I have a question

[la_marquise]

Dear SFF Community,

Most of the time, I'm proud to be part of you. I'm proud to be part of a community that Matched It For Pratchett and regularly raises money for Talking Books for the Blind. I'm proud to be part of a community that is strongly, vocally, actively working to ensure our space is fully accessible, convenient and pleasant for people with disabilities. I'm proud to be part of a community that set up the Carl Brandon Society and Con Or Bust. I'm proud to be part of a community which, on seeing institutionalised racism, sexismn, trans*phobia, homophobia, hostility to people who reject gender normativity, turned around and, yes, argued, long and loud and continuously, but also set out to clean house and make ourselves better. Very few other groups linked by common interest have done that. Most of them seem to prefer to gaslight and bully those who raise such issues. I'm proud to belong to a community that sees its own shortcomings. Yes, we could do better. We can always do better.

There are some great things going on in our community right now. Nine Worlds is working to create and maintain a con environment that is welcoming to PoC, QUILTBAG people, fans with disabilities, new fans. Many cons now have and enforce Codes of Conduct aimed at fostering inclusivity and safety. Con committees are working to find ways to recruit new fans, younger fans. SFWA is working actively to end a culture of normative sexism and racism. Women writers are banding together to address equality in bookshop promotions. Writers of colour are speaking up and working to address the inequality they face. People from across the fan spectrum are supporting and signal-boosting them.

And we are all rooted in the societies that raised us, societies that are, mainly, institutionally racismt sexist, tran*- , xeno- and homo-phobic, hostile to people who face physical and mental challenges, wqhich blame the poor and underprivileged for their difficulties. We were most of us raised in cultures that fostered this, often unconsciously. We are surrounded by images and actions which reinforce an unequal status quo. It awes me that so many in our community fight this, in both their cultures and themselves. IT awed me that we stand up to those who are within the community who seem to revel in their prejudices and tell them, No More.

But, right now, I have a question for you. Why, when we fight these battles, do we so often resort to the same old patriarchal norms? Why do we reserve our greatest spleen for *women* and defend our right to do so? That, I put to you, needs addressing and it needs addressing now. I really don't want to comment on Loncon 3 and Jonathan Ross: enough has been said and said in all kinds of ways. My personal view on it, for those who will demand to know such things, is that I think the chairs made a mistake here. He is a fan, certainly, but he is also controversial and divisive for well-rehearsed reasons. At the same time, he's very popular, particularly with the younger demographic and would certainly have drawn in new, younger attendees. So I can also see that the chairs had reasons on their side too. I don't think the chairs are bad people. I know both of them, have done for years, and they have both worked long and hard for inclusivity in UK fandom. This time, trying for one kind of that, they made a mistake in another kind. We all make mistakes. They don't -- they shouldn't -- cast us into pits of hellfire for all eternity. If that were the case, then the Vox Days have won: they don't care about making mistakes, they just carry on. If we throw each other out of the lifeboat one by one, we end up with no-one.

That's one thing. But I want to go back to my question. Why is the worst reserved for women?
Here's what I saw: a woman, who is a survivor of bullying and class oppression, expressed her concerns over the material that might be used by Mr Ross and how it might affect her. A large number of people, male and female, lit into her for daring to express her fears in public, for being 'mean', for being out of line.
Women must be Good.
A young woman, who is related to Mr Ross, tried to reassure her and was distressed by all the things that were being said. Another woman, the mother of that young woman, stepped in to defend her daughter. She perhaps did not do so tactfully, but she was faced with an upset and unhappy child. And, a number of people lit into her for daring to express her feelings in public, for being 'mean', for being out of line.
Women must be Good.
Both the adult women are now silent on twitter. One has felt driven to delete her account. These women have in fact spoken to each other calmly and come to mutual understanding. But people on all sides -- pro-Ross and anti- him -- are continuing to abuse both these women. I'm seeing more of that than I am people questioning his form of comedy or the chairs' decision. I'm seeing women as a group involved in this being demonised in the press and on social media, for being strident mean girls, bullies, sell-outs etc etc etc.
Because Women must be Good.
Neither of these adult women committed a crime. It's not a crime to be distressed and triggered about potential harassment. It's not a crime to feel the need to defend your child verbally. But people are using the tone argument on both of them, because women Must Be Good. They are demanding complete recanting and surrender. They are demanding recognition for a perceived right to abuse women.
Because women must be Good, and a woman out of line is far worse than a controversial man or a questionable decision.
This is patriarchy at its best, using us to undermine each other. I've seen you, men who position as allies, poking fun at that first woman, implying her concerns are trivial, stupid, blamable. I've seen you, women who I love and admire and support, demanding a right to punish a woman for being married to a man you disapprove of. I've seen male allies and vocal feminists falling straight into the patriarchy trap and blaming the women.
Shape up. Look at who is gaining here. Not us. Oh no. The winner> The system that says women must bear responsibility for policing and controlling male behaviour, that women must adapt their bodies and thoughts and actions to suit male expectations and desires, that women must attain to and keep far higher standards than men at all times, that Women Must Be Perfect.
Mr Ross will not be hosting the Hugos. The concerns the community had over inclusivity and safety were heard. Inclusivity and safety won out.
Yet somehow the long term winner seems to be patriarchal thinking.
And I want to know why.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, I don't think there were any winners in Jonathan-Ross-gate.

