Only a Sith Deals in Absolutes
ETA2: Anonymity and pseudonyms are important, and I believe they should be respected, for a number of reasons. However, I’m also aware that a handful of individuals have been actively shit-stirring and spreading disinformation in this ongoing conversation. VitaSineLibrisMorsEst will no longer be commenting on this blog. (Before anyone asks, no, this is not RH. Yes, I know who it is. No, I will not be sharing that information.)
ETA: I’ve gotten a wide range of comments and emails on this post. At least to some extent, I think I’ve screwed up.
- I am not defending RH. While I have some criticism of the way Laura Mixon presented her report, I’m grateful to her for doing so, and for shining a light on the abuse, harassment, and other attacks this individual has committed over the years. If my posts came off as a defense of RH, then that’s on me as the writer, and I apologize. This is someone who has been actively abusive, and while it might be ironic, given the title of this post, that’s something I absolutely do condemn.
- I’ve been told that some of what I’ve said here mirrors rhetoric being used elsewhere to portray RH as more of a heroic figure speaking truth to power, and dismissing her victims as whiny, thin-skinned authors out for revenge. To which I say Dammit, internets! But I see how I could come across as another voice in that chorus.
- A lot of people are hurting and afraid right now. RH’s victims are chief among them, and deserve support. I’ve been talking by email to minority writers who were stalked, threatened, and attacked by RH and her helpers, as well as to minority reviewers who are afraid because they see RH being condemned for her reviews as well as everything else. I believe all of these voices deserve to be acknowledged and heard.
- I tried to conflate a conversation about reviewing vs. bullying with a conversation about a specific individual who has hurt a great many people in the field. That was clumsy and stupid on my part. I should have picked one or the other. By trying to do both, I dulled and confused what I was trying to say. I’m sorry for that.
I’m continuing to struggle with all of this, and to sort it out in my own head. Thank you for your comments and your emails. Even the angry and critical ones. Especially those.
#
I’ve been thinking about some of the comments and emails I received after my blog post last week about online bullying and harassment. Several people expressed confusion about exactly what I was saying. Was I defending attacks on authors? Condemning angry reviews?
The answer was neither. I was trying — perhaps unsuccessfully — to acknowledge the damage this individual had done as well as the good.
That’s a little easier for me. To the best of my knowledge, I was never one of her targets. I get that it’s harder when you’re the one who’s been attacked. There’s an editor who’s publicly badmouthed me, calling me various names (“Rotten meat” is my favorite) and basically blacklisting me and a few other folks, among other things. When I see friends of mine working with him, I cringe. Don’t you know what this guy is like? How can you work with someone like that?
Maybe they don’t know what he’s like. Or maybe he’s actually a good editor, I don’t know. It’s hard for me to recognize there’s more here than my annoyance, and to recognize that he’s more than just a cardboard villain.
“Requires Hate,” or whoever she is, hurt a lot of people. She bullied and threatened and harassed, and none of that is okay. She also raised valid critiques in her reviews, both of specific books and of the genre as a whole. Because yeah, a lot of SF/F is dominated by western culture, and is full of sexism and racism and cultural appropriation and other problems.
I’ve spoken to people who learned a lot from those reviews, and they’re scared to say so publicly, because it feels like an all-or-nothing conversation. The line has been drawn. You have to pick a side. And that’s damaging.
So I want to be very clear about my own thoughts and opinions here. Bullying is not okay. Threats and harassment, calls for violence against an author (or a reviewer, or anyone else) are not okay. Threatening and/or emotionally blackmailing others to condemn a work because you don’t like it, or because you don’t like the author, is not okay. So much of what RH did over the years was not okay, and these are behaviors we need to do a better job of recognizing and speaking out against.
But speaking up to say you find a book offensive? That it’s full of stereotypes, dehumanizing tropes, sexist or racist bullshit, and so on? Criticizing books and authors who perpetuate colonialism or the erasure and sidelining of women and minorities, of disabled and LGBTQ characters? That’s not only okay, it’s necessary. It’s important. Even when the reviewer is angry.
I’ve spoken with people who are watching this conversation and feel afraid, because they see a lot of rage and hostility toward a reviewer who identified as a lesbian and a woman of color. And while some of that rage and hostility feels justified, based on RH’s harassment and bullying, a fair number of us are falling into that all-or-nothing approach. RH is being condemned in entirety, and that includes both her harassment and her reviews and criticisms and so on.
I have a fair amount of power in our community, by virtue of being a published author, a Hugo-winning blogger, and a straight white American male. But imagine being a woman of color, a reviewer from a different culture, an LGBTQ reader, anyone who looks at the dominant narratives in our genre and sees themselves treated as lesser. Imagine feeling angry and wanting to speak up to power. And then imagine seeing quotes like these presented as evidence of damage done to a community by someone like you:
- “Shit plot. Shit prose. Weeaboo maggotry.”
- “It’s a regurgitation done without skill, with an extra dose of racism nobody asked for.”
- “Easily the most overrated thing ever to come out recently, and I’m going to assume that people who gush over how groundbreaking it all is have only ever read Tolkien and Eragon.”
