Category: Ethics

Where to Buy Books Other than Amazon

Jess MahlerLeave a comment

A few years back I had a habit of every six months or so doing a thread on Fedi about options for getting books other than Amazon. Eventually it finally occurred to me that I could write it once, put it up on website, and update as needed, rather than constantly reinventing the wheel.

Here’s the updated version for the new site.

Couple of notes before we get started:

This is geared towards US book sellers. I just don’t know much about book sellers in other countries. If you know any others please leave them in the comments.

Many folks aren’t aware that Goodreads is owned by Amazon (as, of course, is Audible, and anything with ‘Kindle’ in the branding). The focus here is ebooks, but we’ll also talk a bit about audio books, Goodreads alternatives, and anything else I can squeeze in.

Ebooks:

Authors website — some authors have a webstore where you can buy their books. Bonus: Author gets more money

Publishers website — ditto, without the bonus

Smashwords — support indie authors!

Your Local Bookstore — some indie book stores have ebook sales. (Don’t know any local book stores? Find one on Indie Bound)

Someone’s Local Bookstore — if your local book store doesn’t, you can find a list of other local book stores that do through Indiebound (downside, must use the My Must Reads app)

DriveThruFiction — lots of indie and oddball stuff

Kobo — will give a percentage to your local book store (or someone else’s local bookstore) downside: DRM-locked books can only be read in app or the Kobo e-reader, some books now readable in browser

Google books — yeah, it’s Google. But when it comes to books, google is the lesser of two evils. Many of the same problems as Kobo, but all DRM-locked books can be read in browser

Avoid

Barnes & Noble — their DRM thing won’t let you read your books if you don’t have an active credit card on file

Amazon (of course)

Pulp Books:

Your Local Bookstore

Authors website — some authors have a webstore where you can buy their books. Bonus: Author gets more money

Publishers website — ditto, without the bonus

Someone’s Local Bookstore — Book Bound will let you pick a local store to shop from

Thrift Books — great for used books of all types

Avoid

ABEBooks (It’s owned by Amazon)

Amazon (of course)

Walmart (it’s Walmart)

Audio Books

Librevox — free audio versions of books in the public domain

Libro.fm — subscription service similar to Audible, but you can download actual MP3 files

Chirp — really good sales

Avoid

Audible (owned by Amazon)

KU Alternatives

Everand — monthly subscription to thousands of ebooks, audio books, magazines, and more. BONUS! Many KU ebooks are available on Everand as audiobooks so you can leave KU and still read stuff from some of your fave authors.

Your Local Library — Go old fashioned! Paper books, ebooks, and audio books for free!

Kobo Plus

24Symbols

Goodreads Alternatives

(Yeah, Amazon owns Goodreads)

Storygraph

Bookwyrm

LibraryThing (better for institutions than individuals, but some folks make it work)

Where I Buy Books

My book buying priorities are:

I want DRM free ebooks in .epub format

I want the author to be paid as much as possible

So the first place I look is on the authors website.

Many authors have their on webstores these days. Those webstores almost always offer DRM free epub, and if I’m buying from the website I know that the ‘retailers cut’ on an sale is ALSO going to the author.

My next stop is the publishers webstore (if there is a publisher who has a webstore. Most of them don’t, but a few do.)

If neither the author nor publisher have a webstore, my next stops (in order) are:

Smashwords

Google Books

Kobo

Used bookstores for paper copies

I prefer to buy ebooks because they are cheaper and I’m less likely to lose them if my family becomes homeless again. The cheaper is not the biggest factor these days, which is why used bookstore is the last spot on the list. Authors don’t get a percentage when I buy used books, and I want them to get paid. So even though used books are cheaper than ebooks, I go for ebooks first.

I also have an Everand account and (of course) Overdrive through my library.

Community Suggestions

Stuff other folks have suggested that will be added to the main article in the next update:

Bookshop.org

Waterstones – UK

Blackwell’s – UK w/ international shipping

Better World Books – Used

eBay – Used

Pluto Press – UK

Kenny’s Bookshop — Ireland

Standard Ebooks — public domain ebooks

Project Gutenberg — public domain ebooks

Alibris — US and UK with international shipping

What Is Harm?

