In defense of propaganda

Szal'gatha was the Mistress of Examinations for an academy of sexy sorceresses. This academy was at the center of a vast empire, which dominated much of the known world. And in this world, sexiness and martial power were inextricably linked.

That's because, in this world, all power flowed from one's ability to corral demons and other extra-dimensional spirits, and if you were sexy, the demons were just a lot more pliable. This academy was in the Imperial City, adjoining the Emperor's Palace. And the Imperial City was a city of wood, built deep in the mountains, far from the productive centers of the Empire—it'd been built entirely to contain the sexy energies of these ladies.

Every year, all the sexiest women in the whole Empire would travel to this city for a series of highly formalized examinations. Because study of magic was forbidden unless you were part of this academy, the examiners had to guess how these undeniably-sexy girls might perform once they were actually trained in the various incantations and spells that constituted the secret art of this academy.

Within this academy, there was a strong debate about inclusivity. There existed, some felt, many different types of sexiness. And, moreover, the various demons and spirits had different preferences themselves. Szal'Gatha felt that their vast, diverse Empire should admit students who fit the beauty standards of the various cultures. Szal's position was called Cosmopolitanism.

But there was also a classical type of sexiness that had historically been the speciality of this Academy: thin, slight, delicate, with long hair, and a soft-spoken, laconic affect—the Fairy-Girl archetype. Szal'Gatha herself embodied this type, by the way.

Her arch-nemesis, Kar'Addan, believed the Empire's strength had been built on a particular kind of sexiness, and that this sexiness was superior to the other kinds.

Kar'Addan's position came in various forms and had many schools. Kar'Addan happened to represent the strongest form, which is that she thought the Fairy-Girl archetype was actually superior to the other types. She thought the Houri, the Poetess, and the Wild-Woman were simply worse types, and thus ought to be excluded from the academy.

But other members of their academy believed in weaker versions of this viewpoint, which they called Nationalism. Their view was that each Nation ought to specialize in its own form of sexiness. That each type could only really achieve its highest form, within its own culture, and that the Empire's form of beauty was allied to a certain race and a certain culture, and that it did no good to anyone to pretend like that wasn't true. That the purpose of this academy was to protect the Empire from exterior threats—the Academy’s aim wasn't to make other races feel better about themselves, it was to preserve the Empire’s warfighting capability.

Szal'Gatha was sympathetic to these arguments. In the dark of the night, she wondered if the Nationalists weren't correct. Personally, she had tried to see these other archetypes as being equally as sexy as her own archetype, but to be honest she had trouble. She saw that the Houris and Poetesses had some sexiness, but in her own loins, Szal really preferred her own form of beauty—the one she embodied, which she had honed for her whole life.

One time, at a meeting, she admitted this to Kar'Addan, and the other woman acted like it was some big revelation.

"So you're a hypocrite," Kar'Addan said. "You are not admitting the sexiest girls."

"No, no," said Szal'Gatha.

By the way, these two women were in a forest bower, sitting on a stream, not wearing much clothing. They had flawless skin and long, smooth hair, et cetera. They were having a very serious, philosophical discussion about the future of the Empire, but they looked like two girls gossipping about last night's revels.

That's just the rules of this world. And those rules are sexist. I'm sorry, but I am just accurately reporting how it was.

Anyway, Szal'Gatha said, "No...no...I believe the readiness research. Which is that we need to be diversified. We need to appeal to demons with different beauty standards."

"That is the rhetoric," Kar'Addan said. "But ultimately we are a certain thing. The Empire is associated with a certain race. And with a certain set of demons who favor that race. How can you deny these basic realities?"

"No, I disagree. The Empire belongs to all its people. I believe that we can recruit all kinds of demons to our cause, if the time comes."

"If we are fighting elves," Kar'Addan said. "Then any demons who prefer the Poetess type will side with the elves. It's a matter of comparative advantage. We can never beat their comparative advantage in those fields."

"No, you'd be right if sexiness was the only thing that mattered. But demons also have self-interest. They want to be on the winning side, but only if they think that side can represent their interests. If they think that the Empire means a less-preferred type of sexiness will eradicate all the other types, then they won't side with us. But if they think their sexy needs can also be met under the Empire, then they won't oppose us."

"You're really making some very dangerous guesses about the psychology of demons," Kar'Addan said.

"But that is our business. We are in the business of making those guesses."

