In the movie Back to the Future, Michael J. Fox’s dad, George McFly, is the archetypal original nerd — an awkward, bookish white guy who has no natural game with the ladies, the George of 1955 reads sci-fi comic book magazines that spin space fantasies to accompany our nation’s Cold War policies. By 1966, these space fantasies could be glimpsed in full swing in the new television show Star Trek. While the original series ran for just three years, it spawned a multi-generational franchise of movies and TV shows. In hindsight, those early episodes seem undeniably cheesy, but at the time they were far more serious – not only about the starship Enterprise’s mission “to boldly go where no man has gone before,” but also about the importance of Captain Kirk meeting hot alien babes on all of the strange planets they found.
Geoffrey William Marcy, future award-winning astronomer and UC Berkeley professor, was only twelve years old when Star Trek premiered. A couple of years later, Marcy discovered astronomy. According to a 2001 profile in the LA Times, he would often sit on his rooftop in southern California and gaze through a telescope. “He was 14 and he was obsessed…by the age-old questions that animated the science fiction he devoured… Were there other Earths teeming with life? Marcy was certain there were.” A few weeks ago, Marcy was being discussed as a potential Nobel Prize honoree. Then BuzzFeed leaked the story that Marcy had been found guilty of sexual harassment.
Last Thursday, my colleagues and I received an email from the Chancellor of UC Berkeley informing us that Marcy had resigned. A panel had found that he had sexually harassed female students for nearly a decade. According to Azeen Ghorayshi, the reporter who broke the story for BuzzFeed, Marcy’s great success was part of the reason why his pattern of harassment went unchallenged. As Ghorayshi explained, “Marcy’s is the rare ilk of scientific research that is capable of both reaching the peak of his field and capturing the public imagination.”
Ghorayshi lays out in painful detail how Marcy’s behavior was both widespread and well known; her article documents incidents of alleged misconduct with female colleagues dating back to the 1980s. BuzzFeed also noted that “UC Berkeley is currently under federal investigation for its handling of dozens of sexual violence complaints on campus.” In Ghorayshi’s article, David Charbonneau, a professor of astronomy at Harvard, calls Marcy “the most prominent exoplanet researcher in the U.S.” Charbonneau added that the fight for gender parity in the field is profoundly undermined “when the most prominent person is a routine harasser.”
Jessica Kirkpatrick, one of the complainants in the UC Berkeley investigation, wasn’t harassed herself — but as a former graduate student in the department, she witnessed Marcy’s behavior firsthand: “He’s had a long history of behaving inappropriately, especially with undergraduates.” Marcy was in his mid-fifties in 2010 when Kirkpatrick observed him getting “inappropriately touchy” with an undergraduate. While Marcy was winning international accolades for discovering exoplanets and working with NASA, he was also “groping students, kissing them and touching or massaging them inside their clothes.” While he was making great strides in astronomy and appearing on The Late Show with David Letterman, he was also responsible for a number of promising female students leaving the field.
On the eve of the release of the report finding him guilty, Marcy posted the following: “It is difficult to express how painful it is for me to realize that I was a source of distress for any of my women colleagues, however unintentional.” Yet as a man of science, he must know that this is a scientific impossibility. The hand does not “unintentionally” slip under clothing or grope the body of a student of its own volition. Yet in the white male science fiction imagination of the ’60s, outer space exploration and sexual conquest could often be blended. For Marcy, the bodies of female students seem to have represented little more than new and unexplored terrain.
According to TV.com, Geoff Marcy guest-starred in a 2001 BBC special called “Star Trek Night.” The Times article noted that his dreams were “the stuff of TV fantasy, a ‘Star Trek’ script.” Back here at home, was Geoff Marcy trying to live in his own personal episode of Star Trek? In the realm of sexuality, unfortunately, his fantasies seemed to override any more current information he might have received about what is and is not appropriate behavior. As a faculty member at Berkeley, I can attest that we are mandated to receive training on sexual harassment every other year. I have taken the the in-person training, the online training, and the fun theater skit-based training, and I know that during his sixteen years at this university, Marcy was certainly given the information that his behavior was unwelcome, inappropriate, illegal, and might cost him his job. Yet the dated fantasy trope of the space opera with the bold explorer hero does not die easily.