Jess MahlerLeave a comment

I was drafting a ‘Teshuva procedure’ (the traditional Jewish version of a ‘restorative justice process’) for my synagogue when I ran into a small problem. How could I define the situations the procedure was designed to address and the types it wasn’t. Easy to say ‘harm and harassment,’ but what is harm?

For all the discourse around harm reduction, restorative justice, etc., I realized that I’ve never seen anyone talking about this important question. What is harm?

How do we define it?

Many people in leftist spaces have defaulted to an ‘I know it when I see it’ view of harm. Which anyone familiar with history knows won’t work as a practical definition. It inevitably ends up as a silencing and oppression tactic. After all, if I know harm when I see it and I don’t recognize harm being done to people I see as ‘other’… at best, I don’t have power over them, and they will need to argue for recognition of the harm they have experienced. At worst, I have do power over them and can silence them directly.

Another popular approach (not just in leftist spaces) is to self-define harm. If someone says they are harmed, then they are harmed. This sounds like a fine system — until someone says that your existence makes them uncomfortable and you are harming them by existing. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem like a very workable definition.

Other discussions are happening now, discussions that talk around the question ‘what is harm.’ This discussion on Tumblr, for instance, talks about the problems with equating ‘uncomfortable’ with ‘harm’. If you stare out of the corner of your eye, you can see the fuzzy edges of other definitions taking form.

But as an autistic person, I have been burned by these kinds of fuzzy, not-defined-but-understood social weirdnesses before. I really dislike this way of defining a thing.

I want to see actual discourse. What is harm? What does it mean when we say someone or some group has been harmed? Is all harm the same?

What Is Harm?

We’ll never going to come up with a perfect definition of ‘harm.’ Language is not only ever-evolving but inherently imprecise. That doesn’t mean we can’t try for a good-enough definition.

No one person will be able to come up with a good-enough definition on their own. We need to see lots of discussion and debate to reach a comprehensive, widely applicable definition.

(Let me acknowledge here that I’m sure these discussions have been happening in scholarly circles. But those discussions and definitions haven’t filtered out into mainstream use, which is where they are needed.)

But I’ll put in my two bits and see if anyone wants to riff off them:

‘Harm’ is action that interferes with or prevents full access to personal autonomy or public spaces.

  1. If someone breaks my leg, then both my personal autonomy (ability to choose where to go and when, financial autonomy [paying for medical bills], etc) and my access to many public spaces are restricted. If the TSA takes away someone’s mobility device, their personal autonomy (ability to choose where to go and when etc) and access to public spaces are restricted. Both of these are harm – even if my leg will heal and the mobility device will (hopefully) be returned.
  2. Harm must be an action (including speech actions). It cannot be thought, idea, or intention. However, intention to harm can be an ethical violation in and of itself, even if no harm is caused.
  3. Harm can be accidental or even done without awareness of causing harm.
  4. Any entity can cause harm – who takes the action is not part of the definition and should not be.
  5. Preventing access to other people’s private spaces (without other consequences) is not harm. I do not harm you by blocking you from my blog or not letting you in my home.
  6. Harm is not always unethical. A dentist pulling my tooth is harming me (pain bad enough to interfere with daily life, restrictions on eating, potential long-term dental issues). But if my tooth is damaged enough then the harm of pulling it may be necessary to protect my long-term health. If someone attacks me and I punch them to defend myself, I have harmed them. But they would not have been harmed if they had not acted with intent to harm me first.
  7. Harm can be consented to. I can consent to having my tooth pulled, to ‘extreme’ sports, to kink without safe words, etc. This consent (like all consent) can be withdrawn.

What do you think?

How would you modify this definition?

Or what alternative definition would you propose?

This definition fails to address some harm beyond the individual level. What about ‘harm to the environment’ or ‘harm to the community’? Or broad-scale harms like cultural appropriation. I have no idea how to fix this, do you?

Walking Away from the ‘Zon

Jess MahlerLeave a comment

On January 1st, 2026, I will be unpublishing all my fiction ebooks from Kindle Direct Publishing. If you have been interested in my books and prefer to buy from Amazon, now’s the time to get them before they are gone.

That said, I’d prefer you didn’t. All of my stuff is available through other retailers, including Smashwords, where you can download a clean epub or mobi file and upload it to your Kindle. (Smashwords End of Year Sale is going right now, so you can even get my books at a discount there if you buy now.)