There’s a lot of anger in those comments. I may not agree with them, but so what? Reviewers are never 100% in agreement about anything. But those quotes are presented as part of the condemnation of RH. What’s the takeaway for other reviewers who feel that same anger? Will they be condemned or attacked if they’re not careful and gentle about how they post their reviews? Are they better off simply remaining silent altogether?
ETA: This in no way excuses comments and threats like:
- “If I see *** being beaten in the street I’ll stop to cheer on the attackers and pour some gasoline on him.”
- “her hands should be cut off so she can never write another Asian character.”
- “Spread the word that *** is a raging racist fuck. Let him be hurt, let him bleed, pound him into the fucking ground. No mercy.”
I don’t think Laura Mixon was trying to silence anyone, and she’s done a tremendous amount of work putting that report together. I also give her credit for updating the report as she receives feedback. While I think there are some flaws, I believe that Mixon has done our family a service by bringing all of this out into the open. I know I’d certainly have flaws and problems if I tried to compile something that extensive.
But as this conversation continues, we have to step back from the all-or-nothing approach. Abuse and harassment are unacceptable. I don’t care who you are, or how you try to justify it. And I’m going to continue to work to do a better job recognizing and speaking out when I see it.
I also want to state for the record that blunt, pissed-off, negative reviews are not abuse. Anger is not abuse. Not that anyone needs my permission, but you have the right to your anger at books that rely on racist tropes, that treat women as objects to be raped or killed to motivate the men, that assume only white people exist or matter, that belittle your culture and community, or whatever else.
You have the right to express that anger, and you should be able to do so without fear of backlash from the author, or that the community will try to silence you for daring to voice that anger. Even if the book or story you’re putting through the shredder is one of mine. Because that review isn’t about me. It’s about you and your reaction to the work. And I support you and your right to tear it apart.
VilcaRomba
November 11, 2014 @ 12:06 pm
SM Stirling–yes, on all counts. Brilliantly said.
S.M. Stirling
November 11, 2014 @ 12:08 pm
RH was preferentially attacking Asian women, so I don’t think it’s going to destroy any of their goodwill.
RH is getting exposed for being a nasty piece of work, not for being Thai — if she or “she” is; I speak as one who got taken in by “Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari”, whose pattern of manipulative dishonesty shows some similarities.
I’m not saying she isn’t Thai, or female, either: we just don’t know. We do know she’s vicious, manipulative and utterly dishonest, qualities which know no boundaries of ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.
“From the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing can be made.”
Hidden Anonymous
November 11, 2014 @ 12:09 pm
So reassure me here: what is the difference between an angry review that has misread the text and the reviews RH ‘started with’?
Next: what is the difference between a review that expresses an angry unpopular viewpoint with limited (but quoted) support from the text, and the reviews RH ‘started with’.
Speculate for me: how many future reviewers writing an unpopular opinion in controversial language will be reminded about Requires Hate and thus silenced?
How many won’t even bother writing those reviews because they’re reading along now? And do you consider that a good thing?
Hidden Anonymous
November 11, 2014 @ 12:15 pm
It is statistically likely that an elitist non-neutral reviewer would hold minority groups she cares about to a higher standard, though.
It doesn’t matter, however. She silenced vulnerable voices with the strength of her aggression, at least for a few years. Fortunately for them, justice is finally coming.
S.M. Stirling
November 11, 2014 @ 12:23 pm
Angry reviews as such may not be.
But some -types- of angry reviews, specifically the types RH wrote, are indeed the same class of thing as direct personal threats. Not -identical- to direct personal threats, but of the same class.
She used them quite deliberately as a lead-up to the threats, harassment, attempted career sabotage and so forth.
There’s a difference between anger at something you find offensive, and the type of rage that boils with a lust to hurt and destroy.
RH’s is of the latter category, IMHO. I could be wrong, of course, but after reading thousands of words of her postings straight through, the impression I get is that this person is a boiling cauldron, one of those people who “want to watch the world burn”.
It’s harder to tell accurately in print, of course; far harder. But I get that vibe from her; this is a person who is using the Internet because they can’t use a knife and a baseball bat.
There’s a strong case for seriously frowning on and pushing back at hyperbolic vocabulary.
When you’ve seem someone who actually, physically “had his dick cut off with a machete” in the real world, which I have, using it as a rhetorical trope starts to seem a bit questionable.
I’ve used questionable language and said intemperate things I regret — who hasn’t? But this is a whole different kettle of fish.