Earlier this year, our culture witnessed a very specific power play to enshrine this same fantasy in writers’ imaginings about the future. The Hugo Awards are the most prestigious literary awards for science fiction and fantasy. In August, there was a huge upset at the Hugos — what writer Todd VanDer Werff called “a war for the soul of nerd culture.” A group known as the “Sad Puppies,” representing a disgruntled faction of the genre’s writing community, attempted to exploit a loophole in the award nomination process and influence the outcome in their favor. Their actions were based on their complaint that science fiction and fantasy writing had moved too far from its roots, with “social justice warriors” writers being chosen for the awards. (In this case, “social justice warrior” appeared to have a significant though not complete overlap with women, people of color, and queer writers.)
The Sad Puppies were upset because apparently it is “no longer safe to automatically assume the average sci-fi fan — or protagonist — is a straight white guy.” According to one Sad Puppy author, “A few decades ago, if you saw a…space ship on a book cover…or a barbarian swinging an axe, you were going to get a rousing fantasy epic with broad-chested heroes who slay monsters, and run off with beautiful women.” (Female consent to this running-off was not mentioned.) Nowadays, the novel beneath that same cover might involve a critique of sexism, or colonization, or even feature a queer or transgender hero.
The Sad Puppies’ bid to dominate the Hugos ended in failure. Yet their criticism of the increasingly diverse content in the sci-fi/fantasy genre does not stand alone – there has also been more specific criticism of women writers. Last month, The Mary Sue reported on a male author who reviewed an anthology of women sci-fi writers by stating: “When it comes to writing Science Fiction, it still remains a purely male domain… I applaud the ladies for giving it a try, but…[l]eave the genre to those of us [men] who know how to write scifi, being well versed in its many nuances”.
In this battle for “the soul of nerd culture,” the women are well organized and well armed. In Summer 2014, Lightspeed Magazine addressed the challenges within the genre in an issue with the tongue-in-cheek theme “Women Destroy Science Fiction!” According to one of the editors, Wendy N. Wagner, science fiction “is merely the imagined history of the future. Female characters are typically trivial; women’s concerns are trivialized; and women writers disappear into the shadows cast by better known, male, Grand Masters.”
Women throughout the literary world have similar complaints. When male authors write about family, it’s “profound.” When women authors do the same, it’s “domestic.” Labels like “chick lit,” “women’s fiction,” “cozy mystery,” and “romantic suspense” are all signifiers that tell sexist gatekeepers in other areas of fiction exactly what to ignore.
There are countless examples of women authors running up against male gatekeepers in sci-fi/fantasy. In Slate Magazine, Alyssa Rosenberg discussed sexism in sci-fi and fantasy, analyzing the experience of Delilah S. Dawson, a writer of speculative fiction:
[Her novels have an] intricate alternate history steampunk world that’s based on the supposition that the majority of prey animals have become predators… Dawson describes volunteering at a convention where a guest of honor called the sorts of stories she writes “vampire porn” and told her “that women like me were ruining his genre”—even though, as it turns out, that author wrote sexually charged works himself. Gratifying his own fantasies, for that author, was a perfectly legitimate use of science fiction, but women to gratify theirs, even in well-developed fantastical worlds, was completely out.
Dawson explains her decision not to join the Science Fiction Writers Association (SFWA) thus: “I looked at their website and composition and quickly came to the conclusion that I wasn’t the target demographic.” Not only is Dawson apparently unwelcome, but any vision of sexuality that deviates from the traditional male-dominated narrative is equally unwelcome.