Unfortunately, I know my leaving the Zon — that many authors leaving the Zon — is not going to have any impact. Amazon has proven time and time again they simply don’t care about authors. What will make a difference — the only thing that will make a difference — is if readers start leaving Amazon in large numbers.

I’m asking you today to consider doing just that.

Why You Should Leave Amazon

  1. You don’t own your books — I’m far from the first to point this out, and I won’t be the last. But with Amazon all you are buying is a license to read the book. A license that can be revoked at any time, with no warning. More than one person has logged onto to Kindle to find a favorite books just… gone.
  2. Amazon is an evil corporation with a capital ‘E’ — Do I really need to go into this one? From the way they treat their workers, to how they have withheld royalties to authors, to their ‘Kindle U’ walled garden meant to make them an ebook monopoly, to so many other things, Amazon is evil. We know this. It’s time to act on it.
  3. Amazon is a reader trap — I’ve talked before about how Amazon is an author trap. It’s also a reader trap. It uses a variety of tools to create the illusion that you have to buy from them, that you don’t have choices. You do, don’t let anyone take them from you.

You Can Save Your Library

One big reason people give for not leaving Amazon is they already have so many books there they don’t want to lose. In other words, sunk cost fallacy.

First off, just because you start buying books elsewhere doesn’t mean you’ll lose access to your Kindle books. You can keep reading you Kindle books as long as Amazon doesn’t fuck you over.

But you also don’t need to let Amazon hold your books hostage. There are ways to jailbreak your Kindle books. These may not be available to everyone, but they should be an option for most folks.

I managed to download and save my Kindle ebooks years ago using Calibre. You can still do that, though it’s a bit more of a hassle thanks to Amazon’s perpetual updates. Here’s a guide to two ways to get your Amazon ebooks that still work last I heard. Both require Calibre, which is a free ebook library organizer.

You Can Get Books Lots of Places

There was a time when Amazon was one of the only places to get ebooks, but that time is long gone. In fact, there are good alternatives to Audible and KU now as well.

Check out Where to Buy Books Other than Amazon to get started!

On Queer Fiction

Jess MahlerLeave a comment

Queer is both a adjective and a verb. One can be a queer person, and one can queer shit up. To queer is hard to define — as hard to define as ‘kink’ and ‘love’ — but inherent in any working definition of ‘to queer’ must be ‘to fuck with the status quo.’

If you aren’t shaking shit up, you aren’t queering it. If you aren’t fucking with people’s expectations and overturning world views, you aren’t queering.

There is lots of lgbt+ fiction. There is far less queer fiction. To be queer fiction, it is not enough to have queer characters. To be queer fiction, the story must also queer. A story may queer expectations of romance and relationships, or ideas about society, or genre tropes. It may challenge the current societal status quo or propose an entirely new worldview. Perhaps all of these at the same time.

I write queer fiction. Mostly spec fic — fantasy and sci-fi. Mostly found family. Often kinky. But to the extent I can manage, always queer. What I love most is queering ideas about love and family but sometimes I’ll get a kick out of queering tropes, or ideas about how society can work, or even classical literature.

It isn’t always comfortable to read (or write). But it is always mine.

Queerly yours,
Jess

How can relationships successfully deal with the issue of grudging consent?

Jess MahlerLeave a comment

Note: This is based on an answer I wrote on Quora a number of years ago. The original question was from a monogamous person grudgingly agreeing to a polyamorous relationship, but my response resonated with people in a variety of circumstances. It was one of my popular Quora answers, as well as one of the most personally meaningful.

I’m going to take a stab at this. On the one hand, I agree with many folks who say that grudging consent is not consent. On the other hand, I am in a relationship where resentment and grudgingly dealing with shit is a regular part of our day. Not because of polyamory but because of disability. So I have a slightly different perspective on relationships that include resentment and grudging going-along-with than most people.

So, some background. My partner was not disabled when we entered a relationship together. They were working, had some ongoing health problems. While we had the normal ups and downs, we did okay.