BDG
November 11, 2014 @ 12:25 pm
You misunderstand, perhaps because I was unclear, I don’t think it will be RH’s attacks the will erode the goodwill, her damage has be done, of rather has been inflicted, I think the damage will remain for sometime. I, as I stated before, believe the eroding of goodwill will come from white people. I do not trust white people to not abuse to opportunity to silent similar dissent voices in fear that the next one will be the next RH. I know it’s unfair but I have found in my life, the lives of my family, and in the lives of my people, one simply cannot trust white to do what is right by everyone if it is to erode even a small part of their privilege.
green_knight
November 11, 2014 @ 12:27 pm
‘The death of a thousand paper cuts.’ Outsiders often only see a fraction, whereas the victim sees them all. (Been there, and while I wasn’t _afraid_ of that person, four years of snide comments whereever I went left their mark.) I’m ever so sorry you went through this; when it’s your parents, the potential for gaslighting must be so much greater 🙁
But thanks to my experience, I’m taking reports of ‘this person popped up every time I spoke, whereever the venue’ more seriously than ‘such-and-such is a shitbag and deserves to die’. I dislike hyperbole, but can accept that others draw the line in different places; but constantly reminding someone of a hostile presence in their lives is _meant_ to intimidate, and while one may say something nasty in the heat of the moment, you don’t accidentally set up google alerts for certain people you dislike and you don’t accidentally engage with them repeatedly.
S.M. Stirling
November 11, 2014 @ 12:49 pm
“So reassure me here: what is the difference between an angry review that has misread the text and the reviews RH ‘started with’?”
— for starters, RH wasn’t misreading, she was deliberately dishonest.
She misquoted, took out of context, reviewed books she actually confessed to not having read or to have read a few pages of, and outright made shit up; not to mention restoring to the argument ad hominem right from the start, always a sign of bad faith — the notorious “not Asian enough” tactic she was fond of, frex.
She didn’t do all these things in every single instance, and she didn’t always start out with the full panoply, but a lot of the time… and it was those posts she was most careful to go back and erase, of course.
(And she switched from defending to attacking books on a dime; Tolkien and GGRM, for instance.)
You can’t control what people read into a text. Steve Brust once got congratulations on how a book of his “stuck it to the Jews”. Steve is Jewish and the book had nobody in it but Hungarians and very humanoid dinosaurs.
Writers just roll with those punches.
The lies and misrepresentations were part of her strategy. She set out to destroy writers, and those who supported them; first by provocation that might seem borderline, and then with the dog-rape, acid-in-the-face, make-him-bleed stuff when she got a response.
The reason I think she targeted gay women of Asian background and progressive opinions was that she’d picked that niche for herself and wanted no competition. (The psychological mechanism was probably more complex, but that’s the bare bones of it.) Possibly the others were camoflage.
“Next: what is the difference between a review that expresses an angry unpopular viewpoint with limited (but quoted) support from the text, and the reviews RH ‘started with’.”
— generally, her viewpoint — or the ideological premises which she mimicked when beginning a demolition job — weren’t unpopular, not in the places she was posting.
Her MO when destroying online communities was to polarize and divide, by accusing authors of things -everyone there disapproved of-.
And she often had considerable support because of that tactic; doubly so because her standard response to anyone disagreeing with the review was to attack (often for months or years at a time) the person as racist, homophobic, etc.
The effectiveness was mainly due to clever manipulation of the consensus of these groups. She took on their coloration, only in a demented batshit sort of way, the better to strike and destroy.
“How many won’t even bother writing those reviews because they’re reading along now? And do you consider that a good thing?”
— it’ll be a good thing if reviewers don’t lie, don’t engage in bad faith, don’t try to review books they haven’t read.
And if they avoid rhetoric involving rape by dogs, cutting off parts with machetes, and things of that nature, that would be a -very- good thing all ’round.
I can’t think of anyone it would harm, except for RH and her ilk.
If she hadn’t hurt so many innocent people, you might almost say she’d done the field a service. That’s a bit too Leninist for me to entertain seriously, though.
Dolorosa
November 11, 2014 @ 12:53 pm
Gamegate has made death and rape threats in an attempt to silence people.
There’s only one person here who’s done that, and it’s not Laura Mixon.
S.M. Stirling
November 11, 2014 @ 1:19 pm
She’s certainly made it more difficult for anyone else who might be more “sincere” to use precisely the same set of tropes. However, since they were bad tropes anyway…
I wouldn’t worry as much — RH is a raving psychopath who -imitated- a dissident voice, not an actual dissident voice — but I can see where you’re coming from, since you have far more at risk than I.
I wouldn’t dream of doubting your experiences, which I am sure are just exactly as you say.
green_knight
November 11, 2014 @ 3:39 pm
Jim, I’m one of the people who considered RH’s public comments – even the nasty ones – as hyperbole. It sadly has a tradition in SF, from “I can only suggest that [two writers] – not their story, but the authors themselves – be piled in the middle of the floor and set fire to.” (James Blish, 1964) via Harlan Ellison, “every time I saw or read someone who’d never been poor expound obliviously on what was really going on with poor people, I had to fight back the urge to beat them to death with a hammer” (John Scalzi) to “*burns Target to the ground*” (Chuck Wendig) etc. etc.
What I didn’t see was the juxtraposition of ‘this should happen to people’ and going into people’s spaces/contacting them directly on twitter/following them around to say ‘See? this is what I think should happen to people like you’, because that is clearly an act of intimidation, even if there is no intention ever to follow through with such an act.
