Red Sofa

This is not a post I ever thought I’d be writing, and I certainly didn’t expect to be writing it now, when there’s so many terrible things going on in the world. But the SFF writing and publishing community is not an island: we impact and are impacted by the world in turn, and it’s because of this relationship that I’m speaking now. This is a small matter in comparison to the ongoing protests over the extrajudicial murder of George Floyd and the egregious police brutality with which those protests have been met, but it is still, to me, an important matter, as how the SFF community responds to racism and bigotry in other contexts will always relate to how it deals with internal gatekeeping. After what’s happened, I don’t feel that I can in good conscience continue to remain silent.

Last week, Dawn Frederick of Red Sofa Literary, who lives in Minneapolis, tweeted that she had called the police about “looters” at the gas station near her house in the wake of protests about the death of George Floyd. When other people pointed out that calling the police could potentially result in more violence towards Black people in particular – the Minneapolis protests were peaceful until police turned water cannons and rubber bullets on the crowd, precipitating the riots through a series of violent escalations – Fredrick doubled down in defense of her actions. When one of her agents, Kelly Van Sant, announced her resignation from the agency over the matter, Frederick posted a statement to the Red Sofa Literary website, insisting that there were “zero protesters” present at the gas station, just “straight up looters.” (How she could be certain there was no overlap between the two while watching from a distance is, presumably, unknown.)

Since then, two more Red Sofa agents, Amanda Rutter and Stacey Graham, have likewise resigned from Red Sofa in protest, while several of Frederick’s clients have dropped her. It was only after this that Frederick published a second statement, apologising for her actions; she has also deleted her twitter account. As as a result, I have seen many members of the SFF community debating whether or not the reaction Frederick received was proportional to her offence, with some asserting her credentials as a long-standing advocate for diversity in the SFF community as a reason why she has been treated unfairly.

It is for this reason that I have decided to speak publicly about my own past experiences with Dawn Frederick.

In 2014, I signed with Red Sofa Literary to be represented by Jennie Goloboy, an agent who subsequently left Red Sofa in 2017, not long after the events I am about to describe. While I don’t know for certain that what happened with me precipitated Jennie’s decision to leave Red Sofa, the timing of her departure has never struck me as being coincidental. At the very least, I suspect that what happened to me was a factor in her decision, and while I can’t say that my relationship with Jennie ended on good terms, I do believe that, at the end, her actions were severely constrained by Fredrick.

This is going to be a longish story, but the early details are important to the later context, and so I hope you’ll bear with me.

In December 2016, I received my edits for A Tyranny of Queens, the second novel in my Manifold Worlds duology, published with Angry Robot. As my original editor was unavailable at the time, a different editor had been brought on board, one who was also, coincidentally, an employee of Red Sofa. When the edits came in, I was upset to discover that the editor had made several problematic suggestions regarding diverse themes in the novel. In particular, she wanted me to use a different pronoun for a nonbinary character, stated that a neurodivergent character was insufficiently sympathetic because of their neurodivergence (“I love seeing that in a character, but it does make them very hard to present in a warm manner… It might be nice to present a little more of his confusion about how people interact, his fear… to assist with reader sympathy”), and said that giving the protagonist a notable PTSD symptom, after her PTSD is developed throughout the first book, was “a step too far,” describing the PTSD itself as something that should “be the focus of a whole novel” rather than “a small subplot”.

I’m quoting these details now, not because I want to shame or attack the editor nearly four years after the fact – aside from anything else, it has always been my belief that these comments were the result of ignorance, not malice, and that the editor has since done active work to improve her understanding of these issues – but to explain why I was, at the time, both unhappy and stressed. I wrote an email to Jennie outlining my concerns, and later had a Skype conversation with her about it in greater detail: her response was, essentially, that everyone gets edits they disagree with sooner or later, and that I should just do my best. I didn’t feel as though this addressed the problems I was having, and I was additionally concerned that the editor being a fellow employee of Red Sofa was, if nothing else, putting Jennie in the awkward position of having her client complain about a colleague, but I was on deadline, so I set it aside and kept working on the book.