"Yes, but...not everyone understands that the Academy is primarily a military institution," Kar'Addan said. "Many people instead see it as merely a source of wealth and prestige within the Empire. There is much pressure to relax our standards, so that different families can access spoils."

"I agree, but I am not so cynical. I do not think that self-interest is the primary driver behind Cosmopolitanism. I would not harm our Empire's defensive posture just for some short-term gain."

"But...Szal...surely you cannot believe in Ugliness Studies."

This was the main point of contention in the Academy these days. A group of women, led by Den'Amaat, was championing studies into the nature of Ugliness itself. They felt there was some way of harnessing or deconstructing Ugliness to gain more power.

But even their aims were under dispute. Sometimes when you asked them, they would say their aim was to study Ugliness in order to gain more power and strengthen the empire. Other times, they seemed to want to unseat the Pretty/Ugly Dynamic entirely. They seemed to want to create a world where sexiness didn't lead to magical power at all.

Which was absurd! That was just a rebellion against the nature of reality itself. That, to Szal'Gatha, was no good. But, admittedly, it was hard to pin these people down and figure out exactly what they wanted or what they were studying. Szal'Gatha herself detested ugliness. Given her own druthers, there'd be no ugliness allowed anywhere in the precincts of the entire Imperial City. Ugliness was the enemy!

But...she had a duty to the Empire. If there was genuinely a source of power in Ugliness, then it ought to be explored.

The ironic thing was that the champion of Ugliness Studies, Den'Amaat, was more beautiful than either Szal'Gatha or Kar'Addan. You know, there was a variety of beauty that demons went crazy for, but which Szal didn't really get. Demons really liked the very extreme end of the Fairy-Girl spectrum: girls with large eyes, very elongated foreheads, relatively sparse hair. It was absurd. To Szal'Gatha, these women seemed ugly. But demons loved them. And these women had been in charge of the Academy for years. For centuries. They were the archetype, the apex. Whereas Szal and Kar, who had a more relatively accessible form of beauty, were really seen as being somewhat-less-beautiful, which is why management duties were often shunted down onto them, while people like Den got to engage in higher research.

Anyway, Den had now looped around and was championing this woman, Victoria, who was quite ugly. Victoria had a very large belly, and she suffered from some disease that left her face blemished. She just wasn't plausibly sexy on any level, according to any criteria. And Den claimed that the Empire would somehow benefit from teaching this person how to consort with demons.

And Szal genuinely wondered. Was this serious? She'd read a lot of research about the theoretical benefits of ugliness, as a hedge against demons with vastly-differing beauty standards. But sometimes, when she talked to Den and Victoria, it seemed like they thought, oh, Victoria just embodied a different type of beauty.

Which was false! There were Venuses, yes, who had large bellies and wide hips. But Victoria wasn't a Venus. She was just an extremely ugly girl.

But now Victoria was tromping through their groves, carrying on, and Szal had lost control. She herself was aging. She had admitted these people to her academy, and now she didn't really get to determine its direction anymore.

"There is still time to resist," Kar'Addan said. "We can conduct a summoning. We can have a showdown. If they have power, then let them summon it."

"Yes," Szal said. "Okay...let them summon their power. Let Victoria show us what she can do. If this truly makes the Empire stronger, let's see."

But when it came time to arrange a demonstration, even the terms were impossible. Victoria wouldn't agree to a traditional demon-summoning, because her magic didn't take that form.

"What do you mean, it doesn't take that form?" Szal said. "What form does it take?"

"It's not traditional call-and-response magic, of the paradigm you're familiar with,” Victoria said. “I use a resilience paradigm, that's agnostic about a demon's true preferences."

"Okay...so what can you do that's better than what we do?" Szal said.

"That's not the right question."

"So what is the right question?"

They went back and forth, and Szal eventually came to think, yes, Victoria was a charlatan. There was nothing here. There was nothing underneath this. Which was a terrifying prospect, because they were equal, within this Academy. Victoria had an equal role—Szal wasn't privileged at all.

---

At around this time, however, the Empire came under threat. A tiny group of extremely sexy women came down from the mountains. This group of women embodied the Fairy-Girl archetype, and they were beyond nationalists, they were National Supremacists. They believed their own form of beauty was superior and the others should be exterminated. And the demon army sent to put down this uprising proved to be extremely taken with these women, and the demons deserted en masse.