(What I haven’t seen is the ‘exhortations to her followers to commit similar crimes’ Helen refers to, which would be another level of vile behaviour, and which _would_ justify involving the police.)
green_knight
November 11, 2014 @ 3:54 pm
Lying and engaging in bad faith I’ll give you, but reviewing books they haven’t finished is pretty standard: I don’t have to eat a whole rotten apple to know it’s bad, sometimes a book shows its true colours after a few pages, and life is too short.
On the other hand, I will often read a few pages and swoon and rush to buy a book, so I don’t think the world of literature suffers overall.
XS
November 11, 2014 @ 3:58 pm
I’m posting this in namespace for an anon who felt unsafe doing so. It’s unaltered save for a requested typo fix:
“One of the things that has been driving me batty about this discussion is the persistent efforts–seen in several places, including Hines’ posts–to distinguish RH’s reviews from her stalking. I get that its a fraught issue because of Kathleen Hale and that whack job who hit a woman with a wine bottle. But it misses the point because RH used bad reviews as a tool in her stalking.
Because, you know, one of the key tools of any stalker is using what would otherwise be unobjectionable behavior as a means of intimidation. Things like parking on a particular street, sending a postcard or birthday card, visiting a particular coffee shop, waving at someone from across the street–unobjectionable in themselves, but intensely threatening in the context of harassment, abuse, threats, controlling behavior, and refusing to leave someone alone.
“We need to distinguish between reviews and harassment” misses the point in the same way that it misses the point to say “sure it was wrong of him to abuse you but you can’t ask him to not park on your street every day, it’s a free country.” The context of stalking makes otherwise acceptable behavior into something unacceptable. Stalking is rarely about the acceptability of individual actions. It’s about the patterns.
And furthermore, it expands beyond the individual target. If J Random Guy parks on my street every day, I won’t even notice. If my best friend’s stalker starts doing it, of course it’s going to scare me, even if he has not (yet) stalked me. Similarly, if I’ve watched RH stalk and intimidate a friend for years, and then she reviews my book.., of course I’m not going to consider that the same way I would an isolated negative review. I am not required to turn off my danger senses and “be fair” to someone who both stalks and abuses AND uses reviews to do so.
And furthermore I think, if he thought about it, Hines would realize that. But the specifics in this case, in the atmosphere of a larger-than-RH charged discussion of negative reviews, are obscuring it, alas.”
Ms. Sunlight
November 11, 2014 @ 4:07 pm
As someone with a mental health disability I would really rather people didn’t call people who do harmful things a “raving psychopath”. I don’t like seeing mental health slurs used like that; it’s not a clinical term anyway.
Jim C. Hines
November 11, 2014 @ 4:18 pm
I actually have thought about it, and the assumption that I haven’t is a bit frustrating. That said, I agree with a lot of anon’s comments, and the points being made. The parking analogy is a good one.
But I also recognize that people are now expressing their fears of parking on that street, because they’re seeing RH being condemned not for parking as one tactic in stalking and harassment, but for daring to park on that street at all. So I wish we were doing a better job of clearly stating that anyone is allowed to park on Negative Review Lane, and that it’s the parking-as-part-of-harassment that’s being condemned.
And I know I’ haven’t been clear enough about that, and that my timing on this whole matter has sucked. I wish I knew how to help the people who have said they feel silenced as a result of the condemnation of RH without my posts making other people feel silenced in the process.
At this point, I’m trying to do the less talking, more listening thing for a few days. Aside from responding to the occasional comment.
Dolorosa
November 11, 2014 @ 4:19 pm
Agreed, and thank you saying so.
Foxessa
November 11, 2014 @ 4:36 pm
The following is not to condone the abuse and so on performed by those other personas with which I, at least, had no knowledge, in communities that not only I didn’t participate. but didn’t know existed. About the point the RH blog moved upon attacking other kinds of writers, I stopped following the blog, because instead of making real points that had the right to be made — and in a mode that was darkly humoress in the same way that grimdark frequently claims to be — the blog was no longer interesting either.
As observed earlier, this is another one of these sequential blow ups in the field and its communities, which then leads one to wonder WHY this particular field, its communities and the associated fields such as comix, gaming, etc. provoke these kinds of blow ups so often?
It does lead to speculation that might be because they are at core popular culture entertainments, and popular culture reflects the entire milieu out of which popular culture emerges.
With decades of Limbaugh (who, let us recall, is often defended as ‘not a news person, but an entertainer!’ — and funny!), Fox, and all those like ilks spewing hate speech of every kind against everyone and anyone they feel like, this is the milieu at large.
Actual women are being physically attacked and hurt and raped every day, and these white males have consistently 1) dismissed the attacks and murders as the action of a solitary bad apple; 2) dismissed the attacks and murders as not that bad; 3) dismissed the attacks and murders as the victim asked for it; 4) found the attacks and murders to be entertaining, and / or even comedy fodder; 5 and so on and so forth.
If this is so, how does one go about changing the milieu that creates these entertainments? Can it be done at all?
It has to be because anything else is focusing on the symptoms rather than the illness.
But this is one person’s opinion. Doubtless there may be / is? great disagreement with that opinion.
