Wiscon – Page 2 – Wis[s]e Words

I’m sorry Mario, your harasser is in another castle

Published on June 14, 2014Leave a comment

Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!

Following on from this post, if we do want to change as fandom, want to make cons safe, what should we be doing? For a start of course cons need to do what Readercon and then Wiscon failed to do: not allow a known harasser back next year. Cons need not just a consistent, thought out policy against harassment, they also need to make it known to concom, volunteers and members alike and make sure that any incidents and harassers are known to next year’s concom and volunteers as well.

The key point to remember is that if a con doesn’t prevent know harassers from attending, it means excluding or even endangering their victims; while it may be harsh on a harasser to be ejected and banned, it’s much harsher to subject victims to potential new harassment. The other thing to remember is that for every victim of a harasser that comes forward, there are usually more who don’t for various reasons, especially in a climate where until very recently harassment wasn’t taken seriously.

But there’s a larger problem. Even if every con has its harassment policy and bans harassers, it of course won’t help much if they can just amble along to the next con to menace fresh victims. That’s the silo problem, where each con knows who their problem cases are, but the cons aren’t sharing that information. There therefore need to be some way to share information. You can’t rely on informal networks, as Deirdre Saoirse Moen’s comment on the previous post shows, because there will always be people and cons left out of it.

So there needs to be more formal ways of cons to inform each other about harassers, as well as its own members, volunteers and concom. This doesn’t necessarily mean making this information public, but there are back channels for con “professionals” where this sort of exchange could happen. We need to get this in place sooner rather than later, to avoid harassers just choosing new cons to trawl.

Conspiracy of silence: fandom and Marion Zimmer Bradley

Published on June 11, 20143 Comments

Last year, in a post about that year’s harassment scandal at Wiscon Natalie Luhrs wrote:

I’ve also seen a handful of posts about how, at science fiction conventions, women will work together to let each other know who the serial harassers and creepers are. I find this extremely interesting because I have never been warned about anyone at any of the conventions I’ve attended.

Which I had to think about when reading about the revelations of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s (sexual) abuse of her daughter. It had been public knowledge since at least 2000 that MZB had enabled her husband, Walter Breen’s abuse, who would ultimately be convicted of it, but that she herself was abusive was news to me and a lot of other science fiction fans. The question is, as Agent Mimi put it why didn’t we know earlier, when all the evidence had been there. Why indeed did it take until MZB was dead for her covering for convicted abuser Walter Breen to become public knowledge and not just whispered amongst in the know fans. Why in fact was Breen allowed to remain in fandom, being able to groom new victims?

Breen after all was first convicted in 1954, yet could carry out his grooming almost unhindered at sf cons until the late nineties. And when the 1964 Worldcon did ban him, a large part of fandom got very upset at them for doing so. In the years and decades since, those who knew about Breen and MZB kept schtum and if you weren’t in the know, you didn’t get to know until Stephen Goldin put up the court documents.

But even after this, fandom hasn’t been open, hasn’t been willing to draw lessons from this horrible history, still by and large thinks it’s better to leave molestors in peace than to risk excluding people, is willing to stay silent. What MZB and Breen did and why they did it in fandom is the logical result of a culture that tolerated Asimov’s butt pinching, Randall Garrett’s propositioning or Harlan Ellison groping Connie Willis.

There’s a culture of harassment in fandom, mostly of women by men, which fandom has known about and tolerated (or evne actively encouraged) for decades, where those women lucky enough to have the connections were warned against those know to be harassers (everybody knew Jim Frenkel was one of them, but nobody was willing or felt able to say so out loud until Elise Matthesen did so. Because of that culture of silence, those who do get harassed, often those without the network, new to fandom or for some reason an outsider, feel they’re the only ones to have suffered and are less likely to report it, justifiably thinking that they won’t be taken seriously if they do report being harassed by somebody famous.

The “new” revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley’s own actiosn therefore should serve as a wakeup call to fandom, not only to take harassment seriously, develop policies about it, but also to be honest and open about its (our) own history, acknowledge that we do have a problem providing safe spaces for everybody and that we need to change that.

Wiscon needs to clean its act up

Published on June 3, 2014Leave a comment

So last year Wiscon had a harassment problem when Elise Matthesen was harassed by somebody who later turned out to be Tor editor Jim Frenkel, who was fired for this and similar harassment. This year Wiscon still has a harassment problem, as Jim Frenkel was allowed to not only attend, but play an active role in the con. Which inevitably led to at least one of his victims being made to feel unsafe.

At best, this is a massive fuckup from a convention that should’ve and could’ve know better, at worst this was a deliberate abnegation of responsibility on the part of the concom.

I mean, this is not some kind of borderline case: Frenkel admitted to what he had done and even his employer found the evidence for his harassment clear enough to fire him for it, so hard could it be to just refuse him entry? As well, both the case and Frenkel are well known enough that anybody on the concom should know who he was and why he shouldn’t have been at the con the moment they saw his name on a membership list or volunteer sheet. Or is that the problem, that he was a well known fan, a friend or acquintance perhaps, who had done something wrong but had apologised and it seemed unfair to punish him further?

