On being unsafe

[jeregenest]

Other people have done an excellent job of cataloging the odious amounts of priviledge and downright failure on the part of the aspects of the SF community to come to grips with the preponderance of priviledge being demonstrated by some pretty prominent authors, editors and just smofs. Including, and this is most reprehsnible, following a atctic of "outing" that strikes me as the worst of Fox-news type outrages. Bill O'Reilly would be proud.

The worst thing is this is not unique. This happens every single time. And the authors/editors who do it just go on their happy way. If there was justice in the world Harlan Ellison and Orson Scott Card would have long ago stop selling books, and there would be an even bigger list of folks suffering from that.

For me, this personally resonates. One of the reasons I stopped being so active in gaming was watching how peaseblossom was treated in her attempts to discuss feminism. For example, I still cringe whenever anyone mentions Spirit of the Century.

Yes, its unfair to expect SF to be better and more safe than the larger world. But I certainly don't have to like it.

Comments

[bruceb.livejournal.com]

"Every time I see a thread, written by people who write and read (and play) carbon-breathing aliens from the edge of a ring world under a blue sun talk about how impossible it is to, say, empathize well enough with a woman to write/play her well I get sad and mad and confused."

Or, worse, insist that there's no reason for them to try to understand different people's experience, because after all indulging in their favorite cliches and stereotypes is more fun and that's what it's all about.

[bruceb.livejournal.com]

Kathryn Cramer has, from my perspective, the same problem as a couple of the folks who busily invented things Patrick Nielsen Hayden hadn't said: she got really badly hosed by an identity thief, and does reprehensible things to others justified by her own pain. Likewise with the couple of people who projected quite a concoction of racism onto Patrick. And then these things settle in and pretty well poison the rest of the discourse, as "I demand that you disavow X" type responses show up, and all the rest, and down it goes. I've taken a couple of tries at responding to her broad, clearly not universally valid claims about anonymity and pseudonymity, but got nowhere with it and am not even sure I did any good for the lurkers. But single-handedly she's making a bunch of quite valid concerns look awful via her crusade.

(I would like to see the broadly pro-equality community take up the problem of trolling a bit more. There's demonstrably someone impersonating Will Shetterly, of all people, as if he didn't sabotage his own causes so effectively sometimes. There are a few others. There are no easy answers to the question "What can do about this genuinely unstable person setting out to sabotage our discourse and probably claiming he's our ally for doing so?", but acknowledging it's a persistently present problem is a start.)

BTW, just so you know, I won't be surprised or offended if either of you want to drop me for a while, given that inevitably I will be writing about SotC a bunch. I'm a big believer in the positive healing power of not poking at known wounds with a stick. I've been dropping some of my own regulars lately for comparable reasons, and feeling some benefit from it.

[bryant]

The idea that SF fandom is somehow special is, sadly, part of the problem.

I have a lot of bitter in me that I think it would be unuseful to express. Ask me in person sometime to rant about disemvowelment and the implicitations thereof.