Nenya
November 11, 2014 @ 5:25 pm
No, she was harrassing and bullying people for YEARS before she started the RH review blog. This is not new behaviour on her part. Just because it wasn’t happening in spaces published SF authors frequent, doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening and didn’t cause harm.
This was not a case of someone who started out with reviews and got harsher with time. This is someone who was a well-known troll for years, and then started reviewing books, and then–surprise!–continued to engage in stalking, harrassing, and violent rhetoric. Just like she had for years before she ever started the RH review blog.
(Seriously. I’ve known of her since 2002. This is not some new strange going off the rails on her part.)
Stevie
November 11, 2014 @ 5:28 pm
Foxessa
Perhaps it may be helpful to bear in mind that many of the people deeply disturbed by this do not live in the US; asking us why we are not protesting about Rush Limbaugh or Fox simply underlines the fact that you assume that the US = the world.
Equally, you seem to be assuming that we do not protest against violence in all its forms; that too is pretty dismissive of anything outside your culture.
I do feel that RH’s victims need to be treated with respect, and given some time to process the fact that they were and are not alone. Launching into an analysis of what is wrong with popular entertainment in the US is all well and good, but RH’s victims are not confined to the US; again, your assumptions can do yet more damage to people who have already been hurt.
I’m sure that this is not what you intend, but unfortunately you seem to be reinforcing the belief that RH’s victims are disposable; mere data to be fed into someone else’s narrative. I don’t think that is going to be helpful anywhere in the world…
Miroslaw Baran
November 12, 2014 @ 10:25 am
@HA: Are you seriously asserting that Laura Mixon’s post is comparable to a character assassination attempt done by a narcissist gobshite (which is what Gjoni tried to throw at Quinn)?
Murilegus
November 12, 2014 @ 2:18 pm
Thank you. In debates like this one, this can’t be pointed out often enough.
Jan
November 17, 2014 @ 10:14 am
By no means should condemning RH’s bad behaviour be translated as condemning honest and critical reviews of books. I’m sure that there are some taking pot shots right now, but at the same time, there needs to be a realisation that RH did wield reviews in a disturbing manner, going as far as to go to every website open to reviews to post bad reviews on a single writer and including inappropriate graphics, to put it mildly. RH used reviews to falsely accuse certain writers of racism when there was no racism to be found.
Yes, we keep circling back to the point that RH posted valid reviews SOMETIMES. Which is great except she wasn’t the only person posting these valid reviews and comments. She was just the loudest and nastiest. There have always been other forums and communities which discussed the same issues she did, except that they actually read the books in detail and had a more nuanced criticism. The painful irony is that RH boasted of honesty but did not like other honest reviews unless they completely agreed with her or if they came from her own friends. In book review communities, RH would rarely tolerate any view that contradicted hers.
So yes, RH posted valid reviews SOMETIMES, but she did so at the expense of other reviewers because she was remarkably good at silencing them.
I’m not being very concise about this. My main point is that I agree we shouldn’t condemn honest reviews, but RH was hardly the bastion of honest reviews and I don’t think everyone should behave like exposing her bad behaviour means the end of honest critique. RH is not the be all, end all of reviewers. In fact, we might have more outspoken and critical reviewers today if they haven’t been so harshly shut down by her years ago, and I’m certain more will slowly emerge now to fill in the niche she so aggressively defended.
I’ll also address something I read on Jim’s livejournal, where a person commented that this situation is complex and unlike RH, the commentator was not POC and queer in a country where queerness was not accepted, so she couldn’t say how she would behave in RH’s position. As a queer POC woman, I believe that’s an insulting excuse and shouldn’t have been brought up even in the vague-est context in relation to all the things RH has done.
RH did not do what she did because she was POC and queer. I believe she behaved so extraordinarily badly because she always had supporters and she knew she had friends who would fight her battles for her. In a twisted sense, she was in a position of privilege where she could unleash her rage with the most vitriolic verbal abuse and come out of it smelling like roses. She abused the trust people put in her because they thought she was fighting the good fight and now everyone has come out a little jaded and a little worse off for it. And that’s not even touching on how she has left her direct targets.
We need more critical, more analytical reviews, yes. But it doesn’t need to come with raging toxicity.
Edouard Brière-Allard
November 17, 2014 @ 12:11 pm
Jan, the start of your comment is great: “By no means should condemning RH’s bad behaviour be translated as condemning honest and critical reviews of books.“ That’s a solid 18 words sentence saying that the issue about RH’s behaviour is not about her reviews. Unfortunately, you then proceed to write 307 words about how her reviews were really not good: “My main point is that I agree we shouldn’t condemn honest reviews, but RH was hardly the bastion of honest reviews and I don’t think everyone should behave like exposing her bad behaviour means the end of honest critique.”
Are we exposing harassment or bad reviews? I hope you can see how some people might get confused about what this is really about. (And just so this doesn’t erupt into accusations of denial: I know there is more to it than her negative reviews. I’m just saying that it’s not what most people are actually talking about. This is a shame.) I just think it’s fascinating that a lot of the people who insist that it’s just not about the reviews always bring them back to the surface. The accusation is almost always the same, too: “RH used reviews to falsely accuse certain writers of racism when there was no racism to be found.”