The Imperial Academy was left alone, frantically summoning demons who didn't even bother to arrive.

Den'Amaat fled, finding a sinecure at a foreign court. Victoria used the treasury to buy a troop of mercenaries, and then she sailed off with them to conquer a distant island.

Meanwhile, Kar had stayed. She had engaged in frantic late-night summoning sessions. Most of the Fairy-Girl contingent had either defected to the enemy or been defeated in the ensuing confrontations. It was only the Poetesses, the Houris, and the other national contingents who were left. Kar was trying, painfully, to cobble together some kind of coalition.

Szal meanwhile was in the archives, delving into Ugliness Studies. Had it all been charlatanry? This was exactly the issue that Ugliness Studies had been meant to investigate. What if you weren't the hottest? Could you still win?

But the field itself was so abstruse, so full of theory—Szal couldn't make heads or tails of it. Meanwhile, Victoria was still issuing proclamations from the West about how this proved the superiority of her paradigm.

Okay...finally Szal realized something. Forget about Ugliness Studies. But the basic insight, that maybe something good would happen if you taught ugly people how to use magic—maybe that insight had some value.

Kar'Addan was surprisingly receptive to this idea.

"It's worth trying," she said.

The Empire was large. It wouldn't fall overnight. They had many years in which to regroup, think about how to spend their reduced resources. But Szal was still astonished at how little skepticism her old foe had about the idea of teaching magic to ugly people.

"When Victoria posed the idea, it was clearly charlatanry," Kar said. "But if you think there's something to it, then let's see..."

It wasn't as simple as just picking the ugliest girls and teaching them magic. Instead, Szal scoured the country for folk traditions about magic. How had people been dealing with magical spirits without relying primarily upon their looks? Szal didn't have time to adjudicate approaches. All she had was a library and a set of expertise. She found folk witches and to the extent that they wanted to know about her tradition, she taught them.

Some of these witches then came to her with interesting insights. They had learned to corral the demons in a particular way, but their approach had been limited because of the lack of theoretical framework. Szal's cadre of ugly witches was quite young, and it was led by Cynthia, who was preternaturally brilliant, and who devoted as much time to writing abstruse theories about the nature of magic as she did to her frighteningly effective war-time practice. Demons were terrified of Cynthia, but Szal was not, because the girl just seemed quite good-hearted and grateful to be allowed access to knowledge.

In any case, over the course of many years, Cynthia's Plain-Girl cadre grew in power and fearsomeness. Their abilities were utterly inexplicable to most traditionally-educated sorceresses. It's not that the Plain-Girls were ugly: it's that their looks didn't matter at all! Szal understood their techniques to some extent, but she was not a great practitioner.

Ultimately, Szal and Kar's side won this war. They couldn't attribute it entirely to one factor or another. The Empire was immense, after all, and the insurgency had spent its initial energies without ever converting its newly-acquired territory into a true state. Perhaps the insurgency had been doomed from the beginning—nobody knew for sure.

The Plain-Girls had played a factor, but how large? After the war, Szal debated whether to allow the Plain-Girl cadre to found an academy of their own.

What she didn't want was for later generations to just think, "Sexiness doesn't matter". That wasn't the case at all. This Empire was built on sexiness, and if they forgot that truth, then they were liable to fall.

Szal wished she could convey to the next generation how dangerous Victoria's teachings had been, but it was actually quite difficult to explain. She had concluded that in Victoria's case, the aim hadn't actually been good. It hadn't been to improve the practice of magic. It'd just been hot air and charlatanry.

The difference between Victoria's approach and the Plain-Girl approach was crystal-clear, to Szal. And it felt dangerous, to her, that the latter revered Victoria as one of their spiritual forebears. She wanted to tell them, "You are so much better than Victoria. You have no need to claim her."

But Szal was an outsider. She was pretty. She was sexy. It's true she couldn't really understand what it was like to be shut out, all these years, from the halls of power.

When she'd run the academy, before the war, Szal had thought, deep down, that sexy people—however sexiness was defined—were simply superior magic users. And because of that belief, she had presided over a system that denied magical knowledge to non-sexy people.

But she understood now that this had been an injustice. And, in some way, Victoria had resisted this injustice.

