November 10, 2014 / Uncategorized

Only a Sith Deals in Absolutes

ETA2: Anonymity and pseudonyms are important, and I believe they should be respected, for a number of reasons. However, I’m also aware that a handful of individuals have been actively shit-stirring and spreading disinformation in this ongoing conversation. VitaSineLibrisMorsEst will no longer be commenting on this blog. (Before anyone asks, no, this is not RH. Yes, I know who it is. No, I will not be sharing that information.)

ETA: I’ve gotten a wide range of comments and emails on this post. At least to some extent, I think I’ve screwed up.

I am not defending RH. While I have some criticism of the way Laura Mixon presented her report, I’m grateful to her for doing so, and for shining a light on the abuse, harassment, and other attacks this individual has committed over the years. If my posts came off as a defense of RH, then that’s on me as the writer, and I apologize. This is someone who has been actively abusive, and while it might be ironic, given the title of this post, that’s something I absolutely do condemn.
I’ve been told that some of what I’ve said here mirrors rhetoric being used elsewhere to portray RH as more of a heroic figure speaking truth to power, and dismissing her victims as whiny, thin-skinned authors out for revenge. To which I say Dammit, internets! But I see how I could come across as another voice in that chorus.
A lot of people are hurting and afraid right now. RH’s victims are chief among them, and deserve support. I’ve been talking by email to minority writers who were stalked, threatened, and attacked by RH and her helpers, as well as to minority reviewers who are afraid because they see RH being condemned for her reviews as well as everything else. I believe all of these voices deserve to be acknowledged and heard.
I tried to conflate a conversation about reviewing vs. bullying with a conversation about a specific individual who has hurt a great many people in the field. That was clumsy and stupid on my part. I should have picked one or the other. By trying to do both, I dulled and confused what I was trying to say. I’m sorry for that.

I’m continuing to struggle with all of this, and to sort it out in my own head. Thank you for your comments and your emails. Even the angry and critical ones. Especially those.

I’ve been thinking about some of the comments and emails I received after my blog post last week about online bullying and harassment. Several people expressed confusion about exactly what I was saying. Was I defending attacks on authors? Condemning angry reviews?

The answer was neither. I was trying — perhaps unsuccessfully — to acknowledge the damage this individual had done as well as the good.

That’s a little easier for me. To the best of my knowledge, I was never one of her targets. I get that it’s harder when you’re the one who’s been attacked. There’s an editor who’s publicly badmouthed me, calling me various names (“Rotten meat” is my favorite) and basically blacklisting me and a few other folks, among other things. When I see friends of mine working with him, I cringe. Don’t you know what this guy is like? How can you work with someone like that?

Maybe they don’t know what he’s like. Or maybe he’s actually a good editor, I don’t know. It’s hard for me to recognize there’s more here than my annoyance, and to recognize that he’s more than just a cardboard villain.

“Requires Hate,” or whoever she is, hurt a lot of people. She bullied and threatened and harassed, and none of that is okay. She also raised valid critiques in her reviews, both of specific books and of the genre as a whole. Because yeah, a lot of SF/F is dominated by western culture, and is full of sexism and racism and cultural appropriation and other problems.

I’ve spoken to people who learned a lot from those reviews, and they’re scared to say so publicly, because it feels like an all-or-nothing conversation. The line has been drawn. You have to pick a side. And that’s damaging.

So I want to be very clear about my own thoughts and opinions here. Bullying is not okay. Threats and harassment, calls for violence against an author (or a reviewer, or anyone else) are not okay. Threatening and/or emotionally blackmailing others to condemn a work because you don’t like it, or because you don’t like the author, is not okay. So much of what RH did over the years was not okay, and these are behaviors we need to do a better job of recognizing and speaking out against.

But speaking up to say you find a book offensive? That it’s full of stereotypes, dehumanizing tropes, sexist or racist bullshit, and so on? Criticizing books and authors who perpetuate colonialism or the erasure and sidelining of women and minorities, of disabled and LGBTQ characters? That’s not only okay, it’s necessary. It’s important. Even when the reviewer is angry.

I’ve spoken with people who are watching this conversation and feel afraid, because they see a lot of rage and hostility toward a reviewer who identified as a lesbian and a woman of color. And while some of that rage and hostility feels justified, based on RH’s harassment and bullying, a fair number of us are falling into that all-or-nothing approach. RH is being condemned in entirety, and that includes both her harassment and her reviews and criticisms and so on.

I have a fair amount of power in our community, by virtue of being a published author, a Hugo-winning blogger, and a straight white American male. But imagine being a woman of color, a reviewer from a different culture, an LGBTQ reader, anyone who looks at the dominant narratives in our genre and sees themselves treated as lesser. Imagine feeling angry and wanting to speak up to power. And then imagine seeing quotes like these presented as evidence of damage done to a community by someone like you:

“Shit plot. Shit prose. Weeaboo maggotry.”
“It’s a regurgitation done without skill, with an extra dose of racism nobody asked for.”
“Easily the most overrated thing ever to come out recently, and I’m going to assume that people who gush over how groundbreaking it all is have only ever read Tolkien and Eragon.”

There’s a lot of anger in those comments. I may not agree with them, but so what? Reviewers are never 100% in agreement about anything. But those quotes are presented as part of the condemnation of RH. What’s the takeaway for other reviewers who feel that same anger? Will they be condemned or attacked if they’re not careful and gentle about how they post their reviews? Are they better off simply remaining silent altogether?

ETA: This in no way excuses comments and threats like:

“If I see *** being beaten in the street I’ll stop to cheer on the attackers and pour some gasoline on him.”
“her hands should be cut off so she can never write another Asian character.”
“Spread the word that *** is a raging racist fuck. Let him be hurt, let him bleed, pound him into the fucking ground. No mercy.”

I don’t think Laura Mixon was trying to silence anyone, and she’s done a tremendous amount of work putting that report together. I also give her credit for updating the report as she receives feedback. While I think there are some flaws, I believe that Mixon has done our family a service by bringing all of this out into the open. I know I’d certainly have flaws and problems if I tried to compile something that extensive.

But as this conversation continues, we have to step back from the all-or-nothing approach. Abuse and harassment are unacceptable. I don’t care who you are, or how you try to justify it. And I’m going to continue to work to do a better job recognizing and speaking out when I see it.

I also want to state for the record that blunt, pissed-off, negative reviews are not abuse. Anger is not abuse. Not that anyone needs my permission, but you have the right to your anger at books that rely on racist tropes, that treat women as objects to be raped or killed to motivate the men, that assume only white people exist or matter, that belittle your culture and community, or whatever else.

You have the right to express that anger, and you should be able to do so without fear of backlash from the author, or that the community will try to silence you for daring to voice that anger. Even if the book or story you’re putting through the shredder is one of mine. Because that review isn’t about me. It’s about you and your reaction to the work. And I support you and your right to tear it apart.

137 Comments

1 2 »

Martin
November 10, 2014 @ 9:52 am

“Only a Sith Deals in Absolutes” – This makes the dark side sound attractive ;-).

I agree that blunt, pissed-off, negative reviews are not abuse. But using reviews as a way to release you anger is abuse. At least an abuse of the process or platform.

A minority of people willingly consumes hate produced by others. That is why trolls seeks platforms under a false flag. The same seems to me happening here.

The perspiration of hate/rage/anger does not invalidate criticism. But it dilutes it up to a level that renders it unrecognizable.

Of course there is a huge grey area. Some anger can sharpen the view. But i am with Paracelsus here: Dosis sola venenum facit.
Muccamukk
November 10, 2014 @ 10:11 am

Thank you for this post. You pretty well know what I think after my lj comments last post, but I wanted to add something about performative anger.

I certainly can’t speak for people of colour or someone from SE Asia, but as a woman and a lesbian, I’ve found a lot of solidarity, comfort and inspiration reading angry feminist/queer/socialist/Canadian/whatever bloggers.

There is a lot to be said for considered, well-laid out, logical posts on any point, and I like those too, but sometimes It’s really nice to read someone who says of an oppressive policy or work “This is bullshit, and I’m not %@#^ing okay with it!” Often with the shift key permanently depressed.

The horribleness of some aspects of our society, yes even SF/F, are so engrained that sometime rage is what takes to snap us out of it. Or sometimes you’ve been seeing the horribleness for a long time, and no one seems to be saying a word, and you just feel swamped by it, unsure where to start, and then you find a blogger or a person in meatspace who sees it, and is as mad as you are, but who is speaking up about it, and you go, “Oh yeah, that’s right: I’m not not on my own, and that’s not right.”

Anger can be addictive, and it can be misused, but I’m never going to say it’s without purpose or it’s not okay. I for one have benefited too much from women who are angry, whether they’re allowed to be or not.
Celestine
November 10, 2014 @ 10:14 am

Thank you for this post.
Martin
November 10, 2014 @ 10:20 am

I think i read once something like “Anger is a good slave but a bad master.” As a lot of emotions it can be used for a goal and a constructive purpose. It can even serve as armor when you have to jump (or are thrown) into the fray. But once it starts to rule, it will poison everything it touches.
Muccamukk
November 10, 2014 @ 10:51 am

I can’t say I disagree with you. I certainly can also find anger that’s directed at me by someone who I perceive has power to hurt me to be a very scary thing.

However, you said above that anger “dilutes” the message, and I don’t think it does, at least not always. I think sometimes the anger IS the message, and sometimes it underlines it and highlights the message.