They became disabled over a year, gradually getting worse, then suddenly getting worse, getting better for a little while then getting worse again. We’ve worked hard to keep our relationship going, but it’s been a struggle. I can’t leave them alone with the baby, which means I NEVER go anywhere without the baby. Half the time they can’t wash their own hair, so I need to wash their hair for them. And there are only so many times a day you can be asked to interrupt what you are doing to get someone else a drink before it starts to grate on you.

We’ve been together for about 7 years now. Their health has varied a great deal over that period: including one hospitalization, numerous ER trips, and brief periods when they’ve been able to put their cane away, watch the kid while I worked a night job, or help with the housework.

I love them, I am happy to be in a relationship with them, and I resent the hell out of their disability and the demands it makes of me every fucking day.

Obviously, every relationship is different. As I always say: take what is useful, ignore what is not.

Every day you choose. This is the most important thing of all relationships—every day you choose to be in that relationship. You didn’t say “yes” once, and that was the end of it. Every day you either choose “I’m in this relationship and I’m going to make it work,” or you choose “I can’t/won’t/don’t want to make this work anymore.” Sometimes you need to say “I’m in this relationship, but I need to take care of myself today, so I’m going to step back and will get back in the harness of making this relationship work tomorrow.” That’s okay. But every day you choose. If everyone involved in a relationship says every day, “I’m going to make this relationship work,” the relationship can last through just about anything.

If the relationship stops being healthy for you, it’s time to choose to stop making it work. Don’t force a relationship to work at the expense of your own health and well-being.

Focus on the good things. Living with and taking care of a disabled partner is its own kind of hell. Especially when you don’t have a diagnosis and have no idea if your partner is suffering from a chronic condition or if they are dying and you don’t even know it. You can’t think about it too much, or you will drive yourself crazy. Similarly, a mono partner in mono/poly can’t focus on dates and fears that their poly partner will “find someone better” or other negatives of mono/poly. Focus on the good in your relationship. (Etc for other kinds of relationships.)
(They make me laugh. No one ever made me laugh like this before. They understand me, my depression, my anxiety, my PTSD, and they accept all of it. And they try. Always, they try to do better and be better. Some days, I’m afraid they’ll break themself trying but better, so much better, that they try than that they give up.)

Find ways to adapt. How does disability (poly) change your relationship? How can you change your routines and expectations to work with, rather than against, those changes?

Trust. I need to trust that my partner is doing everything he can. That when they tell me they can’t get to the kitchen to get themself a glass of water, they really are in that much pain. That when they say they can’t wash their hair, they really can’t reach their arms over their head. A mono partner needs to trust that when their poly partner says, “I love you and I won’t leave you,” they mean it. That a poly partner who says “Having sex with someone else doesn’t change how I feel about you,” is telling the truth. The mono partner may not understand how their poly partner can feel this way, but they need to trust that it is true. (Etc for other kinds of relationships.)

I never consented to life with disability. I live with my partner’s disability grudgingly, resentfully, and sometimes painfully. But I love my partner, we are good together, and to be with them I put up with their disability. We talk about it. I cry on their shoulder about how I resent it and how much it demands of me, and they don’t blame me or get defensive because they understand. Sometimes they cry on my shoulder about how they hate hurting me, how they feel like I should leave them and be with someone better because I deserve more. And I hold them and tell them I love them, and being with them is worth all this and more.

I can’t tell you how to turn grudging consent into acceptance. I’m still trying to find the trick to that myself. But I hope this helps.

Just remember, every day you choose. And if there is often something to be celebrated in choosing to continue a difficult relationship, there is no shame in deciding that you can’t anymore. We can only give so much without harming ourselves, after all.

Personal update: I wrote this answer over 8 years ago, and a lot has happened since then. I mentioned in this answer that we didn’t have a diagnosis and so didn’t know if my partner was dealing with a chronic condition or something life-threatening. It turned out to be a whole constellation of different problems: some chronic, some treatable. One of the treatable ones was life-threatening, but since it was treatable, that’s not a concern anymore (thank god!) They are still disabled, and so am I now, but we are still choosing each other every day.

Breaking Free of Kindle Unlimited

Jess MahlerLeave a comment

Kindle Unlimited is an author trap. It is a very successful author trap, in part because when you sign up it doesn’t look like a trap.