In contrast, in the mystery genre, Sara Paretsky founded Sisters In Crime in the mid-1980s. Contemporary women authors in that genre have a well-developed support network available. Sisters In Crime has a high profile, comparable to the co-ed professional association, Mystery Writers of America. But in sci-fi/fantasy, SFWA is the only sizable national option.
Women authors in sci-fi/fantasy encounter the toxic intersection of the bias against women in literature and the bias against women in science. Christine Yant, another of the editors from Lightspeed‘s “Women Destroy Science Fiction” issue, put her finger on the connection to sexism in the sciences: “There was—is—something else going on, too, something apart from the attacks from the outside. It’s a smaller, quieter attack from within, and it’s just as pernicious. Too many accomplished writers are convinced that they aren’t qualified to write science fiction because they ‘don’t have the science.’ I’ve heard this worry more often…from women.”
It seems that in science fiction writing, as in science, women have not always been welcome as equals. Instead we have been welcome to play the role of sassy intergalactic cheesecake, helpless interplanetary ingénue, or wanton extraterrestrial sex kitten.
Astronomer Geoff Marcy clearly approached his intended student conquests as if he were starring in his own dated, sexist sci-fi film, because apparently he just couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea that a young woman could be in his office or his lab to make an actual contribution to science. He couldn’t fathom that he wasn’t James T. Kirk on the Sex Ship Enterprise. He didn’t realize that the university wasn’t his own personal Revenge of the Nerds fantasy. The LA Times profile called Marcy “the boy who found inspiration in the made-up worlds of science fiction,” and noted that his “quest was scoffed at for years before success came” – so maybe he just thought that, just like the sci-fi “heroes” he idolized, he had earned the right to take whatever he wanted.
Given the intellectual gifts Marcy obviously has, it is a shame that he will no longer be able to explore them at the same high level of scholarship. But it’s even more of a shame that he traumatized so many women, negatively impacting their careers or causing them to leave the field entirely.
We can see the incredible contributions of women scientists in spite of a culture that often systematically marginalizes and mistreats them. The good news is that the UC Berkeley administration called Marcy’s behavior “unequivocally contemptible and inexcusable.” And as Joan Schmelz, former chairwoman of the American Astronomical Society’s Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, notes: “This should put sexual harassers on notice: No one is too big to fail.”
Until now, Marcy’s behavior was tolerated, swept under the rug, and/or tacitly allowed. But this year, he’s out on his ass — much like Tim Hunt, the Nobel-winning British biochemist who made a speech to the World Conference of Science Journalists in June in which he called for single-sex labs because women were “distracting” to male scientists. Women scientists immediately took to social media and fought back with the #distractinglysexy hashtag. Hunt became an international talking point about sexism in science, and soon resigned from his prestigious post at University College London.
Perhaps these brilliant women ought to be celebrated and claimed as the real future of science. Sad Puppies like Geoff Marcy and Tim Hunt were once the stars, but their era is over. They’ve probably been burned out a long time, but we’re just now seeing it. According to my calculations, if I multiply the speed of light by the time it takes for women to organize and build consensus to challenge entrenched and institutionalized sexism and sexual violence committed by men…the very last beam of their tired old light should be going out right…about…now.
Thanks this essay is awesome. I’m not a writer but a scientist and a lifelong voracious scifi/fantasy reader, and the Sad Puppies/Marcy/Hunt debacles make me want to scream. I somehow never connected the two (sexist scientists and sexist scifi) together so explicitly.
Same. It’s so obvious but I missed it too.
Yes yes yes yes yes to everything written here. YES.
But.
Did we have to use a picture of James T. Kirk, respecter of women, believer in equality, and 100% inaccurately portrayed by the general population as intergalactic womanizer?
Edited to add: feminist heist novel????
Perfect gif I want that book so badly now.
More on topic, the point about how transparently Marcy is lying when he says he didn’t realize the impact of his actions is incredibly important. Ugh.
Agree 100%. Kirk wouldn’t stand for that sort of shit.
THIS. Kirk was nothing like Hunt or Marcy’s ilk. I’d be honored to serve on his crew.