I think your explanation of her behaviour: “…she always had supporters and she knew she had friends who would fight her battles for her…“, is too complex and unnecessary. RH behaved like an a*hole because she was an a*hole is a perfectly valid explanation. Many things could have contributed to her acting that way, but like she said in one of her apologies, she still had agency. The same goes for everybody else.
S.M. Stirling
November 17, 2014 @ 12:54 pm
The issue about RH’s behavior is not separable from her reviewing. It IS about the reviews… and much else. The reviews are part and parcel of it, not something separate from the nasty shit she did “over there”.
These weren’t “bad” reviews in a technical sense(*); they weren’t intended to be reviews at all, in the sense the word is usually used. They were incompetent if you look at them -as- reviews, but that’s like critiquing a suicide vest stuffed with RDX and nails for being a poor fashion statement.
They were themselves tools meant to intimidate, harass and destroy, along with the threats and mobbing. There’s no separation. It’s a seamless whole
The reviews were simply one more club in her arsenal. Her campaign of harassment was keyed on books and on the critical reception of books.
RH was deliberately pissing in the wells of discourse, sabotaging (as far as was within her power) the whole process of cultural production.
S.M. Stirling
November 17, 2014 @ 12:58 pm
Or to put it another way, yes, she was (and is) an a*hole. But she’s not a -stupid- a*hole. The whole affair shows a malignant cunning and a sharp awareness of the parameters and weaknesses of the circles she was moving in.
The comment section here and elsewhere shows how effective some of her manipulative efforts were and to an extent still are.
Edouard Brière-Allard
November 17, 2014 @ 3:15 pm
“They were incompetent if you look at them -as- reviews…“
“Her campaign of harassment was keyed on books and on the critical reception of books.”
Thank you for illustrating my point. Personally, I found a lot of RH’s reviews quite good and helpful. They played a part in helping me become a better person and understand the world around me. On the other hand, her harassment of various people online (which, despite your insistence, has no relation to her reviews), I find completely reprehensible and inexcusable.
I realize this is selfish of me, but I think it’s very inconvenient that (without a significant amount of work) it’s almost impossible to find what RH actually did wrong so that I can empathise with the victims and provide support (assuming I could). Everywhere I try to look, I keep running into dozens of people crying because they (or authors they love) were called racist.
“sabotaging (as far as was within her power) the whole process of cultural production.”
There’s nothing wrong with activists that try to reduce the quantity of objectionable (for the activists) content being produced. The principle is sound; it’s only the means you use that can be bad. Just so my point is clear, saying something like this in a review: “this work/that author/SFF is racist/sexist and the world would be a better place if no one bought it/he stopped writing/the whole field of SFF was nuked from orbit” = OK; harassing people online (regardless of your motives being good or bad) = NOT OK. The two have no relation, even if the former were to be used for the latter.
With regard to your other comment (below, which I’ll quote in full): “Or to put it another way, yes, she was (and is) an a*hole. But she’s not a -stupid- a*hole. The whole affair shows a malignant cunning and a sharp awareness of the parameters and weaknesses of the circles she was moving in.
The comment section here and elsewhere shows how effective some of her manipulative efforts were and to an extent still are.”
You seem to be saying that the people who offer a nuanced opinion on this situation are somehow manipulated, that they are incapable of forming an independent opinion (in a post titled “Only a Sith Deals in Absolutes”, no less). You seem to be working under the assumption that you are somehow smarter or more objective than the people posting comments here. I’m a smart person myself and there is not much that irritates me more than people who think that way (perhaps because I used to think that way too when I was young, and because a PhD in STEM introduced me to a great number of very smart people that behaved like horrible human beings). I recommend that you read on the Dunning–Kruger effect.
Jan
November 18, 2014 @ 7:39 am
“Are we exposing harassment or bad reviews?”
Here’s a comment a moderator left when RH was finally banned from 50books-poc: ‘Each of these thread openers read to me as if you consider the book to be objectively without value, and that therefore you get to personally think less of the OP for having found value in it.’
When other people left reviews, RH left her own reviews as a response while attacking the reviewer. She did it with vitriol, repeatedly, when certain writers were involved and to any reviewers who dared disagree, while implying or saying that other reviewers were wrong and stupid. The end result were that other reviewers gave up on the community. And that’s a damn shame. So is that just another bad review or harassment using her reviews?
I did state that RH posted valid reviews sometimes, but it doesn’t cancel out the fact that she did use her reviews as a way to harass writers and reviewers sometimes. So no, I don’t see some of these as ‘good reviews’ and I don’t see them as separate from harassment.
I wrote a whole paragraph on how she targeted reviewers who disagreed with her but you have focused on one sentence about racism which I brought up as an example. Just a thought, but perhaps you only see comments about reviews on racism because you ignore everything else? Let’s move on to this focus then:
“I just think it’s fascinating that a lot of the people who insist that it’s just not about the reviews always bring them back to the surface. The accusation is almost always the same, too: “RH used reviews to falsely accuse certain writers of racism when there was no racism to be found.””
