Captain, We Have a Problem: SFF’s Terrible No-Good Very Bad Week (Patreon)

 WHAT IS TIME WHAT IS PLANET NOTHING IS REAL EVERYTHING IS COVERED IN WASPS AND DISAPPOINTMENT

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So that’s basically where I’m at.

It would seem that you can have a global pandemic, you can have a righteous explosion of anger against systemic racism and murder, but as far as 2020’s concerned, that’s just not enough to make a stew.

If you’ve been online in any fashion over the last two weeks or so, you have probably heard about a series of accusations of sexual harassment, abuse, and assault that have ricocheted around the science fiction and fantasy (and gaming and comics and YouTube) community, annihilating some targets, mostly missing others, and pretty much turning the entire speculative fiction sphere into one giant, unquenchable, horrifying tire fire. 

Worst of all, people keep finding new nasty rotten tires to toss on the heap.

It smells awful in here.

Am I going to discuss any of these allegations in detail? Adamantly, no I am not. Am I even going to mention the names of the people involved? Noooope. This isn’t Twitter, and what I am going to say will be relevant long after the individual baddies of the current wave (and make no mistake, we are not done, this is just what’s come out to date) have faded in memory and, more likely than not, gotten new agents and new deals with new publishers and appeared back on the scene rehabilitated like the world’s shittiest LARP of Gandalf the White. Nice threads, Big G but we all saw you grab Gimli’s junk at the bar like five minutes after your little light show, sit down.

The thing is, I’m just so angry.

I’ve gotten so many messages lately, asking me if maybe it’s not worth it to try to be a writer if you’re just going to be treated like meat, if conventions really are some kind of gauntlet of dicks and not a safe space to work like a normal goddamned person, and, most heartbreakingly, from a young writer asking very simply, who is going to protect people like her, just starting out, brand new, going out there under the beautiful assumption that maybe not everything is successive layers of trash on trash on trash on trash.

And that’s just so fucking bad, you guys. That people have to think that. That they have to ask those questions. That so many gallons of ink must be spilled simply to say: keep your fucking hands to yourself, don’t fuck the youngs, and stop saying cringelord sex shit to strangers. And the answers are not a good look. What in the hell am I even supposed to say to anybody? The truth just sucks so much. 

Does this happen in publishing? 

Yes. Often. To many people.

Has it happened to me?

Yes. Many times. By a lot of different people. Mostly men.

Is it going to stop?

Probably not, any more than it’s likely to stop in any industry. Publishing isn’t special here. The arts as a whole are kind of special, in that we are all freelancers with no HR department to make anyone behave, every little thing thrives on a hierarchy of influence that can make or break anyone without having to support it with a paper trail, and everyone seems to just take it as read that artists are somehow different than normal people, seekers of experience and wildness and wonder blah blah blah barf. How many people have said that’s just how Hollywood is, she knew the score, as though southern California an alien planet where there are no rules or laws? And yet few enough people say hey maybe there shouldn’t be NO RULES just because it’s art and no one gets benefits. There will always be a percentage of assholes everywhere, but in the arts, assholes tend to have heaps of confidence because, you know, all of society tends to tell them they’re just so amazing and wonderful and anything for the art, man.

And it is largely men. Not all, not always, but the percentages aren’t subtle. There is a narrative that so many of these men grew up on, and the narrative NOT HELPED by science fiction and fantasy themselves, which have tended to perpetuate it only with shiny spaceships and dragons and chicks in chain mail draped all over it to make it just that much more enticing. The narrative is this: if you succeed hard enough, if you do the thing and receive the praise and the riches and the status, access to very young women is just part of the reward package. It’s automatic. Their consent is to be assumed, because you are just so amazing and so wonderful and you create such glorious art. Who wouldn’t want you? You’re the king of the world.

So until that narrative goes away? I’m not holding my breath. (And it does amaze me just how little power some people need to acquire before this narrative kicks in--some "cancelled" authors and editors were hardly crushing the industry beneath their toes, yet behaved precisely as through they were.)

