You Can’t Always Get What You Want

So the Rolling Stones sang at Glastonbury last night. Or as @sisterspooky tweeted this morning

“I have to clean today. Being a grown-up is rubbish.”

Back to the Rolling Stones, who said the same thing but with more amps. ‘And I went down to the demonstration/To get my fair share of abuse/Singing, “We’re gonna vent our frustration/And if we don’t, we blow a 50-amp fuse”, yeah.’

So after a week of hanging around the latest demonstration on twitterscape about sexism in SF/F and whether male writers can write convincing female characters and vice versa, I was ready to exercise my right to free speech. And the funny thing about free speech is everyone’s for it so long as the other guy is saying something you agree with. Most of the time we’ll wade in when we’re sure everyone else is going to agree, but this week an SF author, guest blogging, said exactly what he thought about sexism in SF, demonstrating the essential flaw in free speech – speaking freely.

What was the response? Oh well, the usual response in any public forum where you’re not going to get stoned for saying what’s on your mind.

If you subscribe to the theory of atomic repulsion (and knowing anything quantum is like catnip to bloggers, I’m not linking in case you never come back) we never touch anything, just register a series of atomic repulsions. So if twitterscape is built on the same principles, there’s going to be disagreement.

At some point, when we’re grown up enough to clean our own rooms, nobody is going to step in to regulate what, when you take a straight look at it, comes down to people who are good with words, using words.

Publishers know it comes down to how and what we write. We sit in front of our screens thinking, the reason I’m not published, or not selling is sexism, or ageism or I don’t photograph well. Excuse me, but most writers ARE slightly weird-looking. Check out current best-selling authors before the marketing department gets them an image that explains the hair or the stare or the whole alien-disguised-as-human-being look. Publishers are probably glad when they get an author who looks good, but at the end of the day, I assume the main thing is the book. I hope that’s the way it works, I really do.

And for me the answer lies in the fact we are writers. Whatever makes us writers (and for me writing isn’t inspiration, it’s a fifth stomach that digests reality and comes out with another sort of reality), our imaginations are surely capable of taking us into another person’s head, regardless of the gender of the body that sits in front of the screen. Can’t we give ourselves that?

There are bits of life that my fifth stomach cannot digest. Then I want to get down to the nearest demonstration and share the  abuse. But for that I remember I clean my own room, I’m a grown up, I can’t always get what I want, that’s the way it sort of works. China Miéville writes genre fiction that must have his fifth stomach working overtime. But when he wants to state his political opinions he writes a small, but very effective, political polemic.

Because You Can’t Always Get What You Want, but sometimes, as the lyrics say, you get what you need.