It may not be a crime to be stressed and triggered about potential harassment but the intensity of the reaction to Jonathan Ross had me wondering if I weren't misreading the name and Fred Phelps and his Church of Hatred had been invited to host the Hugos.

Don't get me wrong---I am in favour of trying to make our gatherings as inclusive as possible and also as safe. But the latter is possible only up to a point. If the idea of having to be within ten feet of someone who has made jokes at the expense of fat people---but has never done so to you personally---is enough to make you begin howling in outrage about being afraid to attend a function where you might---might---have to interact with said person, though in fact you have no idea whether this will happen because the nominating period is still open---

If this is the case, I don't think Jonathan Ross is the real problem. To me, that sounds like a really bad case of PTSD.

And I say that as someone who wasn't enamoured with the idea of Ross as host for completely different reasons but can tolerate conditions that I don't think are optimum.

I say it as a fat woman who has taken a fair amount of snark for twenty years, often from total strangers...but also from people who knew me when I wasn't overweight, who thought it was funny to say, "Oh, here's a BIG writer."

I say it as a woman who has been sexually harrassed, as a woman who has fought off attempted physical assault...but neither of the latter two things has ever happened to me at a science fiction convention.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I think that's a very fair point. This has resulted in a lot of pain and discomfort and unhappiness to many, many people and, as you say, there are no winners. It's deeply saddening.

[bellinghwoman.livejournal.com]

Indeed. And one of the unintended consequences of this whole sorry mess is that for me fandom has been made to feel LESS safe and LESS inclusive, because the message that I am getting is that if I don't agree 100% with what is being done and the manner in which it is done then there must be something wrong with me.

I feel an odd combination of sadness and anger - sadness about what has happened and the pain and distress it has left in its wake, and anger that the space in which I used to feel totally comfortable has been taken away from me.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

That message - you have to do things in a certain way, you have to behave and believe in a certain way - is common to cults. When it appears in paganism big red flags go up, regardless of whether one believes in the principles it is espousing.

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

holy crap.

You've actually just put your finger on what's always kind of bothered me about fandom. I mean, I'm sure I should have seen it before, especially since I certainly recognize instances of actively cult-like behaviour in specific aspects of fandom, but somehow I never applied the thought to the whole of fandom.

But as someone who is passionate about sff/comics/etc but grew up a long way, physically, from any possible interaction with fandom, the, well, *fanaticism*, of the SFF fandom community has always looked a little weird to me. And now I know why. And perhaps that's why although I obviously consider myself a fan and a geek and all of that, I've never really felt like I belonged to fandom in the way that many people seem to feel they do.

Which doesn't make me any less disappointed with the behaviour of Fandom: The Idea in general...

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

:-(
There are lots of people who don't want to engage in big public wars and who work quietly and continually to make things better too.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

THIS! This! And many times this.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I have to confess that whenever an issue turns into a huge public row, my instinct is to be as far away as possible.

[davegullen.livejournal.com]

You couldn't have put it better.

If I didn't have a couple of commitments at LonCon I wouldn't now go, but I don't want to let people down. I keep telling myself the place will be, in the main, full of nice people. Even so I don't really want to be there.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

There is someone here in my town who fired an employee because she might have taken some time off to look after a sick relative. Pre-cognitive dismissal. If it had gone to an industrial tribunal, I would love to have been a fly on the wall.

I draw the line at getting upset over things that might possibly happen but probably won't; like most of us, I have enough to worry about with the here and now.

[ms-cataclysm.livejournal.com]

A similar thing happened with my pension admnistrators. They sacked a top performing fund manager -Nicola Horlick - because they learned that she had a sick kid and they thought it might affect her performance. They then boasted in their investor presentations about doing this. So I now have new pension administrators.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

I can understand where you're coming from, and on first reading, it seems to me that you are basically saying that you think the fears were overblown and that people just get past stuff like this and get on with life. There's nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes.

