Who's Been SIlenced, Again?

We hear a lot in the media now about "underrepresented" populations. "Marginalized" groups. "Own" voices. 

And publishing is doing its level (woke-fueled) best to cater to groups it sees as (or has been told are) underrepresented.  Inadvertently--or, if you believe the propaganda, advertently--silenced. If not outright censored, then at least ignored. Passed over, in favor of "white-bread" work that publishers wanted to sell to their target "white-bread" audience.

Unfortunately, this attempt to make perceived "wrongs" right isn't being done well.

Oh, it's being done with all the good will in the world...but, like any other quota system, it's a self-defeating phenomenon. It will, eventually, embarrass itself, and collapse like the flimsy house of cards it is.

But that's not the reason behind this post.

What's inspired this is an "own voice" that has been silenced for generations.

It's been disparaged. Discounted. Ridiculed. Called "toxic." And...worse.

It's the voice of men.

It's no secret I love men. I always have. I always will.

In junior high and high school, this got me points with my girl friends, who couldn't figure out the secret of "how to talk to boys." I, who had boys hanging around my house all the time, had deduced that secret ages ago:  that boys were, in the end, just people. Like girls were people.

Lest we have any misunderstandings here...I didn't have boys hanging around my house to be with me. They were there for my brother, and the garage bands he was perennially forming, reforming, and playing in.

But they were still boys. Members of the male sex. 

And I loved 'em all.

However, for a long, long time, our culture has not loved men.

I can remember, as a kid, hearing people complain about how TV shows and commercials--even then--typically portrayed men as bumbling fools. 

If something got solved on a commercial, it was a woman who did it.

While the man stood by making dumb remarks and scratching his head.

I suppose it was inevitable that, from that root, came the next phase: where the kids solved all the problems, while the parents stood around making dumb remarks and scratching their heads.

But even then, the dumbest of the dumb was still Dad.

The husband hardly ever won in any of these things. Be it a commercial, a sitcom, or even a drama...the butt of the jokes and insults (or the person who made all the foolish and/or thoughtless mistakes) was usually the man of the house.

And I agreed with people when they said, "Wait. This is wrong."

Fast-forward to my adulthood, in which for a brief time I was on the evangelical Christian side of the Tiber. Baptist, to be exact.

Now, these were good Christian women. Subservient to their men. Honoring the men's authority, their position as head of the household, et al. Right?

Hardly. 

The running joke in these households was a backhanded compliment to the wife: "We husbands are in charge, for all the world to see...but we know who really runs the house." 

That might've been cute, in its own tongue-in-cheek way.

But the women's running joke wasn't cute. 

It went along the lines of, "Well, we make him look good...but we all know men are just overgrown little boys. And you have to treat them that way."

(Don't look so shocked. I'm sure you heard it dozens of times growing up.)

Once again, I found myself thinking, "Wait. This is wrong."

Fast-forward again, to my writing conference days, when I heard a keynote address by none other than Susan Elizabeth Phillips in which she talked about why the "alpha hero" was such a popular trope in the genre. 

You know the alpha hero. He's the swaggering man's man; he's rough, he's tough, he's a shade uncouth at times, he might be a bit crude, maybe even vulgar--until he meets the heroine, who sees the gentle soul inside and "tames" him. 

Roughly paraphrased, she laid the steps out: the heroine teaches him to feel, to express his emotions, to control his barbaric urges and passions, to have manners....

"...in other words," she finished, "she turns him into a woman."

And the place roared laughing.

Only even as I laughed, I thought, "She's right." And, close on its heels, once again thought, "Wait. This is wrong."

And it is. 

Ridiculing men, calling their masculinity "toxic," decrying "patriarchy" as if it's some kind of evil (news flash: it's not)...it's all quite the thing to do lately. 

But there's an even more insidious wrong being done to men now, behind all the rhetoric and hostility.

And that wrong is the worst of all.

It's that men have, over time, been oh-so-subtly...silenced.

The most striking example I heard of this recently was a perfectly "innocent" commercial on the radio. For Xfinity, as it turns out. 

I have Xfinity. I like it. A lot.

I wish I could say the same for their commercials, most of which are embarrassingly not funny, or even mildly witty. (One has to wonder how low the bar is set at ad agencies now.) 

But this particular commercial brings out, in stark relief, what I'm talking about.

The setup is a kid--clearly, a young boy who sounds about twelve--pretending to be a "salesman" for Xfinity's new 10G network.  He begins, "Mom--Dad--Sis--"

What follows is gently funny--Mom asks why he's "in a suit," and Sis identifies his "card" as "just a gum wrapper with your name on it," and the like.

But the interaction, for the entire commercial, is only between the boy, his mother, and his sister.

Even though he begins the commercial saying, "Mom--Dad--Sis," Dad doesn't have a single line in the entire ad.

It's not like it's an ad dominated by a voiceover, either. There's quite a lively exchange between Mom, the kid, and his sister.

So where's Dad?

