But the stupidest part…

Is probably their own response. It relies on my favourite ever internet debating style, in which you reproduce your opponents’ arguments verbatim, say something along the lines of “Hahaha, that is so stupid I do not even know where to BEGIN!” and then act as if the entire thing is beneath you without ever actually providing a cogent rebuttal. It’s no surprise that it’s most popular among the sort of people who’d write and read a blog like The Spearhead, because it’s the kind of response they get from everyone else, and if it works for them, then it’ll work for us too, right? Right? It’s best to think of them as the debating equivalent of ten year olds who believe that watching Dragonball has taught them ninjitsu.

But glibness only works if you’re obviously, unambiguously better than your opponents,  which would be hard to accept from The Spearhead even if they hadn’t provided conclusive evidence to the contrary by quoting the people they were arguing with. What makes it doubly tragic is that they open by quoting someone who effectively brings nothing but ad hominems to the table, yet The Spearhead’s criticism of her serves only to remind us that they’re even more vacuous than their trolls; Versy, amidst the abuse, at least points out that women write Star Trek, whereas the best The Spearhead can do is accuse her of using “shaming language”. Boy, oh boy, do the men’s movement have a defiantly heterosexual hard-on for the phrase “shaming language” of late, and its not hard to see the appeal. Just written a screed about how decadent Ameriskanks have forced you to move to Siberia, where men are men and women are orifices who’ve learned to cook? When people call you a misogynist, it’s not because you’re actually a misogynist, it’s because they’re trying to shame you. And when people say your incoherent rant about women not putting out enough sounds like you’re trying to justify date rape, that’s shaming too! And that time you were staring down that woman’s dress and she rolled her eyes? Yup, shaming. Christ, people are so immature.

And yet it gets worse.  It’s worth keeping in mind that this is a post The Spearhead put together themselves, and thus had control over what to include and what to leave out. Since we know from prior experience that they’re not big on, say, facts, we might expect that if they came across a really, really good argument against them, they might not want to draw attention to it, and that if they did, they’d have a really, really good response. I mean, they’re not exactly on the spot here; there was a week in between the original article being published and the response-to-the-responses appearing, which is more than adequate to come up with something more substantial then “shaming tactics”. So when they reproduce a comment which includes…

First fully realized science fiction novel: Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.

…we’d expect, y’know, some kind of argument against the assertion that Frakenstein was the first science fiction novel. Its not as if there aren’t any. A lot of them are quite well-argued, and also have the advantage of coming from a position of genuine literary criticism rather than paranoid misogyny, which is always a plus if you’re trying to look reasonable. But the best our heroes can do – in a article they have complete control over the content of, remember – is:

This is the most typical troll response. Throw out one or two facts out of context and then use sexual shaming language.

Out of context…? I mean, I’m well aware we’re not dealing with the cream of human intellect here, but surely, surely they must be aware that, in an article about women in science fiction, Frankenstein is the most contextually contextual book that ever contexted? Do they actually not realise that they — wait, they just tried to take someone down by telling them they’ve “got a lot of time on their hands”, which is my second favourite internet debating style. To be fair, the comment in question actually is a massive waste of time, but it still took less time to write than anything in The Spearhead, so getting all judgmental about it is, perhaps, unwise.

Someone does eventually tackle the Frankenstein argument in the article comments, although he gets the subtitle wrong and can’t be bothered looking up the publication date, two pieces of information that I’ll hazard a guess are probably available on the internet. His argument is that, despite what “feminized academia” want us to believe, we should instead look to Gulliver’s Travels – which “featured advance science” – and Utopia – which also features “science” – as the first examples of science fiction novels, both written by manly manly man men. Well, yes, if your definition of science fiction is “a story that happens to include science at some point”, but that’s not what Aldiss was getting at when he named Frankenstein as the first science fiction novel: Frankenstein is a watershed moment because it’s a story about how life itself, previously something primal, cosmic and wholly spritiual, something only God was supposed to be able to control, is suddenly put in the hands of one man, not because he has superpowers or a pact with Satan, but because he understands biology. The “science” in Gulliver and Utopia, that well-known firm of solicitors, doesn’t have anywhere near the same impact on the narratives, and is just there to provide a pseudo-rational explanation for flying islands and immortality devices. Still, the SF TV shows they were whining about work in pretty much the same way, so it’s understandable that someone would take this approach to defining “proper” science fiction.

So there you go. This is but a sampling of the trollery we have attracted, and seems to indicate that our primary foes in the gender wars are insecure, female nerds who know they live in a house of cards.

Since I opened this post by complaining about believing a response is beneath you, I can’t reasonably just say “uh huh” and leave you all to bask in the radiating fuckwittery. So, on the offchance anyone from Spearhead sees this and they haven’t given up reading by this point: If you’re scared shitless of women contaminating SF with their doilies and menstrual blood, then the insecure party might actually be you.

“First fully realized science fiction novel: Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.

Your premise is as invalid as it is insulting, ignorant, and all-around laughable. Enjoy having to pay for sex for most of your life.”

“Frankenstein” or “The Hidden Prometheus” was written around 1800. “Gulliver’s Travels” which featured advanced science was written 50 years before that. In 1516, Thomas Moore wrote “Utopia” About a fictional place with science and technology so advanced that death and suffering were nearly eliminated. In the 1600’s Cyrano DeBergerac wrote “The Other World: The comical history of the States and Empires of the Moon” which involved space travel.

Mary Shelley’s work was certainly groundbreaking and deserves merit, but she was hardly the first science fiction writer, despite what the feminized academia might have us believe.