For my reviews, I’ll be using “counts”, as Das Sporking and Anagnorisis Awakening reviews do, albeit formatted slightly differently. Here, I’m going to set up a universal counts list, for things which happen in a lot of books, as well as any specific to each individual one. Every time a thing happens in a book I review, I’ll add a point to its counts, and the final scores of the books will be compared.
The first set of counts will be for demonstrations of offensive/prejudiced views. This will not be counted when it’s portrayed as wrong, from the point of view of a character we’re not supposed to agree with; villains obviously have views the reader isn’t supposed to like. However, a lot of books have unfortunate implications the author didn’t quite think through, or have characters express offensive views which are never called out. That’s what these counts are for.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of prejudices, and I know I won’t catch every case, but this is a rough list of which ones are most likely to be found.
ABLEISM – prejudice against the physically or mentally disabled, or people with mental health problems.
ACEPHOBIA – prejudice against asexuals. Prejudice against celibate allosexuals is also covered here, though the two states are not the same; implications that one’s life is incomplete without a romantic partner or there is something wrong with people who don’t want to have sex at every opportunity, or even just at this specific opportunity, apply to both.
AGEISM – prejudice against people due to their age, in this context usually against older people.
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM – prejudice against intelligence, learning, and facts. Surprisingly common in books, which strikes me as slightly ironic. Better explained here, but can be succintly summed up as “anything I don’t understand is dumb”.
BIPHOBIA – prejudice against bisexuals, from either a heterosexual or homosexual standpoint.
CLASSISM – prejudice against people for their monetary status or lack of perceived noble ancestry.
FATPHOBIA – prejudice against people for their weight. Common subcategory of lookism.
HOMOPHOBIA – prejudice against gay people (or bisexuals in same-sex relationships).
LOOKISM – prejudice against people for their appearance. Usually applies to contempt of people deemed unattractive, but also applies to cases when attractive people are treated differently based on looks, either better or worse; for example, the “dumb blonde” stereotype, or the assumption connected to sex-shaming that a woman wearing lots of makeup must be promiscuous.
RACISM – prejudice against people of different ethnicities or nationalities. Technically the latter is nationalism, a separate thing, but it overlaps so commonly with racism that for count purposes I’ll use them as one.
RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION – prejudice against people for either their religion or their lack of one.
SEX-SHAMING – prejudice against people for having sex in what the prejudiced person deems either too high a frequency, with too many people, or some otherwise “wrong” way. Surprisingly often overlaps with acephobia or celibacy/modesty-shaming, as demonstrated in Rosalarian’s comic on the subject.
SEXISM – prejudice against people due to their gender. Usually manifesting in casual prejudice against women, can sometimes instead consist of actively malicious misogyny. Negative implications against men as a group will also come under this heading; just because it’s less damaging as a whole doesn’t mean it’s good.
TRANSPHOBIA – prejudice against transgender people. When applied to people of nonbinary/third gender specifically, the term is enbyphobia or exorsexism, but acknowledgement that nonbinary people exist is rare enough that it probably doesn’t need a separate count; transphobia will usually be assumed to cover all non-cis statuses here.
VICTIM-BLAMING – blaming people who have suffered some misfortune, usually abuse or assault, for said misfortune.
And one which doesn’t apply to real life:
FANTASTICAL XENOPHOBIA – in real life, xenophobia means prejudice against any group which is different from one’s own. I’m going to use it to mean offensive, creepy, or unfortunate-implication-filled portrayals of fictional groups such as aliens or elves. Usually this overlaps with one or more of the above points, when a fictional group is too similar, or similar in the wrong way, to a real group. See this excellent article for discussion on how this can go wrong.
I will make another post listing other potential counts, and am likely to add to that post in the future too when I notice certain themes crop up a lot.
Ace Reads Smut 