I think that’s an incredibly skewed perception of what has been happening. I have read many more complaints and horrified comments about the fact that she wrote things like wanting acid to be thrown on people, wishing a writer would be raped by a dog, trying to get publishers not to publish other writers’ works and spending 6 months stalking and harassing a woman who had been raped because she didn’t talk about her rape recovery in an acceptable manner by RH’s standards. Mainly, I’ve seen a lot of sympathy for her victims.
Yes, there are also people who talk about how some of her reviews were off the mark, some with cause, others with an old grudge at being rightfully called out for racism/sexism. I just don’t think it’s the majority as you state. And I talked about reviews too over here, because Jim’s post is centered around reviews, and I didn’t want to dredge up every horrible thing she has done just so I can talk about reviews and reviewers.
If you take a garner to read the dozens of posts and thousands of comments out there – I’m assuming you haven’t from your other comment – then you would actually see that a large amount of criticism or comments is not around ‘she called me racist, wah wah’. You mentioned that all you see is talks about reviews calling people racist and then in another comment, you say you can’t see what she did wrong enough to empathise with the victims because you haven’t expanded major effort to read up on this. From this, I would suggest that you have drawn your conclusion despite barely scraping the surface of what has transpired. Considering that there are many links available to blogs accounting their experiences with RH and a lot of this has been collated in a few places, maybe it’s time you do that reading after all.
“I think your explanation of her behaviour: “…she always had supporters and she knew she had friends who would fight her battles for her…“, is too complex and unnecessary. RH behaved like an a*hole because she was an a*hole is a perfectly valid explanation.”
You missed my point. My reasoning is a counterpoint to the lady on Jim’s Livejournal post (where I couldn’t post because it doesn’t allow anon comments and I can’t be bothered to create an LJ account) who implied in essence that RH behaved the way she did because she was underprivileged and unaccepted. I thought it insulting and perhaps I did not include sufficient explanation when I drew my comparison that with the presence of her loyal supporters, she was actually in a privileged position on the internet where she could get away with saying nearly anything to those with less of a support network and be confident that she would always have a number of people backing her up and defending her from those who disagreed or sought to argue with her about it.
At no point did I say that she or her friends didn’t have agency and to be clear, I’m not calling for a witchhunt against her friends. I’m stating my opinion that strength in numbers meant that she was secure enough in her position to say anything she wanted.
Jan
November 18, 2014 @ 7:55 am
I’ll take another jab at my original point which I don’t think I managed to convey in my rush yesterday. I don’t at all believe that everything she has criticized as racist/sexist are actually free of said racism/sexism. But reading over the original post and comments here, it feels like we’re so worried about the aftermath that we don’t dare admit that she had abused the use of her reviews. In my opinion, this fear (especially amongst us POCs) that speaking up against her will damage what we’re fighting for and discourage honest and critical reviews is part of the reason she managed to continue the way she did for years.
While we’re worrying now that the voices of POCs will be silenced (always a valid concern), we mustn’t forget that she had a hand in silencing other POC reviewers too. In terms of reviews, I have hopes that the net result is that we’re better off after all this has come to light.
Edouard Brière-Allard
November 18, 2014 @ 10:14 am
Thanks for your reply Jan. I’ll just address a couple of specific parts of your reply.
“And I talked about reviews too over here, because Jim’s post is centered around reviews […]”
This is indeed a large subject, my apologies for making you talk about a part of it you would have preferred to avoid here. I should make that a double apology because it’s probably when I tried to keep my post short that I introduced more misunderstanding in the conversation, forcing you to make yours longer.
I said: “I think it’s very inconvenient that (without a significant amount of work) it’s almost impossible to find what RH actually did wrong […]”. You can call me lazy, but I think “[reading] the dozens of posts and thousands of comments out there” qualifies as “a significant amount of work” (especially when it’s sprinkled with [in my opinion] a generous dose of “she called me racist in her reviews” comments). Reading a “report” that defines attacks (in part) as “[m]ultiple, vituperative reviews of their books or stories […]”, doesn’t help a lot (even if there is good stuff in there too). You are right that I haven’t read everything on this subject, and my opinion on the complaints may be biased by the sample I did read. That being said, I do empathise with the victims – some of it I saw myself back then, and I apologise if my comment implied otherwise. I guess my point is only that I’m sad that “negative reviews” keep getting brought on the same level as “harassment”.
Regarding the causes of RH’s actions, you said: “[y]ou missed my point. My reasoning is a counterpoint […]” I did get you point and I agree with the first part. My reasoning was also a counterpoint (of much smaller importance) to yours. It was just my understanding that she seemed to behave inappropriately even before she had anyone supporting her, but your argument could be right.
Jan
November 19, 2014 @ 5:32 am
I do understand your concern and I wish that some of the ‘multiple, vituperative reviews’ weren’t included in the list of examples where people felt targeted. It’s frustrating because I do think it can dilute the point and all I can do is hope it doesn’t take away from the other examples.