I’m not the first to say this, and I won’t be the last. Many indie authors have been realizing they are trapped on KU but don’t know how to escape.

The good news: escape is absolutely possible.

The bad news: fast, easy, or painless — you can’t have all three. Often, you can only have one.

A Bit of Background

The trap that Amazon sets is an old one. I first ran into it as a kid.

My grandfather ran the family business. He’d started it when my dad was a kid and ran it successfully for many years. After he retired, my dad and uncle tried to take over, but they struggled with it. Lots of reasons.

Eventually, they got an offer from a long-time client. The client, rather than handling each project individually and going around to different businesses to see who was available, wanted to contract with the family business to do all their projects.

My dad was ecstatic. This was huge! This contract alone would bring in 80% of the company’s income for the year. They wouldn’t need to constantly stress about finding the next job or the next client. It was wonderful.

Until the contract ended, and the client said they’d only re-up at 75% of what they had been paying.

And my dad and uncle had a choice. They could take the new terms, losing a large chunk of income while doing the same amount of work — or they could lose 80% of their work and income in one go.

If you read about the history of early capitalism in England, you’ll find fabric crafters got caught in the same trap. After centuries of crafters owning the loom/spindle/fibre and selling a finished product to merchants or other crafters, a new practice started. Folks who didn’t have their own tools could use tools belonging to a merchant. But then, they could only sell to that merchant. And if they wanted to stop selling to that merchant or sell to someone else… they lost the tools of their trade.

It was one of the first steps in turning crafters into employees.

For indie authors, Amazon is like those merchants. If you don’t have the tools or know how to format and publish your own books, Amazon will give you the tools. You just need to sell your books through Amazon.
Want to stop selling through Amazon? Then you lose the tools to publish.

KU takes the next step. With KU, you don’t need to actively market your book so hard. It automatically goes to the top of the ‘new releases’ list for a captive audience. KU subscribers are always going to look for KU books first. It’s a relatively easy way to build an audience — an audience that is controlled by Amazon. Amazon can set whatever new rules they want, they can change the contract any which way. And you’re stuck because you can’t end the relationship without losing your audience and income.

So Now You’re Trapped

No shade. It’s hard to recognize these traps if you haven’t seen them before. I came damn close to getting sucked in by KU early on. (They DID get me sucked in as a reader for a long while, which is a different kind of trap…)

But how do you get out of the trap?

Well, I’ve got three options for you, but first —

Important Publishing PSAs

1) Once in a while, I see an author who has their books only on Amazon — but NOT on KU.

This is the worst of both worlds. If you are switching away from KU but still publishing through Amazon, make sure to go into your KDP dashboard and add all your non-KU books to ‘other sales channels.’

2) Highly recommend doing mixed-platform publishing.

That is — publish on both Amazon AND other eBook publishing sites (D2D, LuLu, etc.). Two reasons for this. First, no publishing site publishes to all the same retailers. So publishing through multiple sites gives you more reach.

Second, being dependent on a single publisher isn’t nearly as bad as being dependent on a single sales channel — worst comes to worst, you can switch publishers and not lose more than a month or two of income. BUT having only a single publisher is still letting one company control all of your income.

Personally, I publish most of my stuff to both Amazon (published ONLY to Amazon sales channels) and D2D/Smashwords (published everywhere else).

(While I see definite advantages in the D2D/Smash merger in terms of creating real competition for Amazon, the effective duopoly it threatens to create isn’t much better than Amazon’s current effective monopoly. Keep your eye on the status of the industry, and try to have a third option in your back pocket.)

3 Ways Off of KU

Leap of Faith

I recommend this for folks who don’t have much/any income from KU yet. If getting off KU only means less ‘fun money’ next month, get off now before you become reliant on it.

Just… walk away. Pull all your stuff off KU, post an announcement on your website and social media, update your buy links, and move on.

If Amazon moves against you, as has happened to many writers over the years, it may be your only option. But you’re probably here because you want to avoid this option.

At a Jog

Most folks who’ve been on KU a while aren’t fully trapped yet, but have enough income that just taking the leap will hurt.

If that’s you, and you want off KU sooner rather than later, this may be the best option.

Leave all your existing stuff on KU. If you have already announced an upcoming book as being on KU, publish it to KU.

