Missing Stairs

There are a lot of them. It feels like the staircase is more missing than solid some days.

I wrote about it once before but I never really thought all that much about the whisper network I referred to here. I never really considered that it was a male friend who gave me a heads up as to who to avoid. Not that the ones he identified have been outed in the last round, but one hopes that there’s traction from all the other times survivors spoke publicly about these assholes, and that their time will come.

But it was a guy who warned me. Not my supposed lady-cohort, not the rest of the women in tabletop, his bosses, or other coworkers, none of them said a word.

And isn’t that a mindfuck. Is it because I did something wrong? Is it because of something else? I am incredibly angry about it, horribly horribly angry that they honestly thought someone was a risk but never told the women working with him. I’m wondering why none of these paragons speaking out now bothered to send me a message years ago.

Oh wait, I know the answer to the last one. Because the system is broken.

Companies keep rapists on board because they talk good, and shut their victims up with lawsuits, and pick ’em neatly to make sure they can be gaslit and ignored. They make their victims feel complicit.

Or they prioritise the financial over the ethical. They sign agreements with rapists and send their workers in without warning, right up to the legal limits. Just rumours after all, it isn’t their call to investigate, that’s above their level.

Meetings to cover your ass, and promises to change all your protocols at some point, let the victims speak but the work itself is too hard.

They allow the fandom to be a toxic hell, demanding and ignorant, and send freelancers in without support. While bankrolling the spaces they use to attack writers (while demanding they eat shit with a smile too, always have a professional face on and spit the company lines on demand, no matter what you’re paid).

Bring your receipts too girl, otherwise you’re just sour grapes and it’s open season on everything you’ve ever done.

The perennial ‘but he does good work’ while putting him in a position of power over women. Blue conclusively destroys that particular bit of stupidity but it continues being relevant to far too many companies and their fans.

“No. When someone harasses, humiliates, discounts, abuses, threatens, stalks, takes action to harm someone, no — they do not do good work.”

Then there’s being complicit themselves. Knowing and letting it happen. Joking about it because alcoholism is hilarious. Because being a predator is charming. Because the victims don’t really matter enough.

That’s the crux. Price pointed out that women in geek spaces have always been part of it despite, have always read knowing we aren’t really people to the writers.

I remember the moment I realised that my favourite author saw me as the ‘fucked’ and nothing much else, no matter my brain, my wit, my smarts. It is an ugly realisation.

It’s also unsustainable. Women make up over 50% of the audience/money for nearly every single media form you could care to name — they attend the most movies, read the most books, use the most social media. And these retrograde pockets of nerdboys who wanna be dudebros are fighting tooth and nail to take the medium down around them, rather than to accept women are here, have always been here, and their backlash is not going to go unopposed.

But…

What we develop in response is broken too.

The whisper network is…let’s be real here. It is unreliable, it is not nearly half as helpful as people keep insisting. It leaves out a lot of people — men for one, and the disliked for another, both of whom can be victims and are. It feels a lot like a nice white lady hypothesis, that we all protect each other, as if there are no personal loyalties at stake, no corporate biases, no emotions.

When we apply the same expectations and matrices to behaviour regardless of context, we again disadvantage the neuroatypical, the disliked, the awkward, and the non-default populations. When we ignore culture, or learning styles, or the horror-show that is being vulnerable-while-male, we perpetrate a system that victimises and revictimises those who are deemed less than.

When we close borders based on gender, we seriously disadvantage men who have been victims themselves, we ignore other intersections like sexuality, like race, like gender conformity. At least one of the missing stairs named is bisexual, is poly, is known for his ‘commitment to diversity’ and we still assume his only victim was the woman who spoke up. When we reinforce heterocentric and homophobic bullshit, we we destabilise the whole process of fixing it because it is either on women to keep themselves safe, or men to police themselves while still prioritising women, and it is just an impossibility. We particularly fuck up the very damn thing we are insisting on to keep us safe — information.

Similarly, when we have decontextualised warnings, we do a total disservice to everyone. We render warnings unreliable and that makes life more dangerous for survivors and for potential victims. Context matters — ‘will feed you alcohol and grope you in a corridor’ which is different to ‘offers you drugs and if you accept extorts sex while you are impaired’ which is different to ‘rapes underage girls’ which is different to ‘has shitty boundaries in personal communications’ which is different to ‘hits on anything that moves but takes no for an answer’. All of those things require different methods to deal with, and different levels of risk and preparation, and do fuck all to protect people who haven’t heard the warning.

The focus on these stories — individual narratives and challenges, we don’t change anything substantial. Nair (via Bluemilk) calls this drive to “constantly reconstitute yourself as a subject of trauma” an impediment to discussing structural change, and it is. There is power in numbers, there is community in finding out you are not alone, all of that is true and necessary. It just keeps failing to go beyond that to structural change because it becomes focused on each individual instance and relitigating it and reconstituting it, without shifting the burdens away from that narrativisation to actual change. It, by nature, demands neat, linear, and above all relatable stories, and disadvantages any victim whose story is messy, who is non-standard, who is unlikeable. It simplifies narratives into something that doesn’t even offer help to others.

The shift away from examining the behaviours and structures towards intensive critique of the works created by the predators is…I don’t have any kind words for it. One: survivors create some of the most vicious and horrifying work in any genre. Two: it gives a false sense of control to say ‘this work is now suspect and invalid’ and refuse to consume it. Three: if it is a narrative that supports misogyny and rape culture it did that before you knew as well. Four: it actually ends up disadvantaging survivors because suddenly our own stories and experiences are deemed improper.

There is a place and a time for critiquing work, and for using that kind of authorial knowledge to tease out themes. But don’t fucking kid yourself that doing it now is helping or useful. If you didn’t, wouldn’t, or couldn’t do this before then right now it is a guilt response, not actual action. It is about making you feel better, not changing anything structurally except in ways that fuck over survivors as well.

Our focus on survivors doesn’t offer solutions for stopping perpetrators, and shouting down anyone focusing on that problem is ultimately self-defeating.

I don’t know what the fix is here. What we are doing now is not working.