But I also think this comment exemplifies a lot of what has gone wrong in this whole debate, because I can also read it this way:

1) it seems to refer only to one person's objections, as if those were the only ones and/or as if this were a case of everybody rallying to one person's aid.

2) The second substantial paragraph continues to focus on that same person, and ups the ante by using language that both belittles her fears and implies that she is not in control of her emotions.

3) The next line is an accusation of mental illness, and re-introduces the entirely incorrect meme of 'it's about these two people', but only so that all of the blame can be laid on a single woman, now characterised as having a mental disorder

4) The last part attempts to establish a connection between you/your experiences and those of the one crazy woman who objected. Doing this reinforces the idea that 'normal' women don't react that way, and she really is an outlier.

The result is that the conversation about the many objections surrounding choosing a host for the Hugos has been re-framed to be about "Jonathan Ross was condemned based on the groundless suppositions rambling around in some crazy woman's head."

This re-framed conversation not only reinforces patriarchy, but also derails a conversation based on any other concerns, including whether a person's track record should be considered when selected them for a position.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I see where you're going with this but I still bump up against the only outcome being that Ross was unsuitable and shouldn't have been chosen. Whereas I think there's an alternative position that had all the information been put out there first that we'd be now in the middle of one of our usual fan feuds but Ross would still be doing the Hugos and SFF fandom wouldn't be making the front page of London's main evening news paper for 'hounding' a woman off Twitter.

For the lack of information the blame falls 100% on the shoulders of the chairs. As I've said to you elsewhere, I think, for many reasons he was the right choice if we want to have fandom taken more seriously in the mainstream and raise the profile of the Hugo Awards. But I fully understand that I do not necessarily represent the views of all fandom in wanting to see if that is the case.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

Well, it's something we'll never know, but when push comes to shove, I'd take 'good atmosphere' over being taken seriously in the mainstream and raising the profile of the Hugos any day. Considering that about 60% of the top-grossing films of all time fall within sf/f, there's an entire tv station devoted to it, several of the most popular tv series of the last 10 years have been sf/f, and re-runs of older series are a staple in both the US and the UK, and that's not even counting comics and MMORPGs ... how much more mainstream can the genre be?

And fandom? I'm sorry, but how could it possibly matter what people think? People willing enough to spend time and money on the accoutrements of fandom are no more (or less) mainstream than any other group of people who spend a lot of time and money on any hobby, whether it's LARPing the Civil War or diving or collecting spoons. It's a first-world problem.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Which comes back to a hard question that was asked several months ago by a lot of the book bloggers about the relevance of Worldcon fandom. I think your position is perfectly valid btw and I've somewhat argued for it against Jonathon McChalmont - but there is an alternative perspective and that's where this seems to have emerged.

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

I agree with you - if the story had been changed, we could have had much better outcomes and much less of a complete mess. But the whole underlying problem is that the story was being fed by narratives (concerning bullying, concerning targeting, concerning minorities and disadvantaged groups, concerning being heard, concerning being safe) that hadn't been fully challenged. This whole debacle is a major step, I think, in working out what we need to do to challenge our assumptions to the point where we can write better narratives and start participating in stories that are less worrying.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

As I said to somebody else yesterday, the problem really was narrative and you don't get to play with the narrative when the media get involved and set it for you. It's almost War Games like, the best move is not to play.

And while I fully sympathize with the people who felt the Con Chairs rammed him down their throats and didn't broke any discussion, any question that Ross could be forced to step down without losing the narrative and ending up in, well, *this* was hopeless naive.

Worse than this being the media, it's the British media and they can play the game better than almost anybody.

[(Anonymous)]

It hasn't happened to me, but it has happened to other people. Also, I have had unpleasant experiences and it hasn't put me off participating in fandom, but I am up with ensuring that people with less of a thick skin and sharp tongue and easily deployed elbows than me can come to a convention and knowing they can have a good time, not because there is a total guarantee of nothing happening, but because if it did, they know they would be listened to and people would have their backs.

Also, I think that characterising objections to Jonathan Ross as only arising from the possibility that he might say something on the night is a bit unfair to the breath of objections, most of whom have been expressed without resorting to name-calling.

AnnaFDD, can't seem to be able to log in today.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Inclusivity matters. It matters hugely. I am one of the thin-skinned, in fact, and without the marquis and various friends, I would have run away from cons long ago because of the level of sexual harassment I've experienced.
There are a number of very reasonable grounds for objecting to Mr Ross: I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Apologies if I've phrased things poorly. I was trying to express the gendered aspects that I'd seen.