Another Joanna Russ quote:

In the wings, rarely centre stage, women have acted essentially as foils to their male counterparts, as enemies, appendages, victims or obscure objects of desire, perennially as the Other. You don't need green skin, a pointed head and two antennae to be treated as deviant by the white middle-class male population in general, and the science fiction establishment in particular. You need merely to be, for example, homosexual, non-white, old, working-class or female.

Paddy's issue around what is racist reminded me of one of my favourite quotes about unfairness. Russ is most famous as a writer of SF, especially as the writer of 'The Female man'. She wrote the following on Bad Faith.

To act in a way that is both sexist and racist; to maintain one's class privilege; it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner. Nonetheless I doubt that any of us who does so is totally without the knowledge that something is wrong. To slide into decisions without allowing oneself to realise that one's making any; to feel dimly that one is enjoying advantages without trying to become clearly aware of what those advantages are (and who hasn't got them); to accept mystifications because they're customary and comfortable; cooking one's mental books to congratulate oneself on traditional behaviour as if it were actively moral behaviour; to know that one doesn't know; to prefer not to know; to defend one's status as already knowing with half-sincere, half-selfish passion as "objectivity" - This great, fuzzy area of human ingenuity is what Jean Paul Sartre calls bad faith. When spelled out the techniques used to maintain bad faith look morally atrocious and appallingly silly. That is because they are morally atrocious and appallingly silly. But this only shows when one spells them out, i.e. becomes aware of them. Hence this one effort among many to do just that.

Russ, J (1984) How To Suppress Women's Writing, London: The Women's Press