Four months later, in April 2017, fellow nonbinary writer JY Yang wrote a twitter thread about editorial pushback they’d received for using the singular they as their pronoun of choice for nonbinary characters, while also talking about how the personal blindspots of editors around issues of diversity is an element of gatekeeping in SFF publishing. Recalling what had happened with the editing on A Tyranny of Queens, and acting under the (as it turns out, incorrect) belief that Jennie had passed on my concerns to my editor back when I’d originally made them, I decided to chime in, piggybacking off Yang’s thread to share my experiences. I was careful not to name the editor, though I reiterated my belief that she was well-meaning. I hoped that my speaking up would help to further the conversation about diversity in publishing, and left it at that.

At this point, it’s important to note that, whereas Red Sofa Literary is based in Minneapolis, in 2017, I was living in Brisbane, Australia, meaning that Jennie and I were operating in very different timezones. As such – and as I’m a habitual night-owl – it wasn’t unusual for me to hear from Jennie in the evening. Even so, I was surprised and stressed to receive a DM from her after 1am my time, when I was already in bed and noodling around on my phone, saying that she wanted to talk about my tweets, which I’d posted earlier that day (my time). Our subsequent conversation went as follows:

 

At this point, I got out of bed, got dressed and went to Skype Jennie. I stated that, while I was sorry for causing upset, I didn’t think taking the tweets down would help, as traditionally, deleting tweets in the era of screenshots only tends to make an issue blow up. Jennie replied by saying that, to her, my tweets read like I was dissatisfied with Angry Robot and the final version of A Tyranny of Queens (I wasn’t), and that this was what she thought needed addressing.

And then my four-year-old stopped breathing.

More specifically, he started wheezing desperately, frighteningly for air, so loudly that I could hear him several rooms away. It woke my husband, who dashed in to look after him, and I have a very vivid memory of the last thing I said to Jennie on that call being a panicked, “I’m sorry, I have to go, my son isn’t breathing.” I shut the laptop on the Skype conversation and ran into my son’s room. He was terrified and struggling to breathe. We called an ambulance. The ambulance came, and determined the issue was serious enough to merit a hospital visit. I carried my son out to the ambulance at nearly 2am, and as I ducked my head to lift him in, I badly wrenched my lower back.

The EMTs injected him with steroids on the way to the hospital, and this did a lot to help his breathing. (He had croup; he’d had it before more than once, but never so badly, and not while he was old enough to understand what was happening.) Even so, we had to stay at the hospital for several hours to get him checked out properly. It was stressful and exhausting, both emotionally and physically, and sitting in a hard hospital chair made my back pain even worse. Still, there is not a lot to do in a hospital, and once the immediate danger had passed, I checked twitter to see what was happening. To my surprise, I found that the editor had replied to my tweets, identifying herself as their subject, apologising for her blind spots, and promising to do better in future. I was touched and pleased, and thanked her for her words, which I believe were sincere.

Eventually, at around 5am, my husband insisted I get a cab home and go to sleep, as he’d had several hours of rest to my none, and it looked like our son wouldn’t be discharged for a while yet. I did so, tweeting in the cab that I’d been in hospital and hurt my back, but that my son was okay. When I got home, I took some painkillers and got into bed, but before I fell asleep, I used my phone to send a quick email to my then publicist at Angry Robot, asking if the publisher was unhappy with me, apologising if I’d caused them any difficulties and offering to tweet a clarifying statement if they wished. Then, exhausted, I fell asleep, and stayed asleep for most of the day. I woke up a couple of times and glanced at my phone when I did so, but I was loopy on pain medication and didn’t really process anything beyond “shiny screen have words.”

It was late evening by the time I woke up properly, and when I did, I found I had an email from Dawn Frederick, head of the agency. The only other time I’d emailed with her directly had been when I signed my contract with Red Sofa. The tone of the email was blunt and aggressive. It read as follows:

Foz,

As you know, we’ve been trying to get ahold of you with the situation of the Tweets you wrote over 24 hours ago.  Jennie has tried to reach out to you repeated times, but alas it seems you’ve not gotten back in touch with her.