Now, RH/WF/Whoever has certainly at this point sunk her message, but I would say that it was the creepy stalking and bullying that did that. Not her angry reviews. Lots of people didn’t read her reviews because they were angry (and not just privileged people, but sometimes people with trauma in their past who found all anger scary), but lots of people did because the anger was something they found it useful, a sign of solidarity.
Emily
November 10, 2014 @ 11:10 am

Thank you so much for writing this. I would like to make stickers with you in one of your fabulous poses and this post’s URL to use in real life–every time a discussion degenerates into the “tone argument,” I will swoop in like a superhero yelling “JIM HINES!” besticker everything in sight, and disappear into the almost-urban landscape. I’ve got big dreams.
Martin
November 10, 2014 @ 11:13 am

No real disagreement here: My point (where i should have clearer) was intended to say that if i you pour too much anger into it, it dilutes the key message. This happens if one lets his/her anger run free.

At a certain point, it becomes a feedback loop where one attracts some people by it. This becomes an encouragement to repeat or aggravate the “performance.”

P.S. A strange observation: This reminds me of a discussion with one of the #gamergate key figures i had. He started venting rage and noticed that it brought him fame and followers. Now he doesn’t want to stop because it defines his “importance”.
Marshall Ryan Maresca
November 10, 2014 @ 11:18 am

“Even if the book or story you’re putting through the shredder is one of mine. Because that review isn’t about me.”

I think that is a crucial point. A harsh, angry review about the work is fine. But making it more about the person behind the work is where it gets problematic. I’ve been known to go on long, angry rants about, for example, Piers Anthony’s “And All Eternity”, but I don’t include gibes and attacks on Mr. Anthony himself. That’s crossing the line.
Muccamukk
November 10, 2014 @ 11:22 am

Ah, I see what you mean. I’ve seen that happen as well (tumblr seems to be good for it). Though sometimes people are just genuinely angry about a lot of things. And sometimes it is performative, but in a controlled way that still enhances the message. It’s something to watch for, anyway.

Lol, #gamergate. Better you than me arguing with that lot. But point taken. A lot of “movements” roll through on anger, performative or otherwise, and possibly not enough consideration of earth logic or good sense. Just because you’re angry, doesn’t mean you’re right.
Liz Williams
November 10, 2014 @ 11:42 am

I’ve no objection to angry reviews. A lot of my fellow pros don’t have a problem with them, and in this discussion, I haven’t seen many people objecting to harsh reviews as long as the reviewer has actually read the book (not always the case with RH).

But we do have a problem with death threats.
Juliet E McKenna
November 10, 2014 @ 12:06 pm

No review that needs to be parsed with a ‘but’ to excuse personal abuse qualifies as valid criticism for me.

‘There are some valid observations about problematic representations of race/gender/culture/whatever but calling for Macho McHackenslay to be staked out on a fire ant hill with chili oil poured in his eyes was maybe a bit much…’ *

No, I’m never going to be okay with that sort of thing or consider engaging in debate with someone who writes it.

*example for illustrative purposes only. No actual author is being menaced.
Lyda Morehouse
November 10, 2014 @ 12:17 pm

Yeah, I haven’t weighed into the RH debate because, while my first novel was skewered by her, what she had to say about it was all within the context of her personal experience with my writing. (Though as Liz points out, I was one of those people she openly admitted to reviewing without finishing the book. And she also admitted in the review to stealing it/pirating it from Torrent so there’s that insult, too). But, in fairness, I only discovered my novel on her site because I’d gone to read another review that RH had done about a book I had similar issues with and I found her no-holds-barred take on it refreshing.

This, however, does NOT mean that no one was hurt by her, certainly all the things that have been revealed regarding her stalking, trolling, and abuse are inexcusable. Full stop.

But I agree that things are complicated. For our community to grow and function we need to be able to constructively criticize each other’s writing and behavior and have fearless debates about the issues that are important to ourselves and the future–because that’s what we write about.

To that end, I think one of the reasons science fiction (and fantasy) is such touchy ground is that what you say in your writing about the future (or the past or things you make up) is an important reflection of where we are now and where we want to go and how we see ourselves ‘evolving’ (or devolving if you’re writing dystopia). Personally, I’m glad that so many people are invested in this vision. If I get called to the mat for it, good. If nothing else, it means people are reading me and taking me seriously.

But we need to learn how to do this without abusing anyone–even the “bad guys.”
Lark @ The Bookwyrm's Hoard
November 10, 2014 @ 12:31 pm

Yes. This.
Hiding Anonymous
November 10, 2014 @ 12:42 pm

I think before we can genuinely expect people like RH to stop being abusive, we need to all equally condemn the abuse of authors like Stephenie Meyer and EL James, along with the constant insults aimed at their readerships. And if we want to condemn hypercritical reviews that take strong social stances based on possibly weak evidence, we again need to start with the things we find funny because they’ve been aimed at ‘acceptable targets’.

Not really aimed at you, Juliet, more ‘inspired by’; I’ve got no idea what you find funny. 🙂
Lark @ The Bookwyrm's Hoard
November 10, 2014 @ 12:45 pm

“But we need to learn how to do this without abusing anyone–even the ‘bad guys.'”

Amen. That’s what we need from everyone in this debate – reviewers, authors, and those criticizing the actions of either or both.

I was raised with a very clear, very unequivocal rule: Condemn the behavior, not the person. (Not that it was every stated exactly like that.) In other words, it’s fine to say “that kind of behavior is wrong, it won’t be tolerated, and it needs to stop” — and that can be said both to the perpetrator or about them. But it’s not OK to say “Jane is a [insert derogatory term here]” even when it’s tempting to do so. For one thing, it doesn’t work to change the behavior. If someone calls you names and says nasty things about you, you tend to react with anger and defensiveness and ignore the problem in your own behavior. If your behavior is called out but the other party still shows respect for you as a person, you may still get angry and defensive, but you might also be more open to hearing that what you’re doing needs to change.
Steven Gould
November 10, 2014 @ 12:52 pm

Full disclosures:

I am Laura J. Mixon’s spouse.

I am the current president of SFWA but I am not speaking in that capacity right now.

Jim,

I respect a great deal of the work you have done in pointing out ongoing objectification of women on genre covers, rape culture, and harassment in general, but I believe that your framing this as a discussion about reviews does a grave disservice to the many persons and communities targeted as well as undermines your own work in the area of harassment and harassment policy.

It’s a serious diversion from the real problems here.

For a nuanced and careful examination of this issue, I recommend you read this:

http://vacuousminx.wordpress.com/2014/11/09/on-pocwoc-as-an-identity-category-its-different-from-the-inside/

sincerely,

Steve
Juliet E McKenna
November 10, 2014 @ 12:56 pm

I’ll happily excoriate the dreadful writing of EL James while absolutely condemning personal attacks on that particular author and upholding the right of anyone who actually enjoys reading those books to do so.

What do I find funny? Terry Pratchett’s a good start.

Possibly more pertinent to this debate is what I don’t find funny. I cannot stand The Big Bang Theory precisely because of the targets of their ‘jokes’.

Other folk think very differently and I’ve had some interesting conversations about that which has led to improved understanding on both sides – and which have been conducted without any need for aggressive insults.

🙂
Dolorosa
November 10, 2014 @ 1:03 pm

Thank you for clarifying your position. I feel this post walks a careful line between understanding and excusing, and that it comes down on the side of understanding. However, I worry that in presenting only those quotes from RH’s reviews you are unintentionally downplaying the death threats, stalking on social media and emotional abuse that accompanied them.

I realise that to a lot of people in the SFF community, the connection between the RH and Winterfox personae was new information, but I come from fanworks fandom, where this connection – and RH’s activities in the Winterfox persona – have been common knowledge for several years. When we tried to talk about those activities, we were treated as if we were jealous obsessives angry about a few negative book reviews, and so every time the recent conversation comes back to RH’s book reviews, it’s a frustrating reminder of all those times we spoke up and were ignored.

I am not one of WF/RH/BS’s victims, except insofar as we were in several of the same Livejournal communities back in the day (and for full disclosure, we were mutual followers on Livejournal for a few months) and I was afraid of her, and I feel that they should take the lead in how her actions are dealt with. At the same time, I feel that posting excerpts from her reviews out of the wider context risks playing that context down. That she made valid points in her reviews shouldn’t be in dispute. That she hurt people – some of whom are still feeling the effects of PTSD years later – and that their pain was met with comments like ‘oh, but her reviews raise some very valid points’ shouldn’t be forgotten.
VitaSineLibrisMorsEst
November 10, 2014 @ 1:03 pm

A witch-hunt is a witch-hunt, whether it’s by the good guys or the bad guys, and it’s not looking pretty, either way, and innocent bystanders are getting hurt by both parties. I don’t approve the past actions by requireshate or the current actions by Laura, Liz, Cait, or any others, honestly. She has no excuse for her behaviour but you should know better. Two wrongs don’t make a right, after all.
Edouard Brière-Allard
November 10, 2014 @ 1:04 pm

I’m replying to your post, Liz, but my comment is in fact much more general, so don’t feel targeted if you feel this does not apply to you.

I swear that I did not think this post would be so long when I got started.
———-
While some people say this is about her use of hyperbolic violent language in her review (which I think is okay) and in her interaction with others (which was often not okay), a lot of the talk appears to be coming from people who don’t like to be called out when they write something racist and/or sexist.

As an anonymous poster said in the previous post, if this is about harassment, why is everyone talking about her reviews? In support this point, here is the EBA report on Laura Mixon’s “report”. Methods: the original post (OP), as of around 9:00 eastern on 2014-11-10, was copy/pasted into a new, blank MS Word document. The same thing was done for the entire web page (OP+Comments) with the help of the “ctrl + A” shortcut. In those document, a global search and replace was performed in order to find all occurrences of the words “review”, “criti”, “hara”, “death”, and “threat”.

Results
The following results were obtained.

