Dear idiot

This is an open letter to the man that tried to grab me in the lift this week.

Dear idiot

If I'd realised that your drunken, moronic, racist ass was going to step into the lift after me, I probably wouldn't have gotten on to it. I don't really enjoy fighting in a street situation, and the cramped conditions of a railway station lift aren't conducive to the best form of self-defence I know of, which is running like hell.

When you lurched onto the train at Glasgow Central and started swearing at the walls it was easy to ignore you. Drunks on the train are obsequious throughout the UK - it's more unusual not to see them.
And I'll admit to not paying much attention in the half-minute walk from the train to the station; my leg hurt, I was tired, and it was bitterly cold. I just wanted to get home. I was feeling good, though. The new job was going great, the migraines are at a fairly low level (thank you, new meds and a good GP) and I was looking forward to a nice cup of tea and unwinding before bed.

I stepped into the lift, nodded at the chap standing in front of me - and then you stepped in behind me, smelling like an incontinent badger, and decided you wanted a cuddle.

I've noticed in the past that a higher number of females don't Want To Cause A Scene when a male makes them uncomfortable. I don't know if this is a UK thing, but I've seen a lot of it here. I've watched women that are fiercely independent and strong mutter things like "Excuse me," or "Please stop" when harassed. It usually makes it worse, because the cock-wobbles doing this stuff get off on it. Correct me if I'm wrong, dear tosspot, but I'm 99% sure that this is what you were aiming for.  You saw a small woman in a beanie cap and giant coat and decided this would be fun.

Sadly for you, I don't respond to physical harassment the way you were expecting. Part of this is background and training, part of this is just me, because, dear arse, you triggered every homicidal instinct I have. I'm also very fast, and you are a sloppy drunk.

This is why you ended up with my knuckles resting against your throat and the other fist waiting for your  next action. To be honest, I don't remember moving, but I was in stance almost as soon as your arm landed across my shoulders, and your next grope faded into mid-air.

And I let you see that I really, really wanted to hurt you. Judging by the smell intensifying, you peed yourself a little at that point.

Make no mistake, I'm a small woman. A solid punch or even open-handed slap would've bounced me off of every wall in the elevator, which is why my knuckles were against your throat until the door opened and you got out. The reason I didn't punch? I have no wish to end up in a UK jail, and until you took a swing at me, I couldn't legally defend myself any further than I just had. This is a country where someone won a rape defence by claiming his dick slipped when he tripped on a teenage girl, and holy Cthulhu, I wish I was joking about that. It means I trust the justice system for sexual assault victims about as far as I could through it.
But, dear chunderbucket, I wanted to. I really did.


The fact that you waited until you cleared half the length of the corridor before beginning to screaming abuse at me also tells me volumes about your sense of self-preservation. I didn't respond because you weren't worth the breath or effort, and I had no intention of escalating a situation again, but I'll respond to some of them here.

"This is Scotland!" Yes, I'm well aware of that. It's fucking freezing. I also don't care if it's outer bloody Mongolia, you don't grab a woman you don't know.

"Dirty fucking immigrant." Oooh, you noticed my accent? In two short sentences*? Congratulations.

"Fucking Jewish bitch." *beep* wrong. Not Jewish. Although I'm not sure why you thought that would be a good reason for assaulting me? Or is that because you were going home to jerk off to the BNP website? I have no problem being called a bitch; it usually happens because you've pissed off a male with entitlement issues. I'm good with that.

"Got no business being in my country!" (there may have been sobbing at this point.) *beep* wrong again. My ancestors came to Scotland with the vikings, you pathetic little fuck. I just happened to be raised outside the country. And it's great to know you only have problems assaulting dirty Jewish immigrants when they don't argue back. Your mother must be so proud.

Then you went back to This is Scotland! again, and I got bored. I love this country. I was raised surrounded by traditional Scottish culture and heritage, even in Africa. My direct family fought and bled in the trenches of two world wars wearing kilts.  You, on the other hand? You snivelling, self-entitled, cowardly, pants-staining little badger's arse? You represent the very worst of it. You represent bigotry and misanthropy and drunken hyper-aggression; a slimy misogynistic stain on Scotland's shoe sole.  You make me want to puke.

Have a long life, dear idiot. Long enough to realise that you're a dinosaur, that women aren't there to be pawed at will, that hurling abuse at someone who defends themselves makes you look like an even bigger idiot, that the world is a very small place and we are all stuck on it together, no matter what race or religion or creed we come from, and that the Daily Fail is not suitable reading material for any adult with a functioning brain.

And for the love of Scotland - dude - take a bath.