I did a quick count and there are 6 out of 35 examples listed which was described as ‘multiple, vituperative reviews’ and removing those would hardly have made a dent to the whole post. From the links in those 6 examples, RH goes on twitter to call one a fat ugly cunt and engages with another on twitter, so perhaps that’s meant to count as examples where RH went beyond just leaving harsh reviews. A couple of other examples in Mixon’s table listed examples under ‘multiple, vituperative reviews’ but included samples where RH said the writers’ hands should be cut off or people set on fire or take a machete to dicks, so I don’t count those as just harsh reviews. Just removing 4 of the ‘multiple, vituperative reviews’ would clear things up and I think would ease some minds.
Thanks for clarifying what you meant. I’m not trying to make everyone condemn RH or read every bad thing RH has done. I do understand Mixon’s post was very long and could be difficult to go through. It took me 3 hours and I hardly read every link or comment, so I get where you’re coming from. In case you do want to read more but find Mixon’s post overly lengthy, I found a couple of the links provided here made for interesting reading and I especially appreciated the efforts to warn for shitty behaviour or shitty writers making an appearance:
http://blog.logophilos.net/index.php/2014/11/requireshatewinterfoxbenjanun-sriduangkaew-linkspam/#comment-1633
If you’re still interested in understanding what RH actually did wrong, then this post is probably an easier read for the simple fact that the commentator has gathered a few written examples and included them in one post:
http://intellectusspeculativus.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/requires-hate-requires-speaking-out/
Since I already had the tabs open from yesterday, I thought I might as well share the links.
Anyway, depressing discussions about bad behaviour in the SFF community aside, I hope you have a good day.
Stevie
November 19, 2014 @ 7:42 am
Jim
You have headed the post Jan but you mostly seem to be replying to Edouard; I’m baffled!
Jan
November 19, 2014 @ 9:39 am
I don’t know what this means.
Stevie
November 19, 2014 @ 3:18 pm
Jan
Please forgive me; this is completely my fault; I’d seen your non-threaded reply, and when I looked at your subsequent threaded response for some bizarre reason my brain decided that its author was Jim, hence my bafflement.
Thank you for all of your observations; I have found them very helpful.
Daisy
November 25, 2014 @ 12:22 pm
What is this about? The actual reviews? Or other things RH did on the internest? Because I was a fan of the reviews. As a white writer, I got some interesting information on what to avoid, and, to be honest, some things one cannot talk about in a calm voice because they’re horrible. (Also, I never got the impression that the anger was to be taken 100% seriously, I got the impression it was an intentional exaggeration, a stylistic choice to emphasize the horribleness of the reviewed books).
S.M. Stirling
November 25, 2014 @ 1:14 pm
“There’s nothing wrong with activists that try to reduce the quantity of objectionable (for the activists) content being produced.”
— well, yeah, there is; very wrong indeed. Just for starters, it assumes some people’s viewpoints can be indisputably “right” and entitle them to use bad means to silence people.
Argument is one thing; bullying and intimidation is another.
Bad means are themselves bad ends. You cannot use a bad tactic for a good end; it contaminates everything it touches. You are what you do.
There’s a simple test: intention. Are you a) trying to -refute- someone, or are you trying to b) inflict pain in order to shut them up and deter others?
In terms of discourse A) is legitimate; B), never legitimate.
RH is a consistent example of B. She did it in her reviews, and her reviews seamlessly segue into B by other means.
It’s not a matter of whether her targets deserved it or didn’t deserve it. Nobody deserves it.
Or to use another effective test: just imagine that what’s being done is being done by some powerful, ruthless person -to you- or those you love and approve of.
Does it immediately start seeming hinky and evil? Guess what, it’s just as hinky and evil going the other way. It doesn’t matter if the person it’s being done to is Beelzebub with a serving of Hitler sauce.
Iit isn’t a legitimate tactic when used against you or someone you approve of, it’s not a legitimate tactic period. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander, Golden Rule, and all that.
Tolerance of bad methods for ends perceived as “good” is the way RH got a foothold and managed to operate for so long.
The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
The enemy of my enemy may simply be manipulating me by stroking my dislikes.
Jan
December 1, 2014 @ 6:18 am
Rather than rehashing what I’ve said, if you’re asking me ‘what is this about’ you can refer to my further responses to Edouard. I can tell you in quick summary here that I haven’t said that her reviews are all wrong nor have I said that everyone has to always speak in a calm voice.
If you want to take what she said as not serious, just intentional exaggeration, that’s your prerogative. Personally, I’m not sure when we’re supposed to presume someone is serious or not. Are they joking when they say chop off someone’s hands? Serious if they say someone should be dog raped? Regardless, perhaps you view it as just an exaggeration, it doesn’t change the fact that RH did also use her reviews to bludgeon other reviewers and tell them they were wrong and stupid and resulted in other reviewers, POCs included, leaving book review communities and stop reviewing.
Another ugly twist in the #requireshate saga, courtest of FFA » Rants and Ramblings By An Old Bag
December 9, 2014 @ 10:44 pm
[…] So, when Laura Mixon’s report on Requireshate came out, one of the people blogging about it was Jim Hines. […]