OP
Hara : 7
Death : 7
Threat : 21
Review : 32
Criti : 2

OP+Comments
Hara : 90
Death : 12
Threat : 63
Review : 154
Criti : 41

As you can see, the combined us of the “hara”, “death”, and “threat” keywords is barely more frequent that the “review” and “criti” keywords in the OP. For the OP+comments, review” and “criti” are used more often than “hara”, “death”, and “threat” combined.

The main limitations of the EBA report is its use of only a few keywords to try to present a picture of the discussions, and the lack of context within which each keyword was used.

In order to get around those limitations, a sample comment was selected as representative* of the discussion and analysed for its content. The comment was from Colum Paget, posted in the Mixon “report” post on November 9, 2014 at 6:38 pm.

*This was done using the same method as Mixon, i.e. I just chose it because I felt like it (it was the first one to catch my eye and because of the discussion with CP in the previous thread). I should note, CP, that if you don’t like people to say “bad things” about what you write, you should probably stop reading right now.

Analysis:
The first 2 paragraphs of his post are spent doing small talk, (165 words).

In the 3rd paragraph, CP mentions he long-time suffering of prejudice as a white man in science fiction and fantasy (“as a white man in SF&F, it’s my consistent experience that most people in the community habitually generalize in this way about people of my race and gender”) (236 words).

The 4th paragraph mentions his main encounter with RH (“My first encounter with RH was on twitter when they called for me to be beheaded for a comment (taken completely out of context) I’d made in an old blogpost.”) The behaviour of RH fits with what I personally saw active a couple of years ago. She would often engage directly with people on twitter when she took issue with the racism and sexism in what they wrote, and she would sometimes continue to use the same hyperbolic and violent language that she used in her reviews. To me, this is not okay. The first 127 words of this paragraph are spent describing his experience, but the last 29 words are spent in talking about a possible conspiracy.

The 5th paragraph begins and ends with more conspiracy ideation (“I thought she was some kind of right-wing false-flag operation intended to discredit left-wing”, 129 words). The middle of the paragraph contains both description of how his interaction with RH made him feel and conspiracy ideation (32 words, split in both categories).

In the 6th and 7th paragraph, CP describes what he thought RH was doing (“anti-white racist agenda, and also an anti-male agenda”) and makes further small talk (235 words).

The 8th paragraph sees CP back into full blown conspiracy thinking (192). Worst, he says he believes that part of his conspiracies is now becoming true. The idea that a woman in Thailand could be love SFF and find flaws in published work that hurt her enough that she lashes out in her criticism (sometimes crossing the line in the process) was apparently less credible to CP than the idea the entire thing was fabricated by a 40-year-old white man who wanted to discredit his supporters when he would abandon the act sometime in the future. To me, this appears to stem from the fact that, to this day, he still can’t see the racism and sexism denounced by RH in her reviews.

The 9th paragraph describes how RH “attacked” him by criticizing his work on her blog and twitter, and goes on to describe how those made him feel (116 words). He concludes this paragraph with “In many ways it wasn’t the threats and insults that *really* bothered me (though they did) it was the discovery that so many people would support them, and worse still, would support a worldview that to me seemed pretty much fascist.”, which I file in “small talk” (41 words.)

The 10th paragraph is CP saying her doesn’t like her reviews (“RH was an elite mistress of the dark art of going into what someone had written and ‘finding stuff’ in there.”) (217 words). The 11th paragraph is CP saying that not only does he not like RH’s reviews, but her work might inspires other people to write reviews he doesn’t like (“Other people, likely having their viewpoints effected by RH’s rhetoric, also critiqued my work.”) (119 words). The 12th paragraph is CP saying that negative reviews are bad, because anyone can say anything about anything, and that he should not be targeted by such criticism (185 words). The 13th paragraph is CP saying people should not interpret bad things from what he writes (160 words).

The 14th paragraph is small talk (87 words).

The 15th paragraph is a split between small talk and a plea for the recognition of the discrimination against white men in SFF (207 words split in the 2 categories [103 each]).

The 16th paragraph is important and talks about his experience following RH’s reviews (“You start to think people were avoiding you, or not wanting to be seen with you. You wonder if your rejection-rate is going up. Are people talking about you behind your back?” (128 words, filed under “Not liking bad reviews”, because he is clearly not talking about the effects of RH’s beheading comment).

The 17th paragraph is also touching, as CP addressed the long-term effects of his interaction with RH, but it’s hard to classify as he does not mention if he attributes them to the beheading comment or just the reviews (179 words, filed under “unattributed effects”).

The 18th paragraph is a mix of CP talking about his long-term effects and conspiracy ideation. In this case, since the latter could be a (normal) consequence of the former, this will be filled under unattributed effects (171 words).

The 19th paragraph talks about his experience in SFF (“Overall my experiences in SF&F have been very bad, and it’s not just RH.”) (122 words, small talk).

Finally, the 19th paragraph is CP’s conclusion, which I repost in full “So, that’s my situation. It’s nothing like as bad as some people have suffered, and the major cause of distress for me has been more ideological than personal: it’s been seeing that causes that I thought I supported appear to be horribly and irresolvably corrupted and self-defeating.” (47 words, filed in “description of experience”)

Word count Results
Small talk : 165+16+235+41+87+103+122 = 769
Discrimination against white men in SFF : 236+103 = 339
Description of experience : 127+116+47 = 290
Conspiracy : 29+129+16+192 = 366
Not liking bad reviews : 217+119+185+160+128 = 809
Unattributed effects : 179+171 = 350
Total : 2923 (2924 in the text itself, error because of rounding)

The main limitation of this analysis is that it only includes a single comment by a single person, both of which were not chosen at random.

All kidding aside, I think those 2 “analyses” show a genuine tendency. Yes, some people are mad about the use of hyperbolic and violent language (and the harassment) but, in general, I see a lot more of “I don’t like her reviews” and “I don’t like being called racist/sexist”. And again, I know for a fact that RH was an a*hole to some people, and could certainly respect their desire to never have to work with her. Unfortunately, this campaign appears to be about silencing someone who once wrote extremely good negative reviews.

I’ll leave the (next to) last word to someone I assume is an opponent of RH (I can’t really understand what her point is), found in the comment on the Mixon “report” (http://anotherwards.wordpress.com/2014/11/09/not-the-post-i-started-writing/)

“[Some people did not like] the fact that [her reviews] were made in such a way as to close down any sort of debate or discussion.”

Indeed. Her reviews where spot on, and people didn’t like that they couldn’t brush off the fact that they were writing racist and sexist texts. You can hate RH, the person, all you want, but that doesn’t make what she said untrue.

EBA

Thanks for this post Jim.
VitaSineLibrisMorsEst
November 10, 2014 @ 1:06 pm

How far do you go with this, though? How far does going after someone or their actions make someone as bad as the accused? God knows the discussion needs to be had, but I’m seeing a lot of fury and a lot of people are either afraid of engaging, on both sides, because of the stark black/white approach some are adopting. Harassment is not okay, for anyone, period, good or bad.
mt yvr
November 10, 2014 @ 1:11 pm

This is along the lines of the comment I made over on the LJ on Jim’s last post about this.

It has been often difficult in my life to express the kind of life I had when I was part of an abusive home. I’m going with this because it’s not the subject at hand and thus has distance for some and because it’s about my own experience and not one I’m likely to get “wrong”.

In my life it was exceedingly difficult to express what was happening. A phrase, here or there, was just … you know.. a parent. Except when it was contextualized. And seen as part of a pattern of expression by parents to child.

Endless digs, prods, pokes over and over lead to bruises. Which leads to cuts. Broken emotional surfaces eventually feel the experience as stabbing, not mere pokes. And if you’ve not been there for the whole of it, it just looks.. harmless.

I don’t know the specifics beyond what people are saying here. But I do know that as a person who suffered from abuse as a child, as well as coming out in the 90s here in Canada, there is a difference between “This specific example is abusive” and “This pattern of behaviour, expressed in part in this specific example is abusive”. It’s often hard to explain to people that no, I do not in fact trust straight drunk men in public despite the world having changed and my country having made me a legal being. Because at one point it was not only a reasonable expectation that they could beat me up, it was a reasonable reality that they would.

I’ve heard certain phrases and certain build ups of emotional bullying and I can not unhear the echoes in other people’s conversations when they come up. Stating a bad review is not abuse is fine. But I admit I’m a bit uncomfortable with the conversation that this person, from the perspective of the people who’ve lived with the results, did reviews and separately did reviews that were attacks. I’m not sure that I personally can easily make that distinction.

Hell. I just think of Ender’s Game. Loved it. Now… Now I won’t have a copy in my home. As a writer, as a creative person… I get the conversation I’ll be having my entire life: art and artist. But there are times. Times when I have to think: no. Just. No.
Edouard Brière-Allard
November 10, 2014 @ 1:13 pm

To me, there is nothing inherently wrong with saying: “this work is racist, and I think that makes Author X a racist”. It will certainly not always be true, and you may not like it, but it’s just stating an opinion, which is what reviews are for.
Marshall Ryan Maresca
November 10, 2014 @ 1:18 pm

But it’s not stating an opinion on the work, but the person behind it, and that’s where things move beyond “review” and into “personal attack”. And too many personal attacks then go behind the shield of, “hey, I’m just stating an opinion”.
Jim C. Hines
November 10, 2014 @ 1:19 pm

Thanks, Steve.

Let me say up front that what I’ve been trying to do here may not match up to what I’ve done, or how people are reading it. That’s on me.

I’m not trying to frame this as a discussion about reviews. But when I read Laura’s report, it felt like it conflated abuse and harassment with reviews. She stated that attacks included, “Multiple, vituperative reviews of their books or stories (one review didn’t count).”