THANK YOU! It’s 1960s culture that dubbed James T. Kirk a womanizer, because at the time, that was a Good Thing To Be. He respected women, his former lovers respected him back (not Dr. Janice Lester, but it was nothing he’d done; mostly she just wanted to BE James T. Kirk.)
This is brilliant, and as a woman who writes scifi, I love seeing this discussion taking place among feminists right now. Mostly because women have always been a part of scifi, both high- and low-profile members of the science fiction community, and you can’t tell if someone is a scifi fan just by looking at them – but, however obvious that is, it seems not to occur to people who take the “white nerd guy” stereotype of scifi fans at face value. That myth has been making us invisible for decades. I still get people who are mildly surprised to find out I’m a Trekkie, even though from inside that community, it’s long been obvious that Trekkies are slightly more female than not by percentage. Or that I write a mixture of hard and mundane scifi – the kind that doesn’t use handwaving to explain FTL travel or other improbable technologies – rather than “soft” (meaning sociological) scifi, even though I also find sociological science fiction fascinating and Star Trek itself is the epitome of that sort of sci fi. Go figure.
One thing I want to point out – at the risk of being “that nerd” – is that the final sentence in your piece is a bit off on the math. The speed of light is measured in meters per second, so multiplying it by a time would give you a distance, not another time. However, if you divide a distance (such as the strides women have made in organizing and discussing our marginalization in the science and scifi worlds!) by the speed of light, then you’d get the time until misogynist old men were out on their heads.
Yay for dimensional analysis! 🙂
The magazine I write for did a special Star Wars issue, and we had a big bash to launch it (with old trailers – on film! – of SW and SW-knockoffs projected on screen. It was awesome).
A journalist was there, so a photo of me, two writers for the mag (one man, one woman) and the (male) editor-in-chief was published in the local newspaper. Fun! Except for the caption, which started: “The men and women(!) of magazine and organizer ….”
I know. It’s just an exclamation mark. But few punctuation marks have ever annoyed me so.
RIght!? Women have been as or more nerdy than men since it started being a thing, it’s about time mass media caught up! It’s not a coincidence the earliest fanfic was of Kirk/Spock, ya know?
I used to go to all the Star Trek conventions that were held in NYC back in the 1970s. I can tell you, there were way more women in attendance than men… same for the convention committees for those cons. Women gave conventions, wrote the stories, created the art, attended the cons.
I grew up reading sf/f, raised on Star Trek and Heinlein and Doc Smith, and LeGuin and Brackett and McCaffrey and later McMaster-Bujold, but while my older brother remains active in the community (including voting for those same widely-disputed Hugos), I have avoided both genres for years. The pattern of my aversion (except for Discworld) is so profound as to be a compulsion.
The reason is this: there came a point, after being a critical reader of every other text, when I had to address the ones I’d grown up with, the “genre” fiction which was my intellectual junk food, with the same rigor as I addressed everything else. I had to ask: why, in all this “speculative fiction,” has all the speculation gone to technology, war, exploration, and so little to humanity? With all the technological changes and advances, all the shifts in time and place, why is humanity unchanged? Why is human society so stagnant in these visions? These stories gave me parades of strangeness, improvements in every kind of technology, but their human actors and social roles were frozen in place.
The conclusion I reached was this: for the largest part, this is a result of failure of imagination, empathy, or courage. To the straight white guys writing the bulk of the material, there were no problems with the social order, and thus nothing to improve, challenge, or advance. Nothing changes because they don’t see anything that needs to change: in a social order perfectly adapted to their comfort, it is the rest of the universe which needs to be changed.
Thankfully, we’re forcing them out of their comfort zones here on Earth, and we’re getting better reports from beyond the stars.
You should read some James Tiptree Jr. (edit: to offer an unsolicited recommendation, sorry. Also Tiptree is a pseudonym; the author’s real name was Alice Sheldon.)
Octavia Butler as well, does really well with this.