Let me just say for the record: there is no amount of wonderful you can be that means you’re owed access to other human beings. You could be the greatest human being who ever lived, and you still don’t get some kind of all-access pass to the gender of your choosing. Thinking that you do? Makes you not a wonderful person and honestly your art probably sucks quite a bit too, because it’s the 21st century and you cannot have missed the memo that you’re supposed to care about other people now, Picasso.

Still. I’m just so angry.

It’s not like everyone doesn’t know not to do this shit. What should I say to you that you haven’t already heard? There’s a reason so many of them were accused after bravely saying exactly all the right things about not acting like a huge wobbling cock with no brain driving it, and then slunk away after admitting that they were in fact a huge wobbling cock with no brain driving it. They knew. They knew how they were supposed to act, because in the public arena of the internet, they were extremely aware of how to appear as righteous allies. But they just didn’t feel like it as soon as there was someone young and powerless and pretty they thought would never tell anyone near by. Over and over. Plus, she liked it. Not when that writer did it, but she liked it when I did it. So it was totally okay. Who wouldn’t like me doing things to them when I am just so awesome? It’s unpossible.

That’s the fantasy. That’s why they always seem so stunned. They didn’t love those women as individuals and respect their experiences and work. But those women definitely loved and respected and welcomed Big Name Content Creator #17! THAT’S HOW THIS WHOLE THING WORKS OR ELSE WHAT IS THE POINT OF BEING A BIG NAME CONTENT CREATOR I ASK YOU?

And the women they did it to weren’t powerful agents or editors or bestselling female authors with bigger audiences than theirs. That’s how you know it’s not about alcohol or not knowing they’re “intense” or whatever the excuse du jour is. They chose their targets, all of them young and new to the scene, because there is just a certain kind of guy who needs to be looked up to adoringly to be interested at all. The power dynamic isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. They weren’t unaware or so drunk they couldn’t possibly be held responsible, they sought it out. And they assumed that none of these women would ever be in a position where remembering this moment would come back to bite them, or even to be taken seriously by others. It’s the essence of #MeToo—suddenly we are taking people seriously as a rule, not an exception, and it’s ruining all these men’s good time, don’t you know.

But that assumption, that taking for granted that the power dymanic will always be the same for all time—swaggering alpha geek male author getting All the Things He Wants and young uncertain hopeful female author or fan dutifully slinking off into the shadows as soon as he’s done with her and never being powerful or popular enough in her own right to merit being treated as a professional rather than a toy, it’s gutting. It’s this judgment that not only are you only worth your body now, that’s all you’ll ever be worth. Your art means nothing, your room key has so much more value. 

I fucking remember that shit. And I know how true it is because all those little con games stopped as soon as I had enough sales and followers that messing with me might be dangerous to the reputation of whoever turned up to a con like it was his own personal lady buffet. 

So what do I say that hasn’t already been said? Hey, asshole, don’t do that has never sufficed. God this is so gross doesn’t matter. It happened to me too? Yeah, well, it seems to have happened to a lot of us, hasn’t it? The incessant whining that accusations like these make it impossible for men to have fun at a con, as if that is so much more important than any other issue, and the people who have in fact slunk away into the shadows in pain for the sake of someone’s fun, sprang up almost as soon as the first name dropped. 

People know this shit is wrong. You can’t teach them it’s wrong because they already know. Straight men have zero trouble understanding and supporting the concept of enthusiastic consent when it comes to other men touching them. It’s just that they want her. At least to express some power over her by pulling her into their laps or saying something outlandish so that her attractiveness no longer has power over him. And nobody’s looking. And she can’t stop them without making a scene. So what they know becomes supremely unimportant in the face of what they want. 

I look at these men and I listen to what they have done and it infuriates me that they think they have the right, that they can swan through a world so many of us have fought and clawed our way into, just for a chance to be a part of it, and not only do they think nothing of treating that world as their personal pleasure planet, but they ruin it for everyone else so often they don’t even remember the specifics of any one fuckup.