After that, put everything else up as non-KU. Send out announcements and such as you feel appropriate, and make sure folks know what you are doing. Once you are comfortable with your off-KU reader base/income stream, start moving your earlier stuff off of KU as well.

Note: This does not work as well if all your books are series that don’t work as standalones. Folks who don’t buy books from Amazon will not be able to read your earlier books in the series and so will have no incentive to read the later books. Folks who only read KU books won’t buy your new releases unless they’re serious fans.

If most of your catalog is not able to be read standalone, then you probably need the next option:

Ease Into It

If I was trapped on KU and had a large enough income stream that getting off KU would threaten my financial stability, this is the route I’d take. The first thing I would do is start a new series of short stories/novellas.

Short (and consequently cheaper) stories are one of the better ways to pick up readers off of KU. Possibly include an author’s note saying that you are moving off of KU and readers interested in your future stuff should follow you on x estore/subscribe to your newsletter/etc.

Any existing series, I’d continue to put on KU, but with an author’s note somewhere “For (reasons), I’m going to be shifting my writing off of KU. New stuff in this series will continue to be on KU for at least (your estimated timeline). But new stuff that isn’t connected to existing series will not be on KU.”

Once the short stories/novellas are getting some attention, I’d start splitting my book publishing in half. Half (my most popular series, every other standalone, whatever worked best) would continue to go up on KU. The other half would be non-KU.

As you get comfortable/build a following off of KU, up your non-KU publishing until everything new if off KU — including existing/prior series off of KU.

At the same time, if you have any older KU books that aren’t getting read much, this is a good step to start moving them off KU. They’ll be ‘new’ to many non-KU readers, and moving them won’t hurt your existing income much.

The final step (which should take you at least a year, preferably several) is to start moving your newer/popular KU stuff off of KU. Again, keep your readers informed. Add updated author notes in your old stuff, “This is going to be moving off KU soon.” Or send out newsletters. Or write a blog post. (or all three.)

Again, don’t make the jump all at once. Go one book or one series at a time. (Remember that Amazon kinda/sorta counts collections as separate books, so maybe leave your ‘box sets’ or whatever up on KU until last or something.)

I wouldn’t move more than one book a month — both for time management and easing-readers-into-it reasons.

Depending on how many books you have, this whole process can easily take 5+ years. That’s okay! The point here is to take it slow.

Be aware — you will likely lose KU readers no matter how careful you are. I speak from experience when I say that KU becomes a reader trap — I don’t know how many times I looked at a book and said, “I want to read it, but it isn’t on KU.”

But making a gradual transition like this encourages as many KU readers as possible to follow you off of KU, gives you time to (figure out how to) build a following off of KU, and lets your KU books act as a lead-in to your new not-KU books. It maximizes your chances of getting new readers and keeping old ones.

This process isn’t a ‘get out of jail free’ card. You will need to rebuild your reader base and develop new marketing avenues. But you can do it a bit at a time without destroying your existing income or tossing yourself into new marketing stuff ‘sink or swim.’

Just Remember:

Very often, doing the ‘wrong’ thing is better than doing nothing. If you are trapped on KU, the longer you don’t do anything, the tighter the trap will be.

If you want out of the KU trap, you need to start steps as soon as possible. Even if they are just small steps. Even if you aren’t sure they are the best steps. There’s a military saying: “The best is the enemy of the good.”

Take a few days, maybe a week, to pick a place to start. That’s just good sense. But don’t spend weeks or months coming up with the ‘best’ or ‘perfect’ plan to get off KU.

Just take a deep breath, and start moving.

bell hooks and Being a Respectful Eavesdropper

Jess MahlerLeave a comment

My biggest personal takeaway from bell hooks’ Outlaw Culture (and I emphasize /personal/ takeaway — I’ve got a LOT of political takeaways I’m still processing) is the idea of being an invited ‘eavesdropper’. I’ve long felt, reading work by hooks and Davis and other womanist thinkers, a bit uncomfortable. It was clear they weren’t speaking to me. That I, as a white person, am not part of the audience they address. It felt like I was intruding, actually. Like I didn’t belong here.

