linkspam!

Catching up on email and comment notifications. Some of you can expect to be spammed.

Reading some things:

brihana25 writes about sexual misconduct at cons (the still ongoing imbroglio is in Supernatural, but the post is worth reading for everyone in fandom - context), and reminds us that victim-blaming is never acceptable.

Fandom, and the internet in general, is about as close to anarchy as you can get, and believe me when I say that's not a bad thing. No one knows who you are or where you live, and the opinions you hold and the things you do there don't follow you home. There are very few consequences for things done or said in fandom, and those consequences that do exist aren't really tangible.

Fandom sets your fantasies free and gives you a place and a peer group that you can talk freely about them without feeling the shame that the real world would bring down on you for them. Sex is celebrated, and the more the merrier. And in fandom, almost everybody's in to it. Those who aren't can just scroll on by.

But conventions aren't fandom proper. They are a hybrid of fandom and real life, and when those two things collide, they have a tendency to explode rather spectacularly.

If you go to a convention and you decide to bring your fandom fantasies to life, that is your own business. If you decide to seek out like-minded people to play your fantasy out with you, that's fine, too.

But if people who don't want to be there, who don't want to be part of that, get drawn into it on accident, they can't scroll past you. They can't hit the back button.

If their way out is blocked, even temporarily, even if it's not by you but by someone else you brought there? Then we have a problem.

Read More.


Also, Ableist Word Profile on disabledfeminists.com is a great 101 resource.

anon =/= hater, liar, troll, coward, wanker, or even unreliable

While we're on the subject. Posting anon does not make one any of the above. It simply does not. Whether I'm posting about a baseball game, political philosophy or a real moment of sexual harassment I experienced. Posting anon does not, and should not, automatically disqualify me from having and sharing an opinion.

There is a widely understood fandom rule against outing our fellow fans. Many of us post under pseudonyms, and do our best to prevent their being connected with our real names. Even so, there are times when going fully anon is what's best for us. For our RL reputations, or security, for our emotional health and well-being. Some things are more comfortably said anon - and who are you to demand that we lift that veil?

While it's true that hatememes and 4chan have given anons a bad reputation, and that all kinds of shenanigans have taken place under cover of anonymity, it does not follow that anonymity itself is a bad thing. To anchor this more firmly in current fandom goings-on, spnpermanon is an anonmeme of varied character. It is not a hate meme. It's a hate/love/meta/squee/srs bzns meme, where there is currently some A+ tracking of the con imbroglio going on. It is also the only place that people have felt safe enough to speak publicly about their experiences at WinCon.

If you find yourself claiming that victim accounts are only credible when you can put a pseudonym to their words? Check yourself for asking a victim to display their wounds. There was, it seems, enough misconduct to get thenyxie banned from WinCon. What happens now (appeals etc.) is between her and the concom. You absolutely do not have the right to demand victims step forward, so that fandom can en masse assess the credibility of their stories.



* Some sites and communities block anon comments, and for good reasons. On Scans Daily, for example, we've taken to blocking anon comments because a) it's easy to create an account, b) we got tired of manually unscreening all of them, c) we get trolled a whole hell of a lot. But this is a pragmatic measure, and not a statement about the value of anon comments.

And of course there are good reasons to control and moderate speech. Hate speech, for example, is banned in many places. Fire in a crowded theater - also not good. But truly, ask yourself if your reason is akin to these, or if you're simply scared of what people might say.