So two thousand words in, this is what I’m going to talk about. 

Do you have any idea what women have to think about when they go to a convention as a professional? Especially one just starting out? How many variables they have to juggle just to have a chance to be taken seriously, to be treated nominally well, to walk away with no one hating the shit out of us? Do you have any tiny little water bear of a notion how much worse that is for BIPOC, LBGTQ, or disabled writers?

We are all so fucking busy trying to belong, trying to hustle, very few of us have the time, energy, or institutional power to get away with a stray fart, let alone acting like the Baron Harkonnen on a bender in some poor midwestern Marriott’s shitty overpriced bar. 

I’ve been going to conventions for fifteen years. I still think about every one of these things. Because conventions are my workplace. They are my office. They are where I interact with my colleagues and with my fans, and the respect of either can be lost at a moment’s misstep. I’ve always mildly resented the many white straight cis men I see not giving one delicate sensitive thought to any of this, who just get to be, feeling entirely free to put their worst foot forward if they feel like it, but after everything we’ve learned this last week? Maybe it’s not that we should get to act more like them. Maybe they need to fucking learn to act more like us so they stop hurting people.

So I’m going to tell you what it feels like for a girl. The level of careful performance that goes into your fledgling baby career just surviving a convention these days (because yes, it did used to be different, more on that in a minute), not as a cosplayer, not as a fan, but as a new author who is going to this thing to work. (Disclaimer: obviously not every woman is the same, but the standards others hold us to are pretty goddamned consistent, and I’ve talked to enough of us to know none of this is unique to my dumb brain. You can defy all of this, but it is a choice you make to defy it, and you know the risk when you do. And everything I’m about to say is a lot fucking harder if you’re trans, or BIPOC, or queer. Difficulty stacks.)

1. It Really Matters Quite a Lot What You Look Like, Even to Geeks Who Say It Doesn’t.

So you need to deal with your clothes. Nothing too revealing, because then they’ll think you’re a whore, but not frumpy either, style maybe a little on brand for the kind of books you write, but you don’t want to look like you’re cosplaying as your novel because then people get kind of weird about that sometimes. Jewelry? Big, little, fantasy/SF themed or not, and if so, better find something no one will think is “cringe,” maybe accessories that might be conversation pieces (I have a pendant that says Unreliable Narrator I used to always wear so people would talk to me)? Makeup…well, neutral office professional or on-theme glitter glam that will inevitably melt off your face by the time you get to the bar? Or on-theme nothing because geek-cool authenticity is your bag? The way you look will affect what people think about you. You have to look nice, but not too nice, but not like you don’t care, but not like you care so much, because then you’re not approachable, but also maybe at this con a full steampunk get-up would be okay? But at that con definitely not? And you had better not smell or no one will ever forget it but too much perfume also feels like it will end all your friendships forever. And you know that if you’re not symmetrical and slim and youngish you’re going to get judged way more harshly and have to do all this stuff double time, because somehow even though we’re all geeks and looks aren’t supposed to matter, being a fat girl is still a problem for so many, it makes you invisible or worse, but you can’t help your whole body and the flow of time so fuck it, but you can’t say fuck it, because you’re just starting out and you need people to like you.

And then a white dude rolls in wearing old-ass jeans and a graphic tee smelling like a smear of week-old pimento cheese and everyone can’t wait to talk to him because omg he wrote that book about that guy who could do anything perfectly and all the women loved him but he’s definitely not an author-insert Mary Sue what are you talking about only girls write those!

2. Yes On Land It’s Much Preferred for Ladies Not to Say a Word

Oh good you’re on a panel!

Now don’t talk too much and dominate the conversation, but don’t talk too little so no one remembers you. Don’t talk over other people, especially men, because about 30% of them will get REALLY angry about it, and literally never forget. But that same 30% is definitely going to talk over you, say something that pisses you off deep in your bones, and/or completely ignore anything you say. And the trick is you can’t know without years on the con circuit who that 30% is. And at the same time, if you let people interrupt and condescend to you, you look like a doormat, and you’re not getting anyone interested in your thoughts enough to activate the coveted panel-to-book-purchase pipeline, and That Guy will take it as a cue to Do It a Lot More.