Is he asleep during this "presentation"?

Did he leave to get a cup of coffee?

His kid addresses him...so where is he?

And if his kid is "selling" the family on a major outlay for something like Internet service...shouldn't he be involved in the conversation somewhere?

He's not.

Which is odd enough.

But what's odder? And SADDER?

That this commercial went into production and no one corrected that.

It's a glaring example of what has happened to men, slowly but inexorably, in the media landscape. 

First, their voices have been decried as too loud, too boisterous, too uncouth, too unkempt...you name it.

Then, their authority and intelligence have been ignored--or, worse yet, deliberately undermined.

And now...they've finally done what the culture clearly wants them to do.

They've gone away.

They've become invisible.

And no one seems to realize they're gone.

You know what?

That's wrong.

You want to champion an "underrepresented" voice?

Champion a man.

Let men speak again. In their own natural, wholesome, masculine strength.

Let men be men again. 

Without insulting them, accusing them, ridiculing them, or refusing to listen to their wisdom. Because they do have some, you know.

At least as much as a woman does.

Ladies, we're not the ones whose voices haven't been heard.

We've been shouting down the other half of the population at such a volume, and with such stridency, we don't even realize we've completely taken its voice away.

We all need to stop doing this (not so) "subtle" silencing.

Now.

Thoughts?

Janny

Enough.

The writing world is, in many ways, reminiscent of the Wild West lately.

It's got its share of outlaws lurking, too, seemingly more than there ever have been before.  And they have one target in their sights, constantly:

Traditional publishing.

And it's starting to get really, really irritating.

If you haven't heard the popular manifesto, it goes something like this:

"The traditional publishing industry is a dinosaur that deserves to die and, if there's any justice, it will. It's a closed system in which you have to know somebody, you have to have a celebrity name, you have to have 'pull,' and even then it's impossible to get an agent and even get your manuscript in the doorway. But say lightning strikes, and you do get in the doorway?  They'll then dumb-down your work, tell you what you can and cannot write, and ignore both your cover and your title ideas. By the time they're done with your story, you won't recognize it anymore. But, hey, at least they'll then take two years to get the book out, pay you a pittance, give you no marketing support whatsoever, and blame you when it doesn't sell. No one with a brain should subject themselves to that!"

Well, yeah. If all of that was accurate, no one would.

Only it's not.

But then, it brings about incidents like I witnessed recently in a writers' group on Facebook.

A writer posted that a publisher had contacted her with a four-book deal, and she was turning it down. Why? 

Because the publisher was going to make her take down two of her indie-published titles from Amazon when they took them over, and she didn't see that there would be a financial benefit to doing that. And she then proceeded to elaborate further on why self-publishing was the way to go because no publisher would ever make it worth your while to give up that precious independence!

But many, many of us raised questions.

Such as...why in the world would a publisher pitch an author?

(Note: unless for vanity presses, it doesn't happen that way. No. Not ever.)

This was by far the biggest question most of us had. About which some of us, myself included, expressed doubts that this "offer" was legit. 

Did the author thank us for caring enough that she not get scammed?

Hell, no. 

She lashed out at many of us--yours truly included--accusing us of calling her a liar.

She even had her friends chime in and lambaste us as well.

And in the mix, of course, were dozens of "me-too" echoes from people who repeated the same tired script about how horrible traditional publishing was...ad infinitum.

Only...

It should surprise absolutely no one to find out that in her initial post, this author hadn't quite told the whole truth.

A publisher hadn't approached her out of the blue to publish four new books; a publisher who had already published one of hers had expressed the offer to take on more. The offer wasn't a "pitch" to lure an indie author into the evil of Traditional Publisher Servitude.

This woman has published 40 books on her own, some of which look fairly competent. If that sounds like damning with faint praise, there's a reason.  I would have tried to explore more of them, but I couldn't; there were no "look inside" features for any of her stuff. The most I could glean was a blurb for one of her fiction titles--something so atrociously written that it was clearly done by someone with no clue what a "blurb" was.

(Something going the "traditional" route, by the way, can help you learn to do.)

If any of the people lambasting us took the time to read even that far on her author site, they might have smelled a rat.

I suspect very few did.

I did respond to the accusations of calling her a liar, by merely stating that in her initial posting, the publisher sounded like the liar...not her. And that some of us were sincerely trying to keep her from making a mistake. But that she also hadn't played fair with us, and I didn't need to stick around for more of that.

I left the Facebook group. And I ain't going back.

But let this stand as my manifesto of sorts, if you will. 

I'm fed up. 

Fed up with this slanted, error-ridden narrative. 

Fed up with how it paints an entire industry with half-truths, casts them in cement, and encourages newbies of all stripes to swallow them whole. 

And I'm fed up with spending social media "networking" time with other writers having to debunk, and debunk, and debunk...over and over and over again.

If you're out there independently published? God bless you.

Just stop lying about what the rest of us are choosing if we take the other route.

Enough...is enough.

Thoughts?

Janny