The Geek Feminist Revolution: Essays

by Kameron Hurley

If you’re wondering why there’s been an explosive backlash against women in geek and popular culture, this is the reason: the status quo and mainstream ideas about how the world works must be maintained by those who benefit most from it, and to do that, voices that speak of actual reality, or a different future, must be silenced.

The title also gave voice to something I felt all the time—that I was a human, a man—not in the sense that I felt disassociated from my female body, but in the sense that I, too, had bought that women were somehow “other” and I wasn’t “other” so I must be a man, a real human too, right? I’d internalized an astonishing amount of misogyny growing up that I didn’t even recognize until my early twenties.

You can fight all you want for individual wins, and fight to be the “exceptional” woman, but so long as there’s institutionalized oppression, bias, and unregulated, out-of-control capitalism that treats people as disposable objects, you’re an exception, not a rule. So long as the people with the power—to hire and fire you, approve or deny your loan, or write up your speeding ticket—look at you through the lens of institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia, or any other -ism they’ve learned from stories, videos, media, and other biased individuals, a single win means nothing. We cannot effect true change alone.

It wasn’t about one woman toiling against the universe. It was about all of us moving together, crying out into some black, inhospitable place that we would not be quiet, we would not go silently, we would not stop speaking, we would not give in.

And just as I take comfort in their voices, sometimes, I realize, it’s my voice that needs to be the comforting one, too. When I can afford the risk, it’s my responsibility to step up. Because if enough people pass the buck, and pretend this is somebody else’s problem, then suddenly it becomes no one’s problem, and we slide backward, and we go back those ten steps, and we go back to square one.

You have to strip all that away to see it for what it is: Sexism is about power. Sexism is about controlling the means of production. At its core, sexism has very little to do with the act of sex.

Women with real power are not there to be looked at. They are there to act.

There are many ways to silence a woman, and not all of them involve getting her to stop speaking. Sometimes it’s enough to simply ensure all she speaks about is you.

So when people tell me that including “so many” nonwhite characters in my fiction is “political” or that I’m trying to make some kind of “statement,” I can’t help countering with the fact that the “statement” made by every writer with a white monochrome world is also deeply political, even more so because it’s based on a false sense of normal that’s been carefully and systematically constructed for hundreds of years in this country (and others).

Gamergate was the organized, fully weaponized version of the stalker ex-boyfriend. It was like getting all the stalker ex-boyfriends together at a convention and giving them a hashtag to go vent about the wrongs done to them by all women everywhere.

I am tired of being asked, again and again, what women can do to save these men. What women can do to shield themselves from them. What women can do to protect themselves. I want a new conversation around what men can do to be better. What men can do to fix what is broken. What men can do to become human again, instead of wallowing in this monstrous stew of suffering and disappointment. I want to know what men can do to build a better world.

Start actually listening. For once in your privileged life, listen. Listen. Because if I punched you, and you said, “Gosh, that really hurt,” and I said, “YOU ARE FUCKING CENSORING ME YOU FUCKING COMMUNIST,” you’d think I was insane.

And when we talk about “people” we don’t really mean “men and women.” We mean “people and female people.” We talk about “American Novelists” and “American Women Novelists.”1 We talk about “Teenage Coders” and “Lady Teenage Coders.”2

Somebody needs to be the person who says something is wrong. We can’t pretend we don’t see it. Because people have been murdered and assaulted on street corners where hundreds of people milled around, pretending everything was normal. But pretending it was normal didn’t make it so. Somebody has to point it out. Somebody has to get folks to move. Somebody has to act.

I have the power to reach back to you long after I am dead, through these spidery marks on paper or pixels, and remind you that you have a voice, you have agency, and your voice is stronger and more powerful than you could ever imagine, and long after I am gone, you can pick up this beer beside me and carry on the work we are doing now, the work we have always been doing, the work we will always do, until the world looks the way we imagine it can be.