What makes a vituperative review? Adrienne Kress is someone I consider a friend, and I disagree with a fair amount of RH’s review of her book, but Laura linked to only a single review, despite her stated policy on what’s considered an attack. I’ve been receiving comments and emails both from people stating that they feel afraid of publicly criticizing books because they’re seeing RH being attacked for her reviews.

Shorter version: I feel like I’m responding to a report that framed RH’s reviews as part of her harassment and abuse, and failed to recognize the potential distinction there.

There are multiple real problems here. I don’t claim to understand them all, and I know some of them haven’t yet been made public. I also know that my post today has felt like an attack or a betrayal of RH’s victims, and I feel like shit about that. The last thing I want to do is silence people who have already been hurt. But it’s very possible I screwed up, and that’s also on me.

But there are a lot of messages coming out of this thing. I’m not informed enough to speak about all of them. One message people are seeing is that if you’re a minority and you criticize the genre, you’d better watch your back. I don’t believe for a second that this was the intended message of Laura’s report. But I can also see where that’s coming from. I believe that also qualifies as a real problem, and it’s one I wanted to try to respond to.

I might be wrong. Or it could be that my timing royally sucked. Or I just made a jumble of it. Or all of the above.

Thanks for commenting. I’ll think about this some more, as I’m trying to do with the other emails and comments that have been coming in today.
Dolorosa
November 10, 2014 @ 1:20 pm

That’s why I think the approach taken in Mixon’s report was the best. It laid out a representative sample of WF/RH/BS’s actions, backed up with screencaps, links and charts outlining the backgrounds of the victims, so that each incident could be seen within the broader context of the others. The comments are a place for people to tell their own stories, and the post is being updated with links to those of other victims, and this makes the context even broader. Armed with all that information, people can then make up their own minds.

I agree that a black and white approach isn’t helpful. The valid criticisms raised in RH’s reviews don’t cancel out her threats of violence (sometimes made in those same reviews), and vice versa. But it’s only in setting both beside each other that people are able to take a more nuanced approach.
Jim C. Hines
November 10, 2014 @ 1:29 pm

I worry that in presenting only those quotes from RH’s reviews you are unintentionally downplaying the death threats, stalking on social media and emotional abuse that accompanied them.

That’s a very good point, dammit. Thank you. All I can say right this second is that I’m thinking hard about the comments and responses I’ve been getting on this.
VitaSineLibrisMorsEst
November 10, 2014 @ 1:31 pm

We’ll have to agree to disagree. Mixon’s report was written in a specific fashion, with italicized emphasis and emotional import. She knew what she was doing. It was not balanced, whatsoever. And, as Nick Mamatas pointed out it “looks like science fiction has its own thezoepost.” (Never mind that his hands aren’t clean either, but his point is valid.) No one is going to come out this unscathed and I just wonder if there’s some way of approaching this a bit more carefully without lobbing grenades into crowds. The big question is what is the end-game here? How do we get from here to there, without further casualties? That’s really what i want to know.
Martin
November 10, 2014 @ 1:34 pm

Important point: You can now build a career on anger. There was an interesting article on that: https://storify.com/a_man_in_black/youtube-patreon-and-the-rise-of-the-professional-v

This is again more concerning #gamergate but i am afraid we will see that pattern more often in the future.

The troubling thing is, we may see the development of “positive” feedback channels for such kind of anti-social behavior.
VitaSineLibrisMorsEst
November 10, 2014 @ 1:35 pm

If requireshate has apologized and has no longer contributed to that behaviour in some time, and we allow the notion that people can be redeemed, then what is the best way forward here, though? I have no issue in condemning her past actions, but I also feel like some of this is between her and her victims, and that we have people on both sides stirring the shit. I know in a few cases she has apologized to people, and those have been accepted. And then there’s the public apologies. What would you suggest that the field do, further?
Muccamukk
November 10, 2014 @ 1:42 pm

A few distinctions, then I promise I’m going to go away and leave Jim’s comment section alone.

1. Reviews themselves can be a form of harassment and bullying. They can include threats of death and sexual violence. They can be posted repeatedly in places where the author is sure to see them (not just saying, “Your books sucks!” on your own site or goodreads or whatev, but posting it on every book site with special attention paid to the one the author hangs out on, and hot linking cover images to make sure the author sees it every time). RH did those things as well. I think it was using reviews to bully. As well as just using reviews to… review, which she did a lot too.

2. I feel, and I know others disagree, that one can review a book one did not finish, as long as the fact of not finishing it is stated up front. If, for example, a YA fantasy romp includes six threats of rape, attempts at rape and an actual rape in the first forty pages, I’m probably not going to finish it, and I’m going to say why. Same goes for something being overtly racist, or just poorly written or boring. It’s possible that the tropes will be subverted by the end, but life’s too short, to be honest.

3. It’s quite possible that RH disproportionately targeted women and people of colour because they were soft targets and she knew she could bully them. It’s also pretty likely that that was, in majority, what she read, because that’s what she was interested in. Both can be true.

4. People are allowed to have opinions about whatever they want, being a failboat at one point doesn’t make you a failboat forever, and people change and move on. However, it does kind of look like The Best of Racefail in terms of who is commenting over at Laura’s blog, and I can see how that’s pretty off putting to some.
Laura
November 10, 2014 @ 1:51 pm

According to Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Athena Andreadis, RH was still engaging in this behaviour as of this past July- under her professional name. A future where she “has no longer contributed to that behaviour in some time” would be nice, but as of now, it’s still theoretical.

What should the field do further? Well I’m not, strictly speaking, a member of the field; I’m a fan, not an author. But generally speaking, I think a community’s response to finding an abuser in their midst should be to prevent them from doing further harm. In RH’s case, that would probably entail things like not inviting her to conventions, or asking her to speak on panels, or generally welcoming her into community spaces where she has opportunities to hurt others.
Carrie Cuinn
November 10, 2014 @ 2:01 pm

I’m glad you wrote this. I’ve also felt both sides (at least, the extremes of each side, the people who are making it into an us vs. them situation) are taking things too far. The person who wrote reviews as RH said important, true, things, often in an angry tone, but not exclusively violent or threatening or anything other than justifiably unhappy. That’s not wrong. The person who wrote reviews as RH also threatened and filed and stalked and other things. That is wrong.

But the Mixon report, while compiling data useful and necessary to ensure the public was aware of the range of behavior from a person with multiple online personas, also includes those justifiably angry reviews. It portrays angry reviews as abuse, and that’s dangerously wrong. I wish that the report had left out the reviews entirely, and focused on the other behavior, which was wrong. I could have respected the report then, suggested people read it, and appreciated that it existed.

Instead, it reads as an attack on someone while simultaneously saying that attacks are bad. It frightens reviewers who might otherwise have posted justifiably angry reviews (but not engaged in any of the other RH behavior that’s arguably wrong). Whether it’s intentional or not, it also is presented by a white woman with a lot of power in the SFF community by way of her work, friendships, and marriage, who’s gone out of her way to report on the evils of a person who identifies as a lesbian of color. That’s compounded by the fact that there’s no Mixon report on the evils of Vox Day, for example, or anyone else.

It’s just RH that needs to be documented and we need to be warned against?

Compounding the situation are the number of people using the report (and RHs abusive behavior) as a call to arms in defense of white authors. Stop punching up, they say. Stop attacking our racist/sexist/homophobic writing. We’re victims too. That they’re saying these things in the comments of the Mixon report and those comments were allowed to stand only emphasizes what the purpose of the report is.

Was RH right? Outside of simply (angrily, if she felt inclined) reviewing, no, she’s not right. She did engage in verifiably awful, threatening, and potentially illegal behavior. That’s wrong. It’s right to expose that. But be very, very, clear what your motivations are, and be very, very, clear that anger should not be censured. Mixon didn’t do that.
Edouard Brière-Allard
November 10, 2014 @ 2:02 pm

Of course it gets personal, what’s wrong with that. Do you somehow think that when an author publishes a book with, say, a racist stereotype, that people reading it are hurt on an impersonal level?

I have no problem with attacking authors in reviews (or in online posts in general), which is different then engaging them directly (like on twitter, say).

Anyway, what’s wrong with saying you think bad things of a particular person? Here, let me show you: I think Ina May Gaskin is a fool and a danger to public health. See? Nothing bad happened, no one gets hurt (except maybe IMG, if she ever comes here, but then no one’s forcing her). I could say that here 100 times and it would still be okay. But do note that I’m not engaging with her, I’m just saying it to anyone who will listen.
Liz Williams
November 10, 2014 @ 2:06 pm

Just to clarify, what action would you have taken? – if, for example, this had occurred in your workplace?
Hiding Anonymous
November 10, 2014 @ 2:08 pm

Thank you.

I think some of this goes back to a pervasive idea that calling somebody racist or sexist is THE WORST THING. I noticed somebody above suggesting that calling somebody racist, based on the evidence of things they’d written, was considered an ‘attack’. I think we should all think really, really hard about that. It is a criticism, it is an opinion (usually with arguable support from the text) but calling it an attack and implying it ought not be allowed? Come on.
Dolorosa
November 10, 2014 @ 2:19 pm

Yes, exactly. Imagine saying that, in the case of Jim Frenkel (which I mention because it was the most recent high profile case of abuse within the SFF community), compiling reports about his behaviour was a bad idea and that dealing with him should be ‘between him and his victims’.

I agree that the comments on Mixon’s posts have become overrun with people trying to bring all sorts of other issues to the table, to the point that that space may have become unwelcoming to actual victims, but I don’t agree that keeping everything isolated and behind closed doors is the way to deal with this. We need less isolation of victims, not more.
Hiding Anonymous
November 10, 2014 @ 2:20 pm

That’s the thing. “It’s not about the reviews” feels very much like “it’s about ethics in game journalism”. For everybody who pounds the table and talks about all the other horrible stuff RH did, you can find somebody saying, “Also awful mean reviews shouldn’t be allowed and don’t criticize tendencies of behavior in authors either.” Lots of people really do care about ethics in game journalism! But there’s plenty who are using that as a shield to cover their true agenda, too.