We need to talk. Not tomorrow. Today. I would appreciate 15 minutes of your time, I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

Thanks in advance,

Dawn

Startled, I checked my twitter DMs and found that Jennie had sent me several messages while I’d been asleep:

At this point, I was starting to feel extremely anxious. Having already established both in writing and verbally with Jennie that I wouldn’t be taking the tweets down, I didn’t know what the rush to “resolve” things was, especially as she was aware of the trip to hospital. I emailed Dawn a reply, explaining why I hadn’t been available, but stating that I would get dressed and come to the computer if she wished to speak to me. When Dawn didn’t immediately reply, I hopped back into my DMs with Jennie, where we had the following exchange:

On the basis of this exchange, I stayed awake, believing that I would be skyping privately with Dawn. Instead, I ended up on a call with both Dawn and Jennie that ended up lasting nearly an hour.

And for almost the entirety of that hour, Dawn shouted at me.

It was the worst experience of my professional life. When I opened the call by trying to explain, once again, that I hadn’t been available because of the hospital incident, Dawn said, “This is not about [your son] right now.” (She did not ask if he was okay, though she made sure to tell me that, as Jennie is a mother and because Dawn likes kids, I couldn’t accuse them of being unsympathetic.)

At any time when I tried to talk, either to ask questions or to defend myself, I was shouted down. Jennie said very little, chiming in only once or twice: overwhelmingly, the person speaking (shouting) was Dawn. She told me that my professional conduct in tweeting about my editor was the worst she’d ever seen; that she had Trump-voting relatives in Tennessee with whom she managed to get along, so therefore I had no excuse for criticising my editor in public. She repeatedly claimed that what I done was bullying; that I was a bully. Over and over again, she said I had “thrown her [the editor] under the bus.” When I tried to say that the editor had apologised on twitter, she exploded at me that of course she had, what else could she be expected to do, when everyone knew she was being talked about? I expressed surprise at this, as I hadn’t identified her; Dawn claimed that “everyone knew”.

When Dawn said how unacceptable it was to raise the issues I’d had in public, out of nowhere, without giving the editor a chance to reply, I was baffled, pointing out that I’d clearly raised them with Jennie months earlier. Jennie said yes, but she hadn’t passed them on to the editor, as I hadn’t expressly asked for that to happen. (I’d assumed that, as my email had essentially culminated in me saying I didn’t want to work with that editor in the future, this would happen as a matter of course.)

Dawn then proceeded to tell me that Angry Robot was “furious” and wanted the tweets removed – so much so that they were considering pulling my book a week before it was due to launch. She said that Red Sofa was one of the most author-friendly agencies in the business, “and if you can’t work with us…” she said meaningfully, leaving the sentence hanging so as to imply that, if they dropped me, I would have no future in SFF at all. Dawn accused me repeatedly of lying about the fact that I’d been asleep earlier in the day, saying that she “knew” I’d emailed Angry Robot and therefore had clearly been awake and ignoring Jennie’s messages. Any time I tried to advocate for myself, I was told to stop speaking or risk being dropped by Red Sofa , as she “[didn’t] want to represent that.”

At one point, she tried to frame my criticism of the editor as an un-feminist act, something I should’ve known better than to engage in, “because we’re all women here.”

“Excuse me,” I said, “but I’m genderqueer.”

Dawn made a scoffing noise. “That’s not what this is about.”

(It kind of was, actually, what with the editor wanting to change the nonbinary pronouns I’d used, but when I tried to mention this, Jennie asserted I’d never brought them up with her at all. Ironically, though I’d originally mentioned this as one of my issues while drafting my December email, I’d ended up taking it out of the final version, worried at being seen as hypersensitive about gender identity. Instead, I’d raised it with her verbally when we’d Skyped about the email, which she said she didn’t remember. I tried to argue that being genderqueer was part of my lived experience, something might know less about than me in this instance, but Dawn became angry at the implied criticism. “Of course we believe in diversity! We wouldn’t have signed you otherwise!”)

At one point, Dawn’s shouting was loud enough to wake my husband, who was asleep in the other room. (It was approaching midnight our time by then.) He wandered in, an appalled look on his face at what he was hearing, but he was just as tired as I was, so I gestured for him to go back to bed. At another point, I tried to suggest that there was a conflict of interest in Dawn and Jennie advocating so strongly for the editor, who was also a Red Sofa employee, despite the fact that I was a Red Sofa client; Dawn became absolutely furious at this, denying it completely, and yelled me back into silence.

