two months, you may have missed what's been going on.  While the most recent flux of conversation has been surrounding a certain famous author's mea culpa, followed by a lot of Fail on the part of her friends and colleagues, and finally by her admission that she was "humoring" the FoCs who'd critiqued her work, this latest iteration of AppropriationFail and RaceFail has been brewing at least since the announcement of the (all-White) casting for the Avatar: The Last Airbender movie a few months back.

Short form: cultural appropriation is STILL not cool.

What does that mean? Well, in its simplest form, cultural appropriation means looking at another culture (even one that's ostensibly a subculture of your own) as an uninvolved spectator, mining it for nifty and shiny things you particularly enjoy, then presenting these in your work as a way of being "deep," "relevant" and/or "meaningful" without taking the time to understand the nuances of the culture or the meanings these things already had within that culture. It's a teenaged Caucasian American girl wearing a red dot on her forehead as a fashion statement. It's casting David Carradine as a Shaolin monk. It's distilling thousands of years of history and culture and love and hate and humanity into a tiny Noble Savage mold and pouring out plastic NDNz for the White hero to learn from about living off the land before he Gets the Girl and Saves the Day.

It sucks, really.

And it doesn't mean that people from one culture (or gender, or lifestyle, or orientation, or anything else) can't or shouldn't write people from another. They should. We should. But it means extra work. It means learning those nuances, even the painful ones. It means having to look at the world around you without the comfortable glasses you get to wear when you're in the majority (or just in charge) that filter out the really crappy things about where we are.

We will start with the example of gender. Now, most creators and writers for our shows and books and movies are male. Note that I'm not saying that's a bad thing, simply a fact. We're science fiction and fantasy fans, and our media nowadays tends to be made by geeky guys who grew up watching Star Trek and Doctor Who, and all of whom secretly want their own lightsabers. Some of them are really, really good at creating, writing, and developing female characters. Some aren't. In general, when they write female characters as actual people, given actual development and interests and goals and opinions and lives, we say, "Frak, yeah, she's awesome!" And still, the writers are mostly guys, and while the guys are peripherally aware of rape and battery and pay disparity and the Mommy Wars and all the other things that inform the day-to-day lives of women, they don't have to live them and they don't have to think about them unless they want to.

While they may even have been personally touched by sexual violence, they haven't, for example, spent years talking with friends about what happened when they were drunk or drugged or otherwise coerced into sex, and they can, but usually don't, bring that background onto the page and into the characters. Traumatic, life-changing experiences become jokes, and the ages-old "Well, she deserved it for wearing that outfit / being out alone at night / believing him" is at best addressed in a metaphor with vampires but more typically doesn't even make the cut in character motivations except in shoehorned revelatory backstories about childhood abuse. There isn't the understanding that fear of rape is present, in whatever small doses and buried under however much denial, in every woman's daily life from the day she's old enough to know what it is. It informs clothing choices and activities and dating partners, and while those writers capture the form of it, very few grok that the fear extends towards the male heroes too. So we see a fantasy world that resembles ours, but with off-kilter differences, and sometimes that's a good thing – Dr. Merlin watches cartoons preferentially because sometimes a Y-7 safety zone is the best thing to maintaining one's sanity – and sometimes it's a reminder that, to half the population, we are often as exotic and incomprehensible as Moon maidens.

That doesn't mean men can't write female characters. That doesn't mean men shouldn't write female characters. It means that any given male writer is, from time to time, going to screw up writing about women, that he's going to get called on it, especially from female fans who have seen these same damned problems before, and that he's going to have to decide whether to get defensive or fix the problem for next time. It means he's going to have to stand back and see the world from the point of view of someone raised female in a culture that celebrates masculinity and denigrates things associated with femininity (while fetishizing particular body parts, as if those are not part of the whole). Worse, it means having to examine his place in that world, and what he's done, or passively allowed to happen, because it's easier to maintain that status quo than get branded an extremist, or worse, a pussy. (Word choice intentional. It's a common insult, used to call someone weak, using a slang term for an uniquely female body part. This is what I mean. Just so we're clear.)

Okay. With me so far?

Writing a culture you do not share, be it Japanese culture, Chinese culture, Inuit culture, American Black culture, any of the myriad of African cultures, any of the many NDN cultures, anything, is like male showrunners writing female characters. No one is saying don’t do it. People are saying do it right, do it respectfully, and admit it and fix it when you flub those two. Even when it's metaphorical. I am by far not the only fan sick of the only CoC on a given SF series being the semi-primitive alien who speaks in stilted English, who is the brute muscle on the team, and whose character development ends up tracking closely one of a very small handful of well-traveled stereotyped paths. Also, setting your series in a location where one would typically expect to see a reasonably heavy concentration of non-White faces, and yet casting all the stars and guest spots the same pale shade, is not magically made better by putting in vampires and demons and then saying people aren't interpreting your metaphor properly. This also applies to blue, green, and purple aliens.

(cont. on Page 2)