Steven Gould thinks that’s not important right now, though. Which is… food for thought.
Nenya
November 10, 2014 @ 2:34 pm

I definitely agree with your main point here; it’s certainly possible to both support the right to angry and negative reviews and be completely, 110% opposed to threats, stalking, and abuse. That’s where I find myself right now, in fact, regarding RH.

I will say, though, that like Dolorosa I’m coming at this from being aware of BS/RH first as Winterfox and then as her later identities. If you know someone as a vicious, community-destroying, stalking troll first, and then you see them using the same tactics in their supposed social-justice work…it’s very, very hard to take them seriously as a real advocate for social justice. There are plenty of people whose angry reviews I’m going to appreciate as a useful addition to the discourse, where I can say, “Yeah, what she said! Even if it’s shouty-er than I’d say myself.” Winterfox is not one of them, because to me she is primarily, first, in my experience a harrasser and troll.

Even then, she said some things that were useful and correct. But I won’t be using the RH blog as any kind of reading guide, because of the source. We say “Don’t shoot the messenger,” but we also say “Consider the source,” and in her specific case the source (and her long, long history as an abuser before she discovered social justice language) poisons anything she has to say. For me personally.

Pulling back and looking at things from a wider perspective (because, yes, this particular situation exists but also resonates to larger issues), I do hope people will continue to feel free to point out the things they dislike or find sexist/racist/homophobic/classist/imperialist/badly written in the works they read. Go for it! Speak up, say what you feel. I also stand with those commenters at Mixon’s who are saying that this whole situation makes them more invested in supporting the voices of women and people of colour and queer folks, because it would foolish and counterproductive to let one awful person derail that ongoing goal (one which is, indeed, something all people of goodwill should strive for as a baseline).

Because of my strong feelings about Winterfox/BS in specific, I’ve found your last couple of posts a little muddied, Jim, but I agree with what I think you’re trying to do. I think that it is actually very important to distinguish between review/dispute/disagreement on the one hand and harrassment on the other. Because the one is productive and the other really, really isn’t. It’s up to each of us to determine where we personally draw the line, and to try to be sure what we say and do actually does work towards the larger goal of inclusivity and a better world–whatever that means in particular. As Nalo Hopkinson tweeted, that #requireslove, in what ever way it’s expressed.
Jim C. Hines
November 10, 2014 @ 2:39 pm

“Because of my strong feelings about Winterfox/BS in specific, I’ve found your last couple of posts a little muddied, Jim, but I agree with what I think you’re trying to do.”

Thanks. I think I’ve been a bit muddy, and I’m working on sorting that out in my own head…
VitaSineLibrisMorsEst
November 10, 2014 @ 2:40 pm

It’s hard to say, but in this case your hands aren’t clean. I recall very specifically your efforts to hijack Catherynne M. Valente’s livejournal post a few years ago, attempting to attack requireshate over something else, along with some other bizarre behaviour. Me, I’d fire you both. You both have some issues. Anger begets anger, after all. It’s not healthy, and stalking, whether it’s requireshate, or you, is wrong. Harassment, whether requireshate or you, is wrong. This requires #requireslove, as someone downthread pointed out, as a way out.
Steven Gould
November 10, 2014 @ 2:40 pm

It is always interesting when I learn what I think isn’t and is important from other people.

Jim,

Thanks very much for the clarifications.

I think the conversations we need to be having primarily need to led by the marginalized members of our communities so I am uncomfortable about saying what we should be discussing. However, I will say we have a lot of work to do in order to not allow our new and diverse voices be isolated and more vulnerable to this kind of predation. I am far more interested in helping the targeted persons and communities than in attacking RHB.
VitaSineLibrisMorsEst
November 10, 2014 @ 2:43 pm

In retrospect I could be a bit wrong with my suggestion, yes. I didn’t mean it that way, though that’s on me. My apologies. I’m simply frustrated and I’d like to see a way out of this, for all concerned.
Nenya
November 10, 2014 @ 2:47 pm

Mmm. There was a huge blowup over Vox Day last year, as I recall. He’s been booted from SFWA, and pretty much everyone knows what kind of person he is. Mixon didn’t have to make a report on him because that had already happened. (See also Scalzi and our host’s commentary on the subject as that was blowing up last year.)

The WS/RH/BS situation is just coming out now. So of course there’s a report now. Not to say that many, many of us haven’t known what she was up to for years–but no one with any kind of voice or reach was listening. People are coming out of the woodwork now because her behaviour is being brought into the light of day and there’s someone listening when they say, “She stalked me for three years, she harrassed me, she destroyed my community.”

SFF has a problem with harrassment and sexism and racism. We should be making a stink when Frenkel and Vox Day do it. That doesn’t mean we should let it slide when the person perpetrating it is not a straight white guy.
Nenya
November 10, 2014 @ 2:50 pm

And thank you! I appreciate both the thought and effort you’re putting in to sort out your own thoughts/feelings on it, and the space you’re providing for discussion.
Claudia
November 10, 2014 @ 2:50 pm

“…we need to all equally condemn the abuse of authors like Stephenie Meyer and EL James, along with the constant insults aimed at their readerships.”

You are 1000% right. I think the writing of both of these people are absolute trash, but I have never, not once, suggested that Stephanie Meyer is stupid and unintelligent, or that EL James is an abuse-enabler, etc. Lots of other folks have attacked the crap out of these writers, and I admit that James in particular makes it easy because she doesn’t know how to run her Twitter feed, so she responds in (un)kind, and makes it all worse. She’s a very easy target.

While I cringe a little that there is such a huge audience for this stuff, hey… people reading is a good thing. Particularly in Meyers’ case, a generation of tween and teen girls read a book when they normally wouldn’t have, and that inevitably will lead to reading more books, and more… and yes, they might read trash at first, but eventually as they mature, they may well pick up other things.

So I commend Meyers for achieving something that, as a former teacher, I tried to achieve in my own students. It’s hard to get kids to read, so I’m down, even if it is sparkly vamps.

I also don’t get the vitriol for adults reading Young Adult fiction. Who cares?

My point is, EVERYONE needs to separate criticism of the work from shameless attacks on a writer (and their fans). Period.
Marshall Ryan Maresca
November 10, 2014 @ 2:57 pm

But then, where’s the line between “just an opinion” and “call for action”, and then between “call for action” and “bullying and threats”? Making it about the person instead of the work (even in the case of someone like IMG, where the distinction between the work and person themselves is very blurry) is what creates a problem.

Even if it’s critiquing a person’s actions, I’d prefer it leans into “this is what they’ve done” and not “this is the kind of person they are”.
Carrie Cuinn
November 10, 2014 @ 2:58 pm

I’m in no way suggesting we let it slide, and repeatedly said most of what RH did was wrong, should have been exposed, etc. But that doesn’t make this particular report flawless. We do need to be careful to both expose abuse and support the idea that a review can be angry without being abusive, or the reviewer attacked just for being angry.

That Vox Day’s IRL self was eventually booted from an organization whose rules he violated is not at all the same as taking it upon yourself to investigate, report, blacklist, and ban (as evidenced by the report, multiple comments, and even the comment above). It’s telling that of all the people who are abusive, threaten, etc online, it’s only this one that Mixon felt the need to protect us from.
VitaSineLibrisMorsEst
November 10, 2014 @ 3:01 pm

I almost expect them to turn their attention to Nick Mamatas, now :p
Dolorosa
November 10, 2014 @ 3:01 pm

I want to echo Nenya on that.
717
November 10, 2014 @ 3:08 pm

The inclusion of those justifiably angry reviews as abuse is the reason why I’m not at all comfortable with the report. As a WoC I agreed with quite a few of them, and I felt they were necessary. I am afraid of a precedent being set where people with similar views who make them in similarly angry ways will be lumped in with RH, even if those parties have no intention of carrying out harassment, stalking, and threats like she did.

I saw a blog post a few days ago linking back to the report and listing the authors RH wrote angry reviews for, calling for ‘fair and even-handed reviews.’ If that’s not tone-policing and telling marginalized groups to be nice or else, I don’t know what is.

As for the comments in Mixon’s report, I agree with Muccamukk: it’s a lot of white voices drowning out PoC, and it seems less about the victims (where the focus ought to be) than it is about self-righteous outrage coming from white people. In the end, PoC are paying the price while being left out in the cold, yet again. It’s infuriating.
Laura
November 10, 2014 @ 3:17 pm

I don’t know if this is sarcasm or not, but I actually hope someone DOES write up a post about Mamatas. His behaviour on james_nicoll’s LJ (and for the sake of what, shit-stirring?) was atrocious.
Lark @ The Bookwyrm's Hoard
November 10, 2014 @ 3:18 pm

Ditto. As always, Jim, I appreciate your willingness to listen, to hear, to think, and to rethink. These are thorny and emotionally complex issues, to which we all bring our own experiences and baggage. You try to bring clarity to the issues, you remain respectful toward the people who participate in discussion here (unless their own behavior warrants otherwise), and you aren’t afraid to re-examine your position as new ideas and information come to you. You, sir, are a gentleman.
VitaSineLibrisMorsEst
November 10, 2014 @ 3:20 pm

It was sarcasm, as I had no issue with Nick’s posts, whatsoever. This is exactly what I’m talking about, though. You have no issue turning the witch-hunt onto others. This has grown into something ugly. And that is wrong. Think about that.
Nenya
November 10, 2014 @ 3:23 pm

I must say I don’t feel Mamatas has covered himself with glory in this whole mess. Apparently his persona is Chaotic Neutral, but I kind of feel like “moar chaos!” is unhelpful here.
Liz Williams
November 10, 2014 @ 3:24 pm

I’m interested to see that someone so sanctimonious about love regards a breach of netiquette as apparently more serious than a decade of harassment, blackmail and intimidation.

