Feminism – Page 11 – Wis[s]e Words

When trolling becomes harassement

Published on October 19, 2011

Trolling is as old as the internet, but while most trolling is just annoying, it can often slide into harassement. For most bloggers this sort of thing hopefully is an incidental occurence at worst, but for certain groups it’s a daily routine: the death threats, rape threats, threats against your family, friends or pets it’s all to be expected if you’re a feminist blogger:

It’s a good week, these days, if I only get 15-20 emails from people telling me how much they think I should die, or how much they hope I get raped, or how much they hope my cat dies or I lose my job or fall in a hole or get shot by police or any number of things people seem to think it’s urgently important to tell me in their quest to get me to shut up. We are not talking about disagreements, about calls for intersectionality, about differing approaches, about political variance, about lively debate and discussion that sometimes turns acrimonious and damaging. We are talking about sustained campaigns of hate from people who believe that we are inhuman and should be silenced; the misogynists, the ‘men’s rights activists,’ the anti-reproductive rights movement, the extreme conservatives, the fundamentalists. The haters.

That’s what s. e. smith goes through each day and she’s not the only one, as confirmed by Skud on Geek Feminism, where she talks about the consequences for the people like her on the recieving end of such a torrent of hatred and vileness:

What you don’t see from the blog posts are the effect this had on people’s mental and physical health. I can’t speak for the other women targetted by Mikee, but I know that it affected my ability to concentrate, sleep, work, and socialise. Apologies for the TMI, but my gastro-intestinal system is also fairly sensitive to stress, so I was physically ill as well. I took several days of sick leave and went to the beach for an extended weekend, completely offline, to try and regain some equilibrium.

And the end result is that people stop blogging altogether, as s.e. smith knows:

And it works. I see it happening all the time; blogs go dark, or disappear entirely, or stop covering certain subjects. People hop pseudonyms and addresses, trusting that regular readers can find and follow them, trying to stay one step ahead.

As you know Bob, trolling largely originated on Usenet, where harassers had little choice but to make public threats, which was bad enough, but at least this meant others saw this harassement happening and could rally around the victims. With blogs, the only person that sees the rape “joke” is the blogger it’s aimed at. Which makes it easy for harassers to deny their actions and others to disbelieve the victims, making the harassement that much worse. This incidently, is not an exclusively online problem; much real world sexual, racial or other harassement is invisible to anybody but the perpetrator and their victim.

What’s to be done? For those of us whose gender/race/sexual orientation/usw. does not automatically makes us a target for harassement, the task is simple: to take the victims of harassement seriously when they’re reporting on it and then to support them in however they want to deal with it. If an harasser is called to task, we should not make excuses for them; if we see harassement happening, we should not stay silent. For y’all reading this, it’s of course unthinkable that either you or your friends would engage in such behaviour, but even so we should stay alert to the possibility.

Sausage fest

Published on August 17, 20117 Comments

These are the top ten comics in the Hooded Utilitarian International Best Comics Poll:

1. Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
2. Krazy Kat, George Herriman
3. Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
4. Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
5. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
6. Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
7. The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez
8. Pogo, Walt Kelly
9. MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
10.The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.

Notice anything? Yep, for an international poll it is very much dominated by American comics; even Watchmen, though created by two Brits, is very much in the American comics tradition. Worse, there’s no woman to be seen either, not until number 24, Fun Home, Alison Bechdel. In total there are just eight women on the list for a total of nine entries (Alison Bechdel being the sole woman to be mentioned twice), most of which are clustered in the lower regions of the list, having gotten on with just a handful of votes:

Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
The Dirty Plotte Stories, including My New York Diary, Julie Doucet
Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel
Furûtsu Basaketto [Fruits Basket], Natsuki Takaya
Maison Ikkoku, Rumiko Takahash

Ernie Pook’s Comeek and the RAW Stories, Lynda Barry
A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, Moto Hagio
Moomin, Tove Jansson

I’m not going to blame the poll contributors for their appalling oversights, my own collection not being very gender balanced either and at least the Hooded Utilitarian editorial team are aware of this shortcoming, having asked Shaenon Garrity to redress the balance somewhat in a separate article. The gender skewedness of this list is just a symptom of a much greater problem, that comics as a medium is much too male dominated.