Ultimately it wasn't up to Szal. Cynthia herself was now the leader of a contingent of witches, some of whom had their own desires, their own factions. The relationship between the Plain-Girls and the pre-existing Academy was complicated. Everything was complicated, always. Everything was a product of endless discussion and maneuvering. And there was always so much frustration with each other. Szal felt like her life-force had been drained in these petty intramural conflicts that were simultaneously quite dreary and incredibly important.

And, somehow, at the end of a lifetime of such conflicts, she came to be sitting in a forest-glade somewhere in the Imperial City, watching a young woman wax rhapsodical about Victoria, the founder of the Plain-Girl School.

But luckily, at this moment, she had her old friends, Kar'Addan and Cynthia. And they exchanged a glance across the head of that very earnest young woman. And, somehow, that glance made all the fighting seem worthwhile. After the girl left, these three women burst out laughing, and two of those laughs, it is true, were like the tinkling of bells, while the third was a harsh bray that was not at all sexy and yet was still very good.

The Art of the Tale

The title of this story was inspired by

Isaac Kolding

’s recent post, “Is All Literature Propaganda?” He writes about how message-driven fiction gradually fell out of fashion over the course of the 20th century.

My dissertation tells the story, more or less, of how American novelists and critics came to see propagandistic novels—think antislavery novels, temperance novels, socialist novels, etc.—as aesthetically bad, instead prizing ambiguous, ironic, skeptical novels that show flawed characters encountering morally complex or indeterminate situations.

Many of my readers would argue, I think that this trend has already been reversed—that the 21st-century actually saw a rise of overtly message-driven fiction that is all about the badness of racism, sexism, transphobia, et cetera.

This is somewhat true, I think, but the people who write and sell such stories won’t admit it. What’s happened instead is a pre-screening test where books need to have impeccable politics in order to get widespread praise, but…the books also need to ostensibly not be about politics. Books aren't necessarily overtly political—they all bill themselves as aesthetic objects—but they also tend to be politically correct.

I would argue that overtly message-driven fiction is something different from fiction that's merely PC. And, in fact, message-driven fiction can be thrilling, provocative and very non-PC, even if it ultimately affirms regular liberal values (as most of my fiction tends to).

The trick is that you need to be intellectually honest and take the opposing side seriously. If you construct situations where the rules of the universe reward people who do certain things, then that’s not just boring, it’s also unconvincing. But if you construct your fiction in a way that challenges your own aims, then the result can be very strong and convincing.

The other rejoinder, which is what I was told when I used to take writing workshops, is, “If you have a point, you can write a pamphlet. There’s no political point that can’t be made better by an essay than by a story.”

But I think that’s also not entirely true. I believe that storytelling can bring out the underlying complexity of a situation. In this case, I certainly believe diversity is good, but it also imposes real costs, in terms of sapping an organization’s core focus. And human decision-makers have to make decisions on the fly—decisions that have real consequences that can’t necessarily be foreseen. And because we don't get a chance to repeat our decisions and study alternate paths, we are often left wondering whether or not those decisions were actually right or necessary.

---

This tale is heavily influenced by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories. He wrote a bunch of these allegorical stories that revolve around a single highly-charged image. The classic example is his story “The Minister’s Black Veil” about this minister who one day starts wearing a black veil. Everyone in town shuns him and becomes scared of him. This behavior just seems so incomprehensible. Nobody can explain why he insists on being so perverse.

For the rest of his life, he wears this veil, even though it separates him from his townspeople and from the woman he loves. As he’s dying, that woman tries to remove his veil, but he musters up the strength to refuse her intervention, saying:

"Why do you tremble at me alone?" cried he, turning his veiled face round the circle of pale spectators. "Tremble also at each other. Have men avoided me, and women shown no pity, and children screamed and fled, only for my black veil? What, but the mystery which it obscurely typifies, has made this piece of crepe so awful? When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the lover to his best beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a Black Veil."

Now, this story is not particularly hard to understand. The veil represents his own sinful nature. He’s not particularly sinful, particularly bad—all people are bad. He is just making manifest the sin that hides inside everyone.

But the wrinkle is that peoples’ shirking from him, from his grotesque appearance, reveals their own sinfulness, their own lack of awareness and compassion.

It is a fantastic story. One of Hawthorne’s best.

Similarly, in my story above, I feel like…the meaning is clear. Diversity is good, but…a lot that is bad can hide beneath diversity rhetoric. It’s all in the story—doesn’t necessarily need explaining—but it also couldn’t have been explained any more simply than I did it.