But of course, as we all know, to be lenient to a harasser at a con means making your con unsafe for his victims and potential victims, means excluding these people from your con, means you make a choice in favour of harassment. That’s the message that Wiscon has sent out by allowing Frenkel, a year after he was called out for his behaviour, back into the con. Its actions show that it isn’t a safe place, that in fact as an organisation it doesn’t take harassment seriously and thinks the right of the harasser to go to the con trumps that of his victims to feel safe. If I had been harassed by Frenkel or somebody like him, I certainly wouldn’t return to a con that not only hadn’t prevented this harassment, but hadn’t even seem fit to exclude the harasser after the fact.

Again, it’s not as if Wiscon couldn’t have know this would happen, or didn’t have the resources or knowledge to have handled this better, considering the Readercon example, another con that went through a high profile harassment case and then actually took the time to improve both its policies and policing of harassment. Nobody at Wiscon thought to talk to them?

Is it just me, or does this all seem to point at Wiscon not taking harassment at all seriously, thinking that as a feminist convention it couldn’t happen there?

Too right

Published on May 26, 2014Leave a comment

N. K. Jemisin’s guest of honour speech at Wiscon:

Arm yourselves. Go to panels at Wiscon and claim the knowledge and language that will be your weapons. Go to sources of additional knowledge for fresh ammunition — histories and analyses of the genre by people who see beyond the status quo, our genre elders, new sources of knowledge like “revisionist” scholarship instead of the bullshit we all learned in school. Find support groups of like-minded souls; these are your comrades-in-arms, and you will need their strength. Don’t try to do this alone. When you’re injured, seek help; I’ve got a great list of CBT therapists, for any of you in the New York area. Exercise to stay strong, if you can; defend what health you have, if you can’t. And from here on, wherever you see bigotry in the genre? Attack it. Don’t wait for it to come directly at you; attack it even if it’s hitting another group. If you won’t ride or die for anyone else, how can you expect them to ride or die for you? Understand that there are people in this genre who hate you, and who do not want you here, and who will hurt you if they can. Do not tolerate their intolerance. Don’t be “fair and balanced.” Tell them they’re unwelcome. Make them uncomfortable. Shout them down. Kick them out. Fucking fight.

“Reporting Harassment at a Convention: A First-Person How To”

Published on July 3, 2013Leave a comment

Well known science fiction fan Elise Matthesen was sexually harassed at Wiscon and decided to formally complain to both the convention and the harasser’s employer.

Although their behavior was professional and respectful, I was stunned when I found out that mine was the first formal report filed there as well. From various discussions in person and online, I knew for certain that I was not the only one to have reported inappropriate behavior by this person to his employer. It turned out that the previous reports had been made confidentially and not through HR and Legal. Therefore my report was the first one, because it was the first one that had ever been formally recorded.

Matthesen was surprised to learn both that the person in question was long known to be a serial harasser and nobody had made a formal complaint about him yet, which is why she wrote about this and got it posted not just on John Scalzi’s blog, but also at the blogs of Mary Robinette Kowal, Seanan McGuire, Brandon Sanderson, Chuck Wendig and Jim Hines, who also reveals the name of the accused and confirms that this person had been reported before.

As to why this person hasn’t been named before or been formally complained about, Mary Robinette Kowal has some thoughs about her own culpability in this.

It is of course not uncommon that a serial harasser has long been known and warned about by their victims, but never taken direct action against, so not uncommon that the sex, feminism and BDSM blog The Pervocracy called this situation “the missing stair”:

Have you ever been in a house that had something just egregiously wrong with it? Something massively unsafe and uncomfortable and against code, but everyone in the house had been there a long time and was used to it? “Oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell you, there’s a missing step on the unlit staircase with no railings. But it’s okay because we all just remember to jump over it.”

Some people are like that missing stair.

When I posted about a rapist in a community I belonged to, although I gave almost no details about the guy except “he’s a rapist,” I immediately got several emails from other members of that community saying “oh, you must mean X.” Everyone knew who he was! Tons of people, including several in the leadership, instantly knew who I meant. The reaction wasn’t “there’s a rapist among us!?!” but “oh hey, I bet you’re talking about our local rapist.” Several of them expressed regret that I hadn’t been warned about him beforehand, because they tried to discreetly tell new people about this guy. Others talked about how they tried to make sure there was someone keeping an eye on him at parties, because he was fine so long as someone remembered to assign him a Rape Babysitter.

All of which led Dustin Kurtz to wonder whether Sf fandom’s inclusiveness makes this problem worse and concludes that it should not:

The SFF community, of which conventions are a vital distillation, was, historically, populated by outsiders. The entire idea of genre is of course predicated on a readership that consciously sets itself apart, and no genre made that as much a point of pride as skiffy readers. That has the glorious result that outsiderdom predicated on other criteria—transgendered fans, for instance—is welcome within the community, even when that might be less true in society generally. But some, particularly men of an older generation, seem to mistake a spirit of permissiveness for individual permission.

Whatever the reasons, harassment is rife at these things. But maybe now, in the twenty-first century—the goddamned future—after a year of truly infuriating misogyny from some of the old guard in the genre, maybe now things will finally reach the point where even the most loutish of fans realize that an inclusive community need not include them, that a safe space for geeks doesn’t mean they themselves are safe from repercussions, and that, oh yeah, we all know their boss’ phone number.

As one of the people in science fiction with a big megaphone, John Scalzi took the first step to stop tolerance of harassment, by insisting any con he is a guest of has a proper harassment policy.