Part of that is mindset, a certain ignorance of readers and critics of female cartoonists, in which only a handful of currently active creators are well known, but the context and history in which they work is lost, each a singleton, the same problem we’ve discussed here before regarding science fiction. Nobody is consciously suppressing women cartoonists, but there is still a systemic bias working against them, which polls like this bring to light. It’s so much easier to think of ten, hundred, thousand great male cartoonists who could arguably be part of the list than it is to find even half a dozen female cartoonists who could also be. It’s natural to think of sequences of influence like Noel Sickles -> Milton Caniff -> Al Severin -> John Buscema, but where does somebody like Marie Severin fit in?

But as Shaenon touches upon in her article, there are other barriers as well. The past ten years have seen an explosion of classic comics series, both newspaper strip and comic book being rediscovered and republished in nice, prestige editions, but how many of them have been created by women? Where are the classic female underground cartoonists to take their place amongst the Crumb archives? Where is the Daredevil Visionaires: Ann Nocenti? If the best work by women is not available, how can readers ever discover them?

Finally, and this is something that’s especially true for American comics, it might just be that the kind of work that really gets you noticed in comics is the kind of work that — certainly historical — has been the last available to female cartoonists. That’s the long form comic, the multiple decades old newspaper strip, the fifty issue plus comic book run, the one that needs time and dedication and self sacrifice. In Tom Spurgeon’s unrelated, intensly personal rant from earlier this week (which I found both moving and hard to respond to, if response is needed), he mentions at one point the “children of strip artists whose primary memory of their fathers and mothers is that person at a drawing board, desperate to get away for a few moments but deciding with an almost whole-body resignation to continue working while life-moment X, Y and Z unfolds nearby.” Which of course has always been easier for men than women to do, traditional gender roles being what they were and often, in disguise, still are. As Virginia Woolf once argued, before you could have great women writers, they need a room of their own, which goes double for cartoonists.

So, umm, yeah. It is understandable if bad that a list of the best comics a group of dedicated, clever critics can think of is such a sausage fest, but it’s just one symptom of a deeper imbalance, one not easily solvable, so what can you do? Well, perhaps comics needs to take the Russ pledge too:

The single most important thing we (readers, writers, journalists, critics, publishers, editors, etc.) can do is talk about women writers whenever we talk about men. And if we honestly can’t think of women ‘good enough’ to match those men, then we should wonder aloud (or in print) why that is so. If it’s appropriate (it might not be, always) we should point to the historical bias that consistently reduces the stature of women’s literature; we should point to Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing, which is still the best book I’ve ever read on the subject. We should take the pledge to make a considerable and consistent effort to mention women’s work which, consciously or unconsciously, has been suppressed. Call it the Russ Pledge. I like to think she would have approved.

Heartbreak & Heroines kickstarter cancelled

Published on July 25, 20111 Comment

So it turns out Caoimhe/Kynn cancelled her Kickstarter project today:

Dear backers,

Due to situations of which some of you may be aware, I believe it is unfair to continue asking you to fund Heartbreak & Heroines. Therefore, I am closing the kickstarter project to funding and you will not be charged for the amount you pledged.

I thank you for your interest and I hope you will continue to support women-inclusive gaming projects in the future. I especially want to thank Joanne Renaud for her support and great work as the artist for H&H.

Caoimhe Ora Snow

The “situation” she refers to is not something I’m comfortable about discussing here, but certain allegations have been made against her, which have nothing to do with Heartbreak & Heroines itself; for a rough idea of what they are, look here. I’m not sure whom to believe in this or what the facts in this case are, so I’ll refrain from further comment. It doesn’t help that most of this played out on Livejournal which is going through one of its periodical meltdowns at the moment…

Heartbreak & Heroines

Published on July 23, 2011

Character from Heartbreak & Heroines. Art by Joanne Renaud

I should’ve done this before, as her project is more than fully founded, but Caoimhe Ora Snow/Kynn Bartlett has a Kickstarter proposal up to fund her new feminist role playing game, Heartbreak & Heroines:

Heartbreak & Heroines is a fantasy roleplaying game about adventurous women who go and have awesome adventures — saving the world, falling in love, building community, defeating evil. It’s a game about relationships and romance, about fairy tales and feminism.

