This post by Paula D. Ashe originally appeared on Dust and Shadow on 2/18/14. Note that it is intended as satire.
It’s important as a writer (or artist of any kind, really) to celebrate your successes. No matter how large or small. Seriously, the more I write and publish and talk to people about writing and publishing, the more I realize that there are so many people out there who are just livid at those of us who are brave enough to create something and be proud of it.
There’s been a lot of vitriol about Women in Horror Month after some insecure dudes on Facebook and elsewhere attempted to degrade the celebration. They said we women use our sexuality to gain success, that women writers of horror don’t write as well because we’re women, they violated the WiHM logo by including a clinical diagram of a vulva and analogizing the organ to a woman’s mouth, they made sexually violent and objectifying comments about women writers, and many of them said all this by prefacing it with “I love women but…”.
Obviously, those statements about women writers are totally true. For example, if you stare at the texts of my fiction and then slowly push it away from your face after about thirty seconds some titties will materialize on the page like those holographic 5-D posters they used to have in the mall. I do that because otherwise no one will read, let alone buy, my work. Also, as a woman, I’m very concerned about my fiction being too dark because nothing about being a human being, let alone a woman, is rife with existential or concrete horror. In fact, every time I write a death scene I imagine a unicorn emerging triumphantly from the corpse to calm my delicate feminine sensibilities.