So it was almost as if hooks /was/ speaking to me — or at least, my concerns — when she said in Outlaw Culture that she is writing for a Black audience, and views white people who read who her work as eavesdroppers. Welcome ones, but eavesdroppers. (I believe this was in chapter three, during the interview with Marie-France Alderman. Unfortunately, audiobooks are difficult to cite and nearly impossible to look up a reference in.)

For the first time, I have permission to enter and engage with hooks’ work, and perhaps the work of other Black writers addressing Black audiences.

But what does it mean to be an invited eavesdropper?

What Is an Eavesdropper?

An invited eavesdropper is a very odd thing. Because eavesdropping, in its basic conception, is a violation. When hooks first referred to white readers as ‘eavesdroppers’ I had one moment of ‘Yes! That is what I’ve been feeling like’ and a second moment of ‘Oh… that’s not good, is it?’

hooks put that second thought to rest quickly enough. Probably intentionally, given her awareness of the many white people who did and do read her work. But that idea of violation still needs to be addressed. Or — not violation, but what is being violated:

Privacy.

An eavesdropper is someone who violates /privacy/, and who takes away the safety privacy creates, from the people eavesdropped on.

In saying that white readers are eavesdroppers, hooks is laying a firm boundary — we (white people) do not belong here. She chooses to allow us, but we do not belong. And our presence is a hindrance to the safety and security of the conversation she and other Black people are trying to have.

This may sound strange to white people who only know hooks as someone who has written on racism and sexism. We are used to being the audience when it comes to racism. After all, we’re the ones who /are/ racist, right?

But that’s not what hooks is about. hooks isn’t talking about white people being racist. She takes living in a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society as a given (and always the three are linked for her). hooks is talking about how racism affects Black families, how Black people can respond to racism, the intersection of internalized (Black) racism and sexism, the way Black men are harmed by sexism.

Conversations that — I’ll agree with hooks — we (white people) don’t belong in. Those are intra-community conversations, /not/ inter-community. The difference is important and far too often neglected.

Still, hooks welcomes us — as eavesdroppers.

Can I Be a Respectful Eavesdropper?

I have a lot of thoughts here, but I’m having trouble finding words for them. The heading captures the main idea pretty well — if I am going to be eavesdropping on conversations not meant for me, even with invitation, how can I do it respectfully?

I don’t have a complete answer, but I’ve figured a few things out.

1) Recognize lack of context —

Because I am not hooks’ intended audience, I am missing context. Her audience is a community she is part of and she addresses her audience — other Black Americans — assuming certain knowledge, cultural context, and history that I don’t have and probably never will have.

I need to recognize this lack of context and the way it will make it harder for me to understand some of what hooks says. It will be easier for me to misunderstand or accidentally ascribe incorrect interpretations. I need to do more work to understand than the folks hooks is speaking to, and if I don’t or can’t do that work, then I need to accept that I may never understand.

2) Don’t insert myself between hooks and her audience

I have no business telling Black folks what hooks says, means, intends, etc. If they care, they can listen themselves, if they don’t care it’s not my business. If someone /asks/, that’s one thing, I can answer to the best of my ability, acknowledge where I recognize a lack of understanding, and direct them to where in hooks’ work I learned something. But it is sure as hell not my place to be going around ‘educating’ Black folks about hooks (or any other Black thinkers).

2a) What about educating other white folks?

Good question. I’m of two minds. On the one hand, educating other white folks about racism (and sexism and all the other stuff hooks talks about) is a major way we can help fight back against white supremacy. On the other hand, there’s that whole ‘lack of context’ thing and the risk of sharing wrong or misleading answers

Obviously, I’ve decided I’m okay discussing some of hooks’ work and my reaction to it, but you’ll notice I’m talking about how I engage with/respond to hooks work in one area that affects/addresses me.

I’m figuring this shit out.

3) Intra- vs inter-community

Any engagement I have with hooks work is by definition inter-community, when hooks was writing intra (within) her own community. I’ve mentioned this before. There are times and places that intra-community discussions must and should move into inter-community forums. And there are times they shouldn’t. I can assume, given hooks’ acceptance of ‘eavesdroppers’ that she anticipates and accepts her own work will end up as part of inter-community conversations.

But I think understanding the way intra- and inter-community conversations differ and the harm that can be done by carelessly dragging intra-community discussions inter-community — /especially/ the harm that can be done by an outsider doing that dragging — needs to happen before an eavesdropper has any business /responding/ to hooks writing.