You play a fantasy heroine (or hero, if you prefer) whose heart has been broken. She’s experienced some loss so great that she’s taken up her sword, her tome, her staff, or her wand and walked away from her place in society — by becoming one of its defenders, fighting back the darkness that endangers everyone.

[…]

My friend Dwayne McDuffie passed away earlier this year. He was a comic book and animation writer who loved comics — but also saw they didn’t reflect his life as an African American man. Instead of writing a lot of essays and making blog posts (although he did both at times), he and went founded Milestone Media to create the kind of comics he wanted to enjoy. By doing so, Dwayne changed the comics industry and left a legacy that won’t be forgotten by fans of Static, Icon, Justice League, Ben 10, and other comics and animation properties.

I’m no Dwayne McDuffie, but I do want to change gaming by making it more inclusive — of women, people of color, LGBT people, and basically everyone. Using Dwayne as my model, I don’t want to just talk about inclusive gaming, I want to make and play games that push the window on inclusion.

Caoimhe/Kynn is an old internet friend of mine, dating back to Usenet somewhere in the mid nineties, so I’m biased to want this project to succeed anyway, as seems to have done by having raised over $5,000 from a $3,000 target, but even on its own merits this looks worthwhile. As we’ve seen in the past few years, what with Racefail and the Russ Pledge and all that, fandom in general is in need of having our consciousness raised; what better way to do this than through projects like this, with inclusiveness awareness build in from the start, without being preachy? If you are an RPG player, why not check it out to see if you like it? Only fifteen bucks buys you a copy of the game once it’s done…

The women sf writers men don’t see

Published on July 9, 20113 Comments

In the ongoing struggle to get greater recognition for female writers of science fiction, one of the fronts surely has to be that of history. One of the points Joanna Russ made in How to Suppress Women’s Writing is that each female author is seen as something singular, a freak, standing outside a history almost entirely defined by male writers. This goes for science fiction as much as for literary fiction: in both cases it’s much easier to imagine a history written without references to women than it is to imagine the opposite. I saw this happen two years ago with the Racefail debate in online sf fandom circles as well. When pushed upon it, well meaning liberal (white) sf & fantasy readers could mention two-three writers of colour, but these were always the same two-three (Delany, Butler, perhaps Barnes or Hopkinson) everybody knows, rather than any of the hundreds of other candidates, of whom most sf readers were ignorant to a degree they were not of their white counterparts. Most of Racefail was a struggle to teach this insight to people (willfully) blind to this and to find ways to make sure this insight was not lost, through e.g. the Carl Brandon society I linked to above.

Consciously or not, like writers of colour, female also sf writers get written out of science fiction’s collective awareness and sense of history, the vast mass of female writers ignored in favour of always the same outliers, their history lost in a way that means that every new high profile female science fiction writer is a novum, rather than standing in the same sort of tradition granted to male sf writers. instead she’s either evaluated in terms of that explicitely male tradition or seen as somebody who breaks with it. It’s not just that feminist or female themes and concerns get ignored and sidelined, but that the whole history of the genre can be and is defined in terms of the accomplishments of male writers, with only the occasional token female writer.

It’s this background that makes an effort like Pre-1923 Utopias and Science Fiction by Women: A Reading List of Online Editions, hosted by the Online Books Page, so important. Inspired by L.Timmel Duchamp’s list of Science Fiction and Utopias by Women, 1818-1949, it does exactly what it says on the tin, providing a list of science fiction and utopian writing by women written before 1923 and available online. Lists like these provide context to the male dominated mainstream history of the genre, by showing how many more writers other than Mary Shelly were active before Gernsback “invented” science fiction, that the genre is build as much on a now largely submerged field of female writers as it is on their much better known male colleagues.