Bizarre behaviour, eh? What, like criticising someone on my live journal?

I will continue to defend myself, and my close friends and family, against abuse. I’m sorry if that doesn’t fit in with your opinion of how nice girls should behave. I will do as I have done in this instance – regardless of what people who know nothing about the situation may believe, including, obviously, yourself. I took the following steps: I wrote to my editor* about Sriduangkaew, helped with Laura’s report, and reported Sriduangkaew to the police in the UK. They have seen fit to investigate.

If you believe I, or Caitlin, or Tricia Sullivan, have organised a whispering campaign, or blacklisting, please provide evidence (hopefully more compelling than ‘Nick Mamatas said so.’) I have said that I’ll post my correspondence with Prime if necessary; I’m still happy to do that.

*If you’d like to tell me which of my own colleagues I’m allowed to communicate with, can I send you a list of my emails this week? You can read them all and tell me whether you approve. In turn, maybe I could tell you how to do your job?
VitaSineLibrisMorsEst
November 10, 2014 @ 3:40 pm

That’s sick behaviour right here, you calling the police, I think. Do you mind if I see the police report, if they even listened to you? Never mind that Sriduangkaew is not a British citizen, so exactly what were you trying to do? Please explain that, publicly. I heard that you attempted to harass her friends, though, instead, since you can’t get at her. Is that what you’re referring to? In any case, you’ve got both issues, and like I said, in a proper workplace I would fire you both. End of story. That’s what was asked, and I answered.

I have no clue what else you’re talking about, but I’m referring to Caitlin R. Kiernan’s public statement that no one should work with requireshate / Benjanuan Sriduangkaew, and in conjunction with what Mamatas said, on his posts, it makes it clear to me that some people are just a wee bit too obsessed with going after requireshate / Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

Sorry, you violated internet rules when you hijacked Valente’s livejournal to push your own agenda. That was wrong, then, and it’s wrong, now. But you’re so intent on going after someone that you can’t see the hate that is being spewed.

So you’re admitting that you doxxed requireshate?
Jim C. Hines
November 10, 2014 @ 3:44 pm

This thread needs to take a step back and cool off. Thank you both.
Erica Wagner
November 10, 2014 @ 3:56 pm

People keep saying she had a point with her nasty, excoriating reviews. Leaving aside the issue of whether or not having a point justifies bullying, blackmail, threats, harassment, and intimidation (I think we all agree that it doesn’t), or whether over-the-top vitriol is the best way to get any valid point across, I have to admit that I’m scratching my head here about the “having a point” thing.

I never read the RH blog when it was active, and so really only have access to the stuff that’s been saved and recirculated recently, so I may be missing something. I get that at least a few of her targets were from that set of newer, white, male writers (people like Rothfuss, Abercrombie and so on) who write traditional, white-male centered fantasy that became almost insta bestsellers, and some of them also in the “grimdark” genre. So I could see how allegations of racism and sexism and overall rapiness could be warranted there. There are plenty of other reviewers who have made similar comments and exhibited similar reservations about their work.

But what about writers like Jemisin? Are people saying that RH also had a point when she accused her of being a terrible writer and all that? That she had a point when she said that fans of such work were examples of everything that’s wrong with fantasy?

I guess some of us will agree and disagree about the merit of every author, award winning or not, but it seems like many of her targets were people who are generally thought to be decent writers, and many of them are people who are at least trying to write outside of the traditional white, straight male, fantasy box.

So I’m a bit hazy about what this good point she kept making was supposed to be. Was it that no one should write anything outside their immediate cultural experiences, and if you’re male or from the west, you shouldn’t write at all?
Laura
November 10, 2014 @ 4:00 pm

(For some reason I’m not seeing a reply button for VitaSineLibrisMorsEst) I don’t think people pointing out that “this person has been consistently cruel towards victims of abuse” is a witch-hunt. His actions haven’t been on RH’s scale and I don’t think he needs to be blacklisted, but I have no issuue at all with people saying “wow, this dude is toxic.”
Jim C. Hines
November 10, 2014 @ 4:04 pm

Laura – the comment threading only goes so deep. If it kept going, we’d end up with columns of six-character-wide unreadable text.
Laura
November 10, 2014 @ 4:09 pm

Not to derail from the main issue (Sriduangkaew/RH) but I think “chaos” is a mild word for what he’s been doing- at least when I saw him in james_nicoll’s journal. People were coming forward to say “RH abused me, and I’m frightened of her” and he went after them by moving the goalposts, insisting that it wasn’t a big deal, and insinuating that they were liars. Again, it’s not *as* bad as RH’s behaviour (then again, that’s a low standard to maintain) but it’s also not especially healthy for the community.
Laura
November 10, 2014 @ 4:10 pm

Thirded.
Edouard Brière-Allard
November 10, 2014 @ 4:31 pm

Laura, I read all of Mamatas’ posts on that thread, and did not see him doing what you describe.
Sally
November 10, 2014 @ 5:07 pm

Nenya, you’re being reasonable on the Internet. We can’t have that sort of thing. 😉
Sally
November 10, 2014 @ 5:10 pm

I was so confused that I couldn’t even put it into words, but yes. If someone can answer Erica’s question, which is the in- focus version of mine, that’d be swell.
Foxessa
November 10, 2014 @ 5:31 pm

What’s weird about so much of this, including the latest tracking of the dimensions of the controversy, is that it leaves out entirely how the RH blog began — using the same language to excoriate the grimdark male authors use in their fascinated, detailed descriptions of relentless abuse, humiliation, torture, etc. of female victims, for no reason at all except to establish “we’re not Tolkien!” These authors are everybody’s faves, starting with You Know Who, going on to That Guy You Know and That One, and That One — and those were damned valid points.

It’s interesting, only from a sociologist pov of course, that a woman is getting more abuse for abusing male authors than the male authors and Reddit, Gamers, etc. get for actual abuse of women of any sort who is a nail who sticks out — who have been doing it longer and with larger scope.

Not that I’m defending the other personas that weren’t RH, who in those personas evidently harassed and threatened. Not defending because I never saw or knew, but because that’s wrong.

But the performative critical stuff on the earlier RH made points that others, no matter what they might say in private, wouldn’t say in public.

I dunno. This is another of an endless series of blow ups in the field, that began long before the internets, but this seems to have a particular internet flavor, and thus the scope of this blowup is blowing into entire communities who would never have heard of it, and in ignorance and in less often full information, it is being discussed and judgments are being made. It’s just one after another of these things, which then leads one to wonder WHY this particular field and its associated field such as comix, gaming, etc. provoke these so often?
717
November 10, 2014 @ 5:38 pm

I’ll try my best to answer, as someone who did find reasonable points in some reviews: when I’m referring to those, I’m referring to instances of sexism and racism as well. While comments calling Jemisin (among others) terrible writers and condemning the YA genre aren’t constructive and helpful, when I say the reviews were justifiably angry, what I’m talking about concern issues found in the text, such as glaring cultural inaccuracies or perpetuation of problematic tropes in a book that is promoting the diametric opposite (e.g. I feel the ‘I’m not like other girls’ mindset doesn’t have a place in a book that’s touted as feminist without any criticism from the narrative).

As a WoC, I certainly don’t think RH’s point was that people ought to stick to writing only their own experiences. It’s when they don’t do a good job of representing that marginalized group that invites criticism from me. Too often I’ve seen white authors writing PoC and getting defended when PoC point out the issues quite reasonably, with lines such as ‘but they tried! don’t you know it’s hard?’ when the reviews point out that really, not a lot of research is done, and not a lot of trying. We get dismissed as ‘bitching’ and ‘complaining’ at best, and harassed at worst, and ultimately, when we try to write our own, there’s gatekeeping with words like ‘too ethnic’ or ‘unrelatable’ from publishers.
RequiresHate/Winterfox/Benjanun Sriduangkaew Linkspam » Rants and Ramblings By An Old Bag
November 10, 2014 @ 5:40 pm

[…] Only a Sith Deals in Absolutes by Jim Hines […]
Carrie Cuinn
November 10, 2014 @ 5:40 pm

I’m not speaking as a fan of RH’s reviews, because I’ve only read a few, but in general:

There doesn’t have to be a “point” to RHs reviews, or anyones. She doesn’t have to have been writing for you, for an audience of people like you, or for anyone at all. She could have written simply to get stuff off her chest, yelling into the void that is the internet, with no expectation anyone would see it, and that’s okay. It doesn’t matter if she thought Jemisin was a bad writer, or if she thought everyone who ever wrote ever was a bad writer. She had an opinion, she expressed it, and you don’t have to understand or care why. Neither do I.

The only issue here is that she did other things, not writing reviews, that were beyond acceptable, and the reaction to that on the part of Laura Mixon and others may be inappropriate as well.
Carrie Cuinn
November 10, 2014 @ 5:51 pm

I appreciate you reminding people of this. There’s so much that RH/BS did wrong later/concurrently that should be focused on, exposed, discussed, etc. But by most accounts the review site started with admirable intentions, and did useful things, like giving a voice to justifiable anger, and appropriating dismissive/oppressive language to expose the effect that language while using it to reclaim power. I so wish she’d have stuck to just that, but I guess power feeds anger in dark ways sometimes.
lkeke35
November 10, 2014 @ 5:59 pm

And this is why I think some of the criticisms about RH are coming terribly close to Tone Policing. I read some of RH’screviews, back in the day. I didn’t agree with a quite a few of them (and yes, they were spot on) and after a while, the anger was off putting but I just stopped reading the reviews. I didn’t require her to stop doing them her way because I was uncomfortable.