Regards
Me


*"Don't fucking touch me. I'm serious."

PS: The other guy in the lift didn't say a word, and also exited at top speed. Since the odds were high my new friend Randy the Skunk would have swung at him, I don't blame him.

I never knew books had testicles? A few thoughts on the gender brouhaha.

The SF and Fantasy world has been in an uproar this week, over this. (The latest unbelievable WTF moment comes courtesy Theodore Beale. Jim Hines has a pretty excellent post on this creature, but don't click on the links in that unless your idiot tolerance is higher than mine.)
There've been a lot of people screaming that the cries of sexism were unfair, and the authors themselves responded in a post that pretty much exacerbated the whole damn mess, to be honest. My view? If you have to pick physical attributes about writers, and you're being non-sexist, where are the comments about male authors stunning good looks and movie-star charisma? Their tight buns and manly chests, and comparisons to Ken dolls and He-Man? Why is there even a "lady-writer" and "lady-editor" distinction? I mean, I don't particularly care what an author looks like, or whether they're male, female, or both. I don't care which gender they identify with, and I don't care what their race, religion or sexual orientation is. I care about story.

Then the blog-spots came out. Female writers telling stories about being marginalised, insulted, and humiliated at Cons. And the hate mail that they got for speaking out; like Ann Aguire. And I was floored, because I never, ever, expected gender to be an issue with my writing. Never.

I've dealt with the misogyny BS my entire life in other areas; from my first job where the sales manager thought it was hysterically funny to grope me in his office, (right up until I punched him and got a warning for it) to the guys who would tell me, in all seriousness, that I should be at home making babies instead of selling ironmongery in a hardware store. One of the reasons I consider myself very, very lucky at my current job is that nobody on my team gives a damn about what I have in my pants. They care about me doing my job, and doing it well. There is no glass ceiling in that organisation that I can see; or if there is, it's been well camoflauged. Half of senior management is female, and we have every race, religion and colour you can think of working side-by-side. I love that about it.

I grew up reading sci-fi and fantasy by female and male writers. Ursula Leguin, Joan Aiken, Vonda M McIntyre, C J Cherryh are just a few of the names off the top of my head. It never occurred to me that they might have been considered lesser writers because they didn't posses a penis. As far as I know, even male writers use a keyboard, their brain and heart to write with. I'm fairly sure typing with testicles would be awkward, and possibly painful.

When I started publishing, and reached out to fellow writers and bloggers, I never had the gender issue thrown back at me. Then again, I publish using my initials, mainly because I wanted to keep the writing career separate to a small degree from my work life. (It's an open secret; pretty much everyone I work with knows I write. A couple of them have even read my books:)) The whole gender thing never occurred to me.

My twitter handle is the same, and I'd been on there a couple of months before I realised some people thought I was guy. (To be honest, I thought that was quite funny. Still do.) And when I pointed out that I was a girl, and yes, I had boobies, and yes, I still write the same books, I didn't have any issues. Nobody came back and called me the Downfall of Writing because of my ovaries. Which is good, because my ovaries don't write my books either; I think that would outweigh testicle typing in terms of inconvenience and pain.


I've never been to a con. I keep meaning to go, but the timing and finances have never co-operated. My friend and fellow writer, Anne-Mhairi-Simpson, regularly goes to the UK cons and has a blast. She hasn't mentioned anything about stalkers, harassment or the
general unpleasantness others have come across, so I don't know if that's even a thing here in the UK. I'd be surprised if it wasn't; it's a sad fact that most females will put up with a certain level of dickish behaviour because we've done it all our lives. (That doesn't make it right. It just means it happens so frequently and so often we no longer process it, like the fact that if you go out and it rains, your shoes get wet. Unpleasant, and unavoidable, but at a low level tolerable and forgettable.)  So I can't speak from personal experience regarding cons.

Apparently, judging from some of the comments I've seen, there's a good chance readers won't pick up my books because I'm female. I'd like to think the average reader is more intelligent than that, because thinking my writing is inferior because I'm female is not just insulting my girl parts, it's insulting your own intelligence. 

Books don't have testicles or ovaries. They don't frantically hump each other in the library after lights-out to make new books. That's left up to the writers. (Making new books, I mean. I pretty much don't care who my favourite authors are getting down with either, as long as they write in other moments.)

At the end of the day, story is what counts. Story is everything. Story has no gender, no race, no religion. It transposes those barriers; it brings a meeting of minds across distance and time and nationality. It takes us down the rabbit hole, and if your first concern is whether your rabbit is a boy or a girl, you have issues that no story will ever touch.