Research everyone you’re on a panel with beforehand so you don’t inadvertently say something that implies you don’t know who they are and celebrate their entire catalogue even if you think they are actually the utter worst. Don’t ever let on that you think anyone is actually the utter worst because you’re not a monster and you don’t want to hurt people.

Okay, now don’t say anything offensive (even potentially, to anyone, at any point now or in the future) or stupid or factually (even technically) incorrect, don’t alienate anyone in the audience or on the panel with your demeanor or opinions, don’t act like you know everything but also don’t come across as falsely modest, but be bold and make exciting statements that further conversation and thrill the crowd, making them laugh if possible, because they’re all livetweeting this thing so you’ll want to say something good enough to get transcribed. 

Do all that off the cuff with questions you won’t necessarily have ahead of time, while everyone else is talking too and there’s a time limit and the conversation is moving faster than an improv troupe on four coffees and a talent scout in the audience.

Figure out a way to introduce yourself that is short, witty, states your resume with some self-deprecation but not too much because half the room is aspiring writers who don’t appreciate being told achieving their dream of publishing a book/getting an award nomination/being in an anthology with X famous writer is NBD. Do you bring a copy of your book with you to hold up during introductions? Do you only show it during intros or do you prop it up on the table for the whole panel so people remember it when they go to the dealer’s room? A whole lot of people find that pretty cringey and gauche, but it’s effective marketing, but maybe it looks too desperate, but maybe you’re only on one panel and you need to make it count, but that well-known writer guy isn’t doing it so maybe it’s not something successful people do and you want to look successful even if you don’t feel it AT ALL, fuck, do you bring business cards? Should they have your book cover on them? Do you bring swag? Does the panel table suddenly look like your book puked all over it? Shit, that’s no good, maybe just show nothing, but then are you missing an opportunity for sales?

THIS IS FUN, WE ARE HAVING FUN.

Now all those rules need to also be applied to the bar and room parties throughout the con because that 30% will get just as het the fuck up over being interrupted or talked over or in any way not the center of the conversation (I once had a Very Famous Dude Writer at a Very Big Publisher’s Party literally PAT ME ON MY GODDAMNED HEAD and tell a gathered throng that he made me a star. I had never met him or interacted with him before in my life. But I’d been a fan, so I was looking forward to it and I felt like a stupid tiny puppy in a shop window being manhandled by someone with no intention of adopting me). If you expect to make contact and connections and get work out of the $1500 you put into coming to this con, you have to be outgoing and make an impression on people, even if you’re a massive gas giant of an introvert, but if you’re too outgoing or opinionated or just have the wrong opinion about Whichever Thing This Year Has Been Determined to Be Uncriticizable (and there’s always something). Don’t offend anyone by not knowing who they are or not recognizing them or not being available for a conversation if they want to have one even if you were on your way somewhere else, and never be short or snippy or inattentive even if you haven’t slept since you arrived at the hotel.

Welcome to that moment where you enter the cafeteria at a new school and don’t know where to sit only it’s the rest of your life forever.

3. Alcohol Is Danger

Know your limits, don’t get drunk. Three drinks tops because if you slide into that zone where you can’t quite remember all the rules you might end up doing or saying something embarrassing that ends up all over social media and basically everyone but the big boys has a much harder time getting past that kind of thing (For awhile, the top image hit on my name was a picture of my editor pouring scotch down my throat while I was wearing the Tiptree crown at an after party and it’s not the BEST if four years later you’re writing books for kids) and someone always has a camera.

Sure, the swaggering punk rock awesome guy everyone loves writer can get totally blasted on Thursday night and not sober up till the plane ride home, but no one knows you yet, and people judge women a lot more harshly for being out of control drunk whereas they’re much more willing to compare a male writer to Hemingway or Joyce and chalk the hard drinking up to his super cool masculinity ooooh he knows so much about scotch you guys.