As a WoC, I’m very sensitive to people trying to shut me up, not because they didn’t like what I said, but because they didn’t like the manner in which I said it, allowing them to comfortably sidestep whether or not I was telling the truth. Discussing the manner in which she made the review is being thrown into the discussion because some people who got bad reviews see this as an opportunity to bash her with impunity because of other things she did.

But then I’ve never received a bad review from her, so I have the luxury of looking at it from this direction. Sure, you should be mad at the bullying and intimidation and personal attacks, that’s uncalled for, in what is merely supposed to be a book review, no matter how it was said, but I think people should be careful not to wander down the same road they vilify her for following.
Hiding Anonymous
November 10, 2014 @ 6:05 pm

That seems like a strangely… corporate idea. Like, people are not responsible for the things they say or the way they act, it doesn’t actually reflect on their identity. Or at least it shouldn’t? I’m not sure I’m on board with this….
Nigel
November 10, 2014 @ 6:11 pm

‘And, as Nick Mamatas pointed out it “looks like science fiction has its own thezoepost.”’

Wow, I’m sure Zoe Quinn would be thrilled to be regarded as equivalent to Requires Hate. One broke up with a jerk, the other spent ten years bullying and abusing people. Good one, Nick. I wonder what the tag-line for this line of defense should be? ‘Actually it’s about balance in online bullying reports?’

‘The big question is what is the end-game here? How do we get from here to there, without further casualties? That’s really what i want to know.’

The important thing is that it’s all water under the bridge. Sure, we could talk about who abused and bullied and harassed who til the cows come home, but at the end of the day, can’t we just admit that RH and her victims were both wrong and leave it at that?
Hiding Anonymous
November 10, 2014 @ 6:16 pm

Putting what RH did and what Mamatas did in the James Nicoll LJ on even the same scale is one of those frightening things I keep hiding from. I saw Mamatas insisting on scrupulous citations of his own words when people accused him of things and repeatedly pointing out the context of situations when he knew it. If that is bad for the community, it is probably a bad community.
Ann Somerville
November 10, 2014 @ 6:18 pm

“If requireshate has apologized and has no longer contributed to that behaviour in some time”

She and her cronies (who were conspiring with her privately in a chatroom) were going after people in *October*.

And if you think all this curiously same tone same wording briefing against people like Elizabeth Bear and Laura Mixon is a coincidence, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Apologies are meaningless unless the behaviour changes, and all the people actually hurt have that hurt addressed and remedied to the extent possible. I see nothing from RH/BS doing anything but CYA.
Hiding Anonymous
November 10, 2014 @ 6:27 pm

It honestly doesn’t matter if she had ‘a point’. One thing that comes from modern reviewers with diverse voices is that people can find a community of like-minded people and like-minded tastes. One ‘point’ of criticizing Jemisin and YA (or whatever) was that readers who also disliked Jemisin and YA might now have more points of comparison to calibrate RH’s taste against their own. It’s one reason why, in this massive media surge, having detailed, critical reviews is really, really important.

It’s disconcerting to see the review of Jemisin held up as even a misdemeanor. One review (and accompanying cultural criticism) I’ve been considering writing for a long time is of Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk & Honey series, which I think is not very good. The idea that a harsh review that isn’t in line with popular opinions is (leaving aside, as you said, all the abuse and stuff) Not Welcome is pretty scary right now, though.
Spriggana
November 10, 2014 @ 6:35 pm

After reading a bit about RH I think the problem was posting multiple reviews of the same book in different places, sometimes under different usernames. I could be wrong, of course.
Marshall Ryan Maresca
November 10, 2014 @ 6:47 pm

That wasn’t my intention, but I can see how I came across that way.

I’m more saying… I’d rather be shown evidence than told a judgment, if that makes sense.
Hiding Anonymous
November 10, 2014 @ 6:59 pm

I keep wondering who her ‘helpers’ and ‘cronies’ are. Do we have any names? I do think it’s probably pretty disrespectful to dismiss people who may have shared opinions with RH as simply nameless ‘cronies’, as if she was pulling their strings.
Ms. Sunlight
November 10, 2014 @ 8:35 pm

I know, and it’s hilarious given how often people actually do say something racist or sexist or otherwise bigoted.
Ms. Sunlight
November 10, 2014 @ 8:54 pm

So, exactly how is that a problem? If I want to review something is there a rule that states I can only do so in one place? She wasn’t sockpuppeting, as far as I am aware; none of these identities were particularly closely guarded, many of those now reporting harassment have stated that they were aware of the various identities, and she would frequently link to tweets or postings under one or another identity on her Requires Hate blog.

People often have different usernames on different sites, particularly if there was some time between signing up to each one.

Don’t misunderstand me; I absolutely believe that RH has behaved inappropriately and unpleasantly to some people and that’s not to be condoned, but a review – no matter how hyperbolic or scathing – is not itself harassment.
Hiding Anonymous
November 10, 2014 @ 9:05 pm

I’m sorry, was “It’s [presumably Jim’s discussion of reviews] a serious diversion from the real problems here,” NOT meant to suggest that you didn’t think the reviews issue was important right now? I’m at a loss for how else to interpret that statement.
Ann Somerville
November 10, 2014 @ 9:19 pm

I don’t think Jim would welcome the conversation going down this track. But you can google and look up Twitter as well as I can.
Dolorosa
November 11, 2014 @ 3:17 am

No, that wasn’t it. The problem wasn’t the multiple reviews – it was that frequently she went after people on multiple platforms, outside her reviews. One author said that RH followed her from platform to platform, and posted bestiality porn which she claimed was the work of that author. Another was stalked for years, and was subjected to abuse on Twitter, every time she talked about certain subjects.

For others it extended beyond social media into their professional lives – Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Athena Andreadis have come forward about this.

These are the things her reviews need to be set beside.
Kari Sperring
November 11, 2014 @ 5:04 am

I agree. This aspect is very troubling. We need negative, critical reviews, especially when dealing with problematic books, films, games and so forth. Reviewers need to feel they can draw attention to such things without being attacked for ‘meanness’.
And I agree with Hidden Anon’s point earlier in the post about the way Meyer and James and their fans are somehow ‘acceptable targets’ too. They’re not. Criticise the work, fine. Don’t imply or say that the writer and their readers are worthless people. There is a huge dose of sexism in the way successful female writers like James, Meyer and Rowling and their fans are dismissed and it’s not acceptable.
Jim, thank you for adapting this post. The first version did make me feel like I should have stayed silent because my history harms others and must never be mentioned. This version doesn’t, so much.
Dolorosa
November 11, 2014 @ 5:16 am

I find the conflation of people who criticise RH’s behaviour outside her reviews and Gamergate disturbing. I find it particularly disturbing that Nick Mamatas has described Mixon’s report in language that implies it is no different to Gamergate’s ‘report’ on Zoe Quinn. The difference is that Zoe Quinn did none of the things Gamergate accused her of doing, while no one – even the people criticising the Mixon report are denying that RH did the things outlined in it.

I have no problem with people criticising Mixon’s report, its grounds for inclusion of certain material, or the unrelated agendas being pushed in its comment section. But I think the Gamergate comparison is inflammatory and unfair.
Helen Hall
November 11, 2014 @ 5:27 am

I have been impressed by your work pointing up the objectification of women, but I do feel you are muddying the waters with your posts about RH / Benjanun Sriduangkaew by trying to make it All About the Reviews.

I came across her two years ago on LJ and even then people were saying that she had a history of online abuse under a variety of pseudonyms. Later she discovered the SJ campaigners and realised she could use their ideas as a figleaf to disguise and justify her abuse.

She did target genuinely problematical fiction, but it’s clear from Laura’s analysis that non-white female writers were disproportionately targeted, sometimes just on the grounds of insufficient racial/ethnic purity. As a result, she silenced many voices and destroyed valuable communities that were intended to promote SF by non-white writers, especially women.

Two years ago I looked at RH’s blog and Twitter account and found them horrifying. I am an older British woman, so no doubt some people on this thread will think that it’s old fashioned to object to death threats and graphic descriptions of horrific torture in reviews and online comments. It’s just hyperbole, I was told at the time. No one actually means it. She isn’t actually asking people to behead authors. How ridiculous you are! That could never happen!

Well, I’m afraid this sort of thing does happen. A young man was beheaded in public on a London street this summer. At least one young woman was nearly blinded and permanently disfigured when someone she thought of as a “friend” threw acid in her face. (And that was just one news story I happened to see. I’m sure there were other incidents, even if not quite so horrific.)

If you are reading stories like this in the news, then RH’s exhortations to her followers to commit similar crimes against you are absolutely terrifying. Jim, you admit that you’re a white, American male, probably living in a decent neighbourhood, but not everyone is so lucky and what people in your position can brush off as “hyperbole” can seem like a very real threat to someone else.
helyanwe
November 11, 2014 @ 7:07 am

Oh for crying out loud, the language of RH was the same as when she was posting as Winterfox only even more hateful. RH still attacked the same minority authors and white authors as she did as Winterfox, only RH’s attacks were even more disguised as social justice and even more vicious.

WF/RH/BS is not getting abused, her abuse is finally being exposed.
Jim C. Hines
November 11, 2014 @ 9:15 am

“Jim, thank you for adapting this post. The first version did make me feel like I should have stayed silent because my history harms others and must never be mentioned. This version doesn’t, so much.”