Absolutely. She’s my fave. Love them both. I think we (you and I, not me and Octavia or Alice) are the same person maybe. When will we get coffee or lunch again?
I subscribed to a pulp called “Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine” when I was a teenager, and someone (I think it was Isaac Asimov!) wrote an essay in the mid-70s about all the most promising new writers of the decade, doing a paragraph or two on 8 or 9 new F & SF writers. I remember that all but one of them was a woman! The name C.J. Cherryh was one of those new writers, I can’t really remember any of the others…
…except the last writer the author reviewed. The last writer was James Tiptree, Jr., and the author of the essay made damned sure we all understood that, though the ladies seemed to be taking over the genres of Fantasy and Science Fiction, good ol’ James Tiptree, Jr., was holding up the banner for menfolk, and that men were still coming out on top, because he was The Best New Writer by far!
I was so pleased when only a year or so later, in 1977, the info leaked that James Tiptree, Jr. was in fact, Racoona Sheldon, or Alice B. Sheldon.
Samuel Delaney! Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand!
Or Julie Czerneda or Tanya Huff or Car Yi or Harry Turtledove or Christopher Moore or Charlaine Harris Anne Leckie or…
There are many sub-genres in SF/F , ‘hard’ and ‘military’ being only two. Huff writes military SF, magic fantasy, vampires. Czerneda’s protagonists tend to be more or less female (well, with aliens…) and her biology background is her hard science. Car Yi won the Hugo. Turtledove has a higher than average number of female protagonists and his women characters are not sidekicks. Moore does humourous horror and his women (Abbie von Normal– so adorable!) are both winners and losers at life. Leckie uses ‘she’ as the fallback pronoun, which I personally find annoying, but… And Harris writes lovingly about marginalized people, some of whom are weres and vampires.
There are many more. The Sad Puppies loss, not that anything has really been lost, is fandom’s gain.
Oh and Jo Walton and Connie Willis and Spider Robinson.
I am a HUGE fan of James H. Schmitz, a writer of the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, who was a feminist before the word was in common use. His greatest characters are all wonderful, empowered female characters: Telzey Amberdon (I use her name as a handle), Trigger Argee, the Witches of Karras; but what is more significant is that his default background or secondary character isn’t Straight White Male. Minor characters: presidents of planets, universities or companies, business people, police officers, minor bureaucrats — all of them are just as likely to be female as they are likely to be male. He felt that the galactic society of the future would have complete equality of the sexes to the point where nobody would even notice or make comment on it.
Schmitz wrote space opera that was all set in the same future in Agent of Vega and his many tales of the Hub; if you want a fun read with a smart plot and great female characters, check out Baen Books, they publish his work and do a good job as his works’ caretakers.
Marcy has a hashtag too, it’s #AstroSH
Oh my god, I can’t even read male scifi writers, it’s always such boring, boring sexist drivel. I stopped reading male scifi writers recently though and I actually like the genre again!
But…but…Iain M Banks! (#notallmalewriters…just like 90% of them…)
But to agree, I did a think last year where I only read female SF/F writers for like six months, and it honestly was one of my best reading decisions ever. Discovered new writers and finally got around to reading sooo many classic writers I’d stupidly put off.
I have a couple I’ll read! I mean like, I’ll still read Philip K. Dick and Tad Williams and Kim Stanley Robinson but that’s it.
BUT IAIN was totally my thought in response to this. Women and other minorities in SFF are doing such cool shit right now, there’s no reason to read anyone else … except maybe Iain.
Well, and Pratchett.
…Oh no, and now I’m sad about BOTH again. 🙁
Still, The Shepherd’s Crown did pull the series together for a good finale. Much better than the rather forced Steam.
Dialogue went all to pot though. I’m blaming the amanuensis and collaborator for that though.
To balance everyone else’s protestations, I completely agree. It’s not that there aren’t good male writers. I just have to claw through so much drivel to get to them. And at this point, I really feel like I’ve heard soooooo many stories from white men that I’m tired of it.