Plus, people who aren’t writers are ALSO grabby at cons and drinks at room parties are pretty communal in identical plastic cups and if you get too out of it, saying that The Wheel of Time sucks a whole ass way too loudly in a room that contains the author’s wife who edited the series and several ardent fans and hell maybe even Brandon Sanderson could be the least of your worries.

So you just don’t get to drink like everyone else does unless you are very well in control of your limits and actions under the influence but no one will start a hashtag about what a pity it is that women can’t have fun at cons anymore, because that concern was never and will never be about you and your experience.

4. Oh Hey Also Sex

And you probably just don’t have sex with anyone at a con either. It is super dangerous for you. Not for men, not for famous men, not for people who are just there as fans who might hook up with Aquaman after the Masquereade. But for you, for a woman, for a new author, for someone trying to make real connections in this world who reads the internet and knows the guy touching your leg is probably not trying to make the kind of connection you are. 

It’s a small world, and drama gets out, and slut-shaming, gossip, and not taking women seriously if folks know anything at all about her sexual history is as rampant as in any high school. Certain cons have a sizable poly contingent who gets down with glorious and flamboyant displays, but very few (not none) of them are authors, and very few of the ones who are are women, because shit, my UK editor asked me not to swear on Twitter, how am I supposed to go to some Geeks Wide Shut party on the 14th floor when anyone who spills the beans could destroy my professional standing, especially since female children’s writers are held to even higher standards (some combo of fairy godmother, sunday school teacher, and best friend auntie) than adult writers, as your words end up in the heads of people’s kids? 

This kind of fun is a VERY risky fun if you came to work. Not only because people could hate on you for “getting around” or whatever 50s jargon tends to bubble up when people get weird about sex, but you could fuck up and trample on someone’s boundaries too. You don’t want to hurt anyone, you just want people to read your book. Even if it wasn’t intentional, it can still happen, and you know you are almost guaranteed not to be among the forgiven because you have no power in this spehre yet. This fun is not a fun you get to partake of with a carefree mind. But it is exactly the kind of fun men are so eager to protect even the potential of as soon as anyone stands up to say hey maybe don’t rape or assault me how would that be.

And people will be happy to tell you that cons used to be these orgiastic free-for-alls without all these RULES, MAN. Back in the days of water brothers and Asimov pinching every ass he could find when cons were spaces where geeks were suddenly king and the jocks who took up all the sexual air in the room were gone. Drugs and fucking and famous guys doing crazy nonsense was the law of the land, they will so dreamily tell you. And yeah, from everything I know, it was like that. I have watched older fans and authors engage in touching and fondling that our generation would call harassment, and they don’t see any problem with it. Which is FINE because that’s the social currency of their in-group. But they’re pretty shocked when they try it on new people and suddenly Genevieve Valentine has reported one of them for harassment and the entire internet has taken sides. 

I do wonder, though, how amazing and fluid and wonderful and accepting those older cons really were. Because I hear about what famous men got up to, lionized into some kind of dick-hagiography. But I don’t hear a lot from the women who got pinched or grabbed or coaxed into a room they didn’t really want to be in. I don’t really hear anything from the targets of these famous lusts. Just that they could “get away with it” and “no one made a big deal” which doesn’t actually sound like consent to me at all. And we do know about Walter Breen and Marion Zimmer Bradley and other abusers who were allowed to thrive in the convention system because no one wanted to make a big deal and free love was the future and children suffered because of that. So when people tell me how licentious things used to be, I raise my eyebrow, because it seems to have been a playground for famous or popular or otherwise charismatic men to do what they pleased to whom they pleased, without having to worry about pleasing anyone else.

AND THAT’S NOT ANY FUCKING DIFFERENT THAN IT IS NOW.