I definitely didn’t want to make you or other victims of RH feel unsafe or silenced. I’m sorry for that, and I’m glad the changes to the post helped.
Jim C. Hines
November 11, 2014 @ 9:24 am

Helen – While I’ve already said that I screwed up in some respects here, I haven’t been trying to make it All About the Reviews. Nobody here is excusing or justifying the horrifying threats and abuse RH committed, nor have I said anywhere that those threats should be dismissed as hyperbole.
Greg
November 11, 2014 @ 11:03 am

This kind of thing needs a spotlight put on it:

“Let him be hurt, let him bleed, pound him into the fucking ground. No mercy.”

We’re living in a world where the difference between satire and intending death is the difference between whether Schrodinger’s cat is alive or dead: you only know when you look, by which time its too late.

And when people like VitaSineLibrisMorsEst want to say that shining a spotlight on death threats is the same as death threats, that “A witch-hunt is a witch-hunt, whether it’s by the good guys or the bad guys, and it’s not looking pretty, either way”, then clearly the wind blows north-north-west and they can no longer tell a hawk from a handsaw, and should be treated as such.

I do think that something to keep in mind is that one difference between people like RequiresHate and people like the ones trying to put a spotlight on that behavior, is that RH is operating a scorched earth policy whereas people with spotlights are trying to follow rules of engagement to specifically target and call out bad behavior. Scorched earth is easy. Absolutes are easy. Dealing with rules of engagement is messy and not everyone will agree on what is a legitimate target. People in the trenches, people who have been fired upon by the enemy, generally want fewer restrictions. People further away tend to see the value in discriminating use of force.

Hines saying reviews should not be a legitimate target is not the same as Hines condoning or downplaying RH’s death threats. His update should help clarify that. But the discussion of what is and is not a valid target is not something that should ever be taken off the table in any fight, nor should it be convoluted into siding with the enemy.
S.M. Stirling
November 11, 2014 @ 11:09 am

To begin with, for the most part the people RH accused of various things in her reviews did not, in fact, do those things. She merely -accused- them of doing so.

The essential point is that the reviews -cannot- be disassociated with the rest of the behavior; they’re part of it, and of a piece with it. That was her MO — start with the review, establish complicity on the part of some of the audience by pushing their buttons, and then escalate.

Why was this possible? Precisely because they were willing to go along with the original poisonous, hate-filled rhetoric.
S.M. Stirling
November 11, 2014 @ 11:29 am

So if a rhetorical style or set of permissible tactics allowed someone like RH to flourish for -ten years or more-, wrecking lives (and that’s not an exaggeration), inflicting serious harm on vulnerable people, and shutting down discussions (and probably causing jaywalking), then perhaps the rhetorical style itself needs examining. It’s a wake-up call.

Means are inseparable from ends; in fact, the means you use determine the ends you can accomplish.

Remember, she didn’t do this alone — she worked by encouraging dogpiling, by sucking people in to her circle and then (among other things) making them obey by blackmailing them with the threat of revealing confidential correspondence to family and employers, and so forth. The more they obeyed, the more deeply they were committed and the more incentive they had to suppress doubts.

In short, she was a champion inciter of mobbing attacks — a technical term which everyone should look up.

So as a general principle, do not allow yourself to be drawn into a mobbing attack. Remember, nobody (or very few) people ever think “I will now join a vicious mob which intends to destroy someone for the lulz”.

Participants always feel -righteous-. They think they’re doing good and fighting evil. It’s the Old Adam of combative tribal solidarity, exhilarating and intoxicating.

I think it’s a good bet that even RH thought that she was “right” to some degree, though her pattern also indicates narcissism, outright sadism, and possible sociopathy. (Lots of people in leadership positions exhibit those traits, for obvious reasons.)

A good test is this: imagine the people you most dislike and think most wrong and harmful were in a position to do Tactic X to -you- or to those you love or like or approve of. Would you consider that a legitimate? if you don’t, it’s probably not a legitimate tool for you to use either. There’s a reason the Golden Rule features in so many otherwise unrelated religions and philosophies.

There’s a quote from Nietzsche which is apposite:

“Distrust all those in whom the will to punish is strong. They are of a low sort and kind; the bloodhound and the hangman look out of their faces. Distrust greatly all those who speak much of justice. Indeed, their souls lack more than honey. And when they speak of themselves as the “good and the just”, remember always that they would be Pharisees [persecutors] if only they had… power.”
Madame Hardy
November 11, 2014 @ 11:40 am

I absolutely agree with you that angry reviews are not the same as personal attacks.

It seems to me that Laura J. Mixon’s statistics make an important point that is being overlooked. Requires Hate’s angry reviews were disproportionately focused on women of color (and women), just as her personal attacks were disproportionately focused on women of color. Given women of color’s tiny representation in published fiction, that focus is troubling.
Hidden Anonymous
November 11, 2014 @ 11:49 am

Thezoepost itself accused Zoe Quinn of sleeping around and rape as she defined rape. It later even posted an addendum saying she couldn’t have traded sex for nonexistent reviews. The document, full of citations and nominally written to protect others from her toxic personality, was still used to set off a far-reaching firestorm that seeks to influence many aspects of ZQ’s industry _even though the post wasn’t about those things_. As far as I know, nobody not on a Gamergate offensive ever mentions the intimate concerns in thezoepost because (rightfully so) they are really nobody’s business.

Since there is reason to believe that unconnected people with an agenda of their own will use the Report to further an agenda that involves silencing voices they don’t like, comparisons to Thezoepost do not seem inappropriate. Bad things can come of good intentions and we owe it to ourselves to try to offset that damage before it happens if we can.
S.M. Stirling
November 11, 2014 @ 11:51 am

Yes, she did seem to show a pattern of preferentially attacking women of Asian background, often gay ones, though not always. Probably for the same reason that serial killers usually (though again not always) select victims from their own ethnic group.

However, note that the hideously bad stuff she did would be just as hideously bad if it was directed at Prince Andrew or the Pope.
BDG
November 11, 2014 @ 11:52 am

I’m so incredibly worried that this will just destroy all the good will and understanding that has been created over the last few years for POC like myself within the community. I’m sorry to say I don’t trust white people to not abuse this, to not use this as another means to silent dissenting voices. RH, who I will point out, so one doesn’t think I’m some sort anti-white shill, I do not agree with in terms of anger or violence as tools of criticism, I’ve been on the wrong side of both of those to many times in my life to not recognized the fruitless hollowed-out tree in which those things grow, but I did occasionally agree with some of her points and I still agree with them, I thought I saw a kindred soul, a person seeking a cathartic release of rage, or pain, or something, that builds up being a settled person in settlers world. A person whose anger, while not agreeing with it, I recognized as being a valid in the age of economic imperialism. An yet here we are, a mad women whose long history of abuse and gross misuse of the language I use, and I’m sure other POC, to defend myself from abuse, from a world that is all to keen to let the noose hang around my neck in case I step outside my bounds by speaking out of turn, is in fact the exact opposite of what I believed. A bit of a Trojan Horse in fact. I genuinely fear that this all will destroy the walls around me, taking another safe (or rather safer than normal if only because it provides a small measure of escape) haven away because of the actions of a single person and I…I just slump in my chair because of it; defeated.

I suppose this this is extremely selfish of me, as I was one of the people who, however indirectly, contributed to the suffering of the many victims of RH by simply being the audience. I do have empathy for the victims of RH, I understand being under the random, brutal hand of abuse and yet…some of things said in the comments are what I consider very, very ignorant. One gentleman in particular I would have a few choice words for if was it was in a different context simply because he so utterly dismissive in the face of his own victimhood of all other victimhoods. But I won’t because while I might be selfish, I try not to be actively cruel. This is becoming overly long, all I won’t to say thank you for providing a platform in which I could air my grievances with this entire debacle without being attacked.
Madame Hardy
November 11, 2014 @ 11:56 am

Yes, but I’m responding specifically to Jim’s point that angry reviews aren’t the same class of thing as direct personal threats. (Some of Requires Hate’s reviews were, of course, both.) It is statistically unlikely that a neutral reviewer would focus (quite justified) anger at the representation of non-majority genders, ethnicities, and cultures primarily on authors belonging to those cultures.
green_knight
November 11, 2014 @ 11:59 am

If Macho McHackenslay wrote a book which justifies that people like the reviewer ought to be gunned down like rabid dogs, and he portrays not just one or two characters having that opinion, but justifies it in portraying how any effort to NOT kill people like the reviewer is a disaster for civilisation, and if at the same time people in the real world have that opinion and actually shoot down members of your community in the street without being punished by the law (but get a bookdeal and TV appearances and community support instead)…

… then ‘I want Macho McHackenslay to be staked out on a fire ant hill with chili oil poured in his eyes’ is part of a cultural conversation that the reviewer did not start. And when one side can say ‘these people deserve to be treated badly’ and get, well, book deals despite that, and the other side cannot say the same on their blogs, then we, as a society, have a problem.

This is not to defend RH’s harassing behaviour the extent of which is only coming to light, but I think it’s an important point. And of course it’s more complicated than that – writing about an anonymous group is not the same as picking out a person directly, and writing ‘reading this made me wish to stake Macho McHackenslay’ is not the same as going on Twitter to post, ‘Hey, @Macho_McHackenSlay, I think you deserve-‘ or setting up a GoogleAlert and posting this in every forum Macho’s book gets mentioned, just as it’s different if the book that sparked the outburst is ‘Flower Arranging to Brighten Your Life’ than when it’s ‘How to Bag a Human Trophy in Detroit’.

So while I feel that I wish nobody would ever write a phrase like that, I wish even more that nobody felt that writing such a phrase was an appropriate reaction to a published book they just read.

If we wish to condemn violent hyperbole, we should condemn it every time, and by every writer. (If never see it again, it’s not to soon.) It has a tradition in SF, and if we call it out as unacceptable, we need to call it out every time and regardless of the source.

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