The Martian’s outsized success should be understood in the fact that it’s about a white man being exceedingly competent.
Also, a large part of its popularity is that it prioritized describing a clever science hack over being well written.
“it prioritized describing a clever science hack” – Ah, that’s what I like most about it though! It’s about SOLVING PROBLEMS and my brain liked it. I do not suppose that that’s what everyone finds enjoyable for their leisure reading, but it’s precisely that element of the book that made me happy.
I really enjoyed The Martian and read it in a night, but I didn’t like the dude’s casually misogynist comments and that the women were described in terms of their attractiveness (no men were, as I remember).
When I read it, I was thinking that the movie could have cast a woman as the Martian with very little change to the story.
Sandra Bullock came to mind first, but also Stana Katic, Renee Zwellinger, Toni Collenette, Helene Joy, Gina Torres, even Jewel Staite because ‘machines just speak to me.’
I felt like the book was just dying to get Matt Damon’s face on it though.
I definitely think the main character could have been a woman (honestly the character development was thin enough that anyone could have been watney) but the writing always screamed “insert favorite white male action star here!”
I started to be disappointed that this happened at a seemingly progressive institution like UC Berkeley, and then remembered — hippies are often secretly (or not-so-secretly) misogynist.
Really great essay. While I’m unquestionably a “geek” nowadays – science PhD, game-player, reader of tons of speculative fiction – it took my post-adolescent self frikkin forever to actually get around to reading “adult” Science Fiction. Mostly because my main associations with literary SF were the “good old boys” of Heinlein, Asimov, dudes with laser guns, etc. How could I enjoy the writing of men whose fabulous imaginations of the future somehow stopped short of reimagining 1950s gender roles? Luckily I started finding writing by both men and women that actually felt revolutionary – Ann Leckie’s agendered society, Iain M Banks’ post-scarcity utopian-socialist Culture, Ursula Le Guin’s…everything. Still don’t like the “classics”, though.
I almost feel like most of the young women I know in science/STEM *are* still inspired by Star Trek…except it’s the Star Trek of Next Generation / DS9 / Voyager. That same feeling of discovery, but mixed with a strong emphasis on team work, cooperation, diversity, and respect. Or the (similar) science fiction of Mass Effect. Reminder to self: pitch essay about Mass Effect w/ FemShep being the rare expression of the female power fantasy. (…Okay, maybe Mass Effect isn’t the best example to bring up in this context, given how much inter-crew nookie occurs, cough.)
There’s nothing wrong with inter-crew nookie as long as all involved persons are capable of consent.
Love this Aya! I grew up watching the original Star Trek series with my Dad, and continued on with Next Generation, Voyager, Deep Space Nine…I have only recently found the genres of speculative fiction, post-colonial sci-fi and welcome this conversation and recommendations on new reads, so far I’ve got books by Nalo Hopkinson and Tananarive Due, of course everything by Octavia Butler…any suggestions for other books by women of color authors in these genres? Thanks!
I love Karen Lord’s “The Best of All Possible Worlds”.
The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson
oooh! 2312 and Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson are so good!!! 2312 especially explores both hard tech and dramatic social changes around gender and sex, family, and race. Really interesting on all levels.
Small typo: “have taken the the in-person training”.
I recently tried to re-read 'Farnham's Freehold' but was overcome by his anthropausal misconceptions of femininity.
Younger women, those under 50, should avoid this novel.
I take issue with the writer of the article referring to Marcy’s illegal behavior as “sexual harassment” and him as an “harasser”. Touching someone sexually without their consent is ASSAULT. He probably also committed sexual harassment (saying or writing sexually explicit things to someone without their prior consent) as well, but let’s not downgrade this here.
He’s a sexual predator, if you want to talk about his illegal activity more generally.
Harassment =/= assault, but both are abuse, both are illegal, and both make him a sexual predator.
That said, I like this article. I just wanted to get that extremely important correction out there.