5. SMILE

Yes, smile, girl! Smile to everyone, look happy and approachable, look non-threatening, work on that resting bitch face for which there isn’t even an equivalent male phrase, make sure your mug isn’t putting people off, don’t ever not pay attention to your face, it might slip into something not attractive to some random person who sees you. I hate that I started doing it, but my resting bitch face is so fierce I found that people, and not just men, but let’s be honest, mostly men, liked me a lot better if I acted, not only happy and friendly, but submissive, tilting my head down so I was always looking up at people, spreading my hands in a slightly helpless gesture, softening my voice, smiling, smiling, smiling.

But it always has to look natural! No one likes a fake!

It's hard. Going to a convention as a woman, as a POC, as a queer person, as a trans person, as a newbie, as anyone with little or no power, is hard. It has always been hard, it's just that people with power didn't really care before because they thought it was supposed to be harder for us.

6. The Point

The point is, what I see happening now, that a vocal crowd seem to be so damn annoyed by, is the notion that men at conventions might have to, just for a minute, think about SOME of the things that women, POC, LGBTQ+, non-neurotypical, and all other marginalized authors HAVE ALWAYS HAD TO THINK ABOUT AT CONVENTIONS. That men might have to consider how their actions affect others and reflect on how their audience will see them OH GOD NO THE INJUSTICE OF IT ALL. That perhaps, just perhaps, someone who is tall, heavily muscled and tattooed, and a former member of law enforcement might have to consider that the way they look will make people feel certain ways, and consciously shape their behavior to make them seem more friendly and approachable and NOT DANGEROUS by NOT BEING DANGEROUS. That hey maybe you just don’t get to fuck at a con! Because it’s a workplace! And that’s not actually a war crime, women have literally always known fucking at your workplace is super risky, fraught with dicey power structures, and usually not worth it but god forbid these guys have to live like their not Boss Dog of Reality even for a moment. Who will think of their right to bang young impressionable fans and then emotionally abandon them and never have anyone think worse of them for it?

And that’s genuinely the objection. What if all these new ideas about consent mean I don’t get to fuck someone? But I really want to fuck them. Do they want to fuck me? I assume so, after all, they loved my book and they didn’t say no.

Yes, Virginia. Maybe that means you don’t get to fuck someone you really want to fuck. Because it’s your job as the person in the superior power position to do no harm. The one and only time a fan tried to get me to go home with her, no matter how pretty or smart she was or how much I wanted to, I didn’t, because it would have been wrong and she might’ve been hurt by it, by all the little things that might go wrong in a normal hook-up or even just me going home and not calling her, and you don’t do that to fans, because fans are sacred.

Not harming someone is more important than fucking them. I know it’s a tough idea, but you’ll get used to it.

Does that mean you can’t flirt? Or that casual sex is bad? Goddammit, no. But none of what has come out in these last weeks is flirting. Flirting is banter, wit, will they won’t they, plausible deniability, an interplay of intellect and subtle social cues. Y’all need Jane Austen. IF YOU WOULD FEEL WEIRD SAYING IT BEHIND A FAN, MAYBE IT’S NOT FLIRTING. Just talk about books and life and your dreams and if something comes of it after the con, and they aren’t WAY younger with WAY less power than you, because that may not be illegal but “not illegal” is a PRETTY LOW BAR, MY FRIEND, sure, pursue that, get consent, act right, and knock yourself out, but for fuck’s sake just let people work without trying to get them on top of you and hey maybe you should work too instead of doing the convention equivalent of cruising other people’s cubicles. All it takes is one bad experience with you to make a person hate your books forever, so YES you have to worry about that just like we all do. And what we’re seeing online is that writ large—one bad experience by proxy, and impressions of books and writers changed forever, even the ones who, by whatever invisible racial/social/financial/cultural calculus it is, don’t lose everything immediately.

I simply can’t take the whining about “fun” and “how it used to be” and “now we can’t do ANYTHING anymore” seriously. All anyone is asking is for powerful people to control themselves and consider same shit the rest of us have always had to. Don’t lie, don’t say gross shit to strangers, don’t hurt anyone if you can help it and you can, don’t be selfish, keep your hands to yourself unless otherwise invited, behave, in short, as we teach kindergartners to behave.

Welcome to having to think about other people. A lot of us fucking live here.