“90% of everything is crud.” – Sturgeon’s Law
Theodore Sturgeon was a sci-fi writer who had his first sci-fi fiction story published in 1939. In the early fifties, he first stated what eventually became Sturgeon’s Law. Tired of being told that 90% of sci-fi was crud, he retorted that it was true of all genres, but it was only sci-fi that specifically got called out for being crud. He pointed out that when people talked about mysteries, they mentioned the elite writers (which is funny because when I got into reading mysteries in the nineties/aughts, it was definitely considered lesser than literary fiction and lumped in with sci-fi).
It’s been adapted into “90% of everything is crap”, whereas I say, “90% of everything is shit”. In addition, I’ve upped it to 99%, although I will generously concede that it might be closer to 95%. The point is that true art is a very small percent and everything else is shit.
I would point out that there is even more effluvia these days simply because it’s so easy to put things on the internet. That makes me hold firm to my idea that 99% of everything is shit. In fact, I would probably up it to 99.9%. Just because anyone can, it doesn’t mean that anyone should.
It’s daunting to even find anything remotely consumable on any given subject. I’m not talking art, by the way; I’m just looknig for good content. So, the top 10%–not five or less. I put “autistic” in YouTube, and the first fifty or so videos are by white men and women. In fact, one of them is one of the videos I saw by a white man talking about masking for autistic woman–and did not have a female guest in his video. He thought wearing a wig and talking in a higher voice would be enough. Which….yeah. That’s not it, my dude.
There’s a lot of videos on autistic people with ADHD, which I’m pretty sure is not me. The Asian woman I’ve mentioned in a previous post (the last post? Not sure. Time. What even is it?) is not in the first fifty or so videos. I put Asian American in the search box, and the Asian American woman I mentioned is the second hit. And there are many videos with the gender pretty split between the two binary genders.
I found one person who was queer, nonbinary trans, autistic, and Korean American. I am including one of their videos below because in it, they talk about representation in media, intersecitonality, and the hope that one day, they will have plentty of mediocre media that reflects themselves to choose from.
I’ve made that joke, by the way. That the day when I can be a mediocre person of color and not be called a detriment to my race or other signifier.
When I was getting my masters in Writing & Consciousness (do not ask. I don’t want to talk about it), my advisor and I had a fight over one of my stories. Oh, that was my project for the program. We had to write…I don’t exactly remember what, but it was something like 50-100 pages of short stories, all around a theme.