Engage with it personally? Sure. Share reactions to it? Usually. Respond to it? ie, critique it? Nope. I’m nowhere near a place I can do that respectfully. And neither are the vast majority of white folks.

Am I Writing a Bigoted Story? – The importance of checking ourselves

Jess MahlerLeave a comment

I read a story once. It was a good story in the sense of being well written, engaging, with no major plot holes.

The author put a note in the beginning, explaining that this story was set in a fantasy version of the bronze age. This meant (of course) that there were slaves and women were not treated equal to men. That doesn’t make the author or the story sexist, it’s just a setting!

I think the author meant it. I think he had no intention of writing a sexist story. He was just (as far as he was concerned) writing a story in which sexism happened and slavery happened. He wasn’t endorsing these things, he just wanted to tell a story.

That story was Demon’s Gate by Steve White and it, more than anything else, taught me the danger of unexamined biases. And the importance of asking, “Am I creating a bigoted story?”

We, as creators, cannot afford to let our biases or our creations go unanalyzed, uncritiqued.

For instance…

A nobleman and his loyal slave discover something hinky at the palace. As they investigate they discover a group of noblewomen who are tired of being treated as, well, women. (You know, second class citizens, property of men, that kind of thing.) These women are fomenting some kind of plot against the empire. Except the (male) leader of their little cult is a demon in disguise who has tricked them into opening a gate into the demon’s realm. Once the gate is opened it will flood reality with demons who will turn the world into a literal hell on earth forever more.

The nobleman (and his loyal slave) break the cult by convincing one of the young women that the cult was wrong. The women needed to accept their place, not rebel against the status quo. This woman realizes she needs to tell the nobleman everything she can about the cult. The climax is an epic race against time to stop the women’s cult from opening the gate to the other world and a battle for the fate of mankind. The members of the cult are either killed or imprisoned. The demon is banished with the help of the one woman who is permitted to be a power in her own right (religious figure) and everyone lives happily ever after.

The premise of this story can be boiled down to “a bunch of women form a support group to try to better their lives and nearly bring about the end of the world.”

Just to highlight a few points:

1) Women trying to fight against oppression nearly destroy the world (literally)

2) Women only get the idea to fight against oppression when a man (or demon pretending to be a man) urges them to. Even in fighting against oppression, they follow the leadership of a man

3) Protagonist is a privileged slave owner who is a hero because he is fighting to preserve a corrupt, oppressive empire

The 1920s want their anti-suffragette memes back. And Dixie wants to know where the General Lee doppelganger got to.

But Realism!

There are a lot of issues with the endless calls for realism — especially in SFF! But that’s a tangent, because….

You can write stories in slave societies, in sexist societies, in elitist societies, in racist societies, and not have your story be bigoted!

David Freer does a not-horrible job of this in A Mankind Witch. By the end of the story, the Prince of the Holy Roman Empire gets some of his self-satisfied religious bigotry knocked out of him, a Nordic princess learns that putting a slave collar on a man doesn’t strip away his basic humanity, and a Berber pirate learns that there are things he cares about more than money and the next ransom. All while fighting free of a troll queen, outwitting dwarves, and solving a crime that nearly ends the fragile peace between the Northlands and the Holy Roman Empire.

Awesome story, I recommend it and the rest of the series.

Anyway, as creatives, we need to check ourselves and our work. It isn’t as simple as ‘if there is bigotry in your work it is bigoted’. Life doesn’t work that way.

We need stories that portray bigotry. We A) need to not erase bigotry from history (or current events) and B) we need to have stories celebrating people who triumph over bigotry.

Even if we didn’t need those stories, we still wouldn’t want to shut down all stories portraying bigotry – that would eliminate stories about the lived experiences of most people who have ever existed.

But we need to do the work to portray them well. We can create those stories without reinforcing the bigotry, without resurrecting bigoted ideas and tropes that should have died a century ago.

And we can damn well make our heroes people who are fighting against bigotry or learning important lessons about not being bigoted. Not bigots who are proved right by the stories we tell!

If you like fantasy in a Bronze-age setting, check out my novel Planting Life in a Dying City, about building family in the face of loss and trauma.