In the end, Dawn gave me an ultimatum. I had twenty-four hours to post an apology to the editor, or Red Sofa would drop me as a client.

When the call ended, I was numb and shaking. (I’m shaking now as I write this.) I rested, inasmuch as I was able to rest, and then I wrote the apology. Posted it. Received confirmation from Dawn and Jennie that they approved, and that I could keep my representation.

I was still deeply shaken, but by that time, I’d calmed down enough to realise that I still hadn’t heard anything directly from my then publisher at Angry Robot. The publicist I’d emailed, however, had responded, and their (friendly, courteous) email implied Red Sofa had been the ones to contact Angry Robot, and not the other way around. This was confusing, as it seemed to go against what Dawn had told me on the Skype call, so after consulting with an excellent, level-headed writer friend, I tentatively reached out to the publisher to get their take on things.

To my relief, the publisher happily agreed to speak to me. Unlike the call to Red Sofa, my Skype with Angry Robot was calm and professional – and extremely enlightening.

According to the publisher, it was indeed Red Sofa who reached out to Angry Robot about my tweets, something they apparently did before I ever received my first DM from Jennie. Not only that, but Red Sofa also didn’t tell Angry Robot about my December email, letting the publisher believe that my comments about the editor had, indeed, come out of nowhere. The publisher’s understanding of things was that Dawn and the editor were Facebook friends: having seen my tweets, the editor had posted privately to Facebook about how upset she was, as she’d been proud of her work on the book (it was also, apparently, her birthday, which I hadn’t known). Dawn had been so incensed on the editor’s behalf that she’d gone straight to contacting Angry Robot, reassuring them that she would “get to the bottom of it.” The publisher also confirmed that, while they’d been a bit miffed about the tweets, they hadn’t asked for them to be taken down, nor had they ever been going to pull A Tyranny of Queens. I thanked the publisher for taking the time to talk to me – they were gracious, calm and forthcoming – and we ended the call on mutually good terms.

It was at this point that I looked back over my original DMs with Jennie and noted, with a certain painful irony, that almost the first thing I’d said to her was that I didn’t want to be shouted at. I hadn’t actually thought that Jennie would shout at me; I’ve just had enough hot-tempered, unreasonable bosses in my officeworker life that my anxiety wanted me to make sure it wouldn’t happen. My mental health, at the time, was garbage, something I’d also discussed with Jennie in the past. I felt vile: maybe Jennie hadn’t shouted at me, but she hadn’t stopped Dawn from doing so, either – but then, Dawn was her boss, and had clearly given her little to no say in the situation, either.

Up until this incident, I’d never had a single negative experience with Red Sofa, which was part of why the whole thing was so jarring. It was the first time I’d done anything to make the agency unhappy with me, and Dawn reacted so violently that even now, years later, just seeing her name crop up when I’m not expecting it gives me a sharp adrenaline spike and leaves my hands trembling.

I’m still not sure how much I blame Jennie for what happened, because the truth is, I don’t know the extent to which Dawn, as her then-boss, was dictating her actions. But knowing that they’d lied to me about Angry Robot’s role in things, and feeling strongly that Jennie hadn’t been advocating for me as a client, I didn’t feel I could trust either of them going forward. As such, I dropped Jennie as my agent and Red Sofa as my agency, though it still remains the agency of record for my Manifold World duology.

Three years later in 2020, I still don’t have a new agent. I’ve got plenty of works in progress, but I don’t have anything finished that I can shop around, and part of the reason for that – aside from yet another international move, parenting a small child, and dealing with a series of health issues, both physical and mental – is that, ever since my experience with Red Sofa, I haven’t felt as though I’m welcome in the SFF industry. I’ve been demotivated, struggling to push myself to finish a first draft, because what’s the point? How can I belong in an industry that doesn’t want me to speak up when I encounter something terrible?

Because that’s the real crux of it; that’s why my experience with Dawn and Red Sofa has felt so catastrophic. It’s not just that I encountered a horrible person who treated me badly in a professional context; it’s that the culture of silence in SFF is such that, when I spoke privately to colleagues about what happened with Dawn, even when people were horrified by her actions, their overwhelming consensus was that speaking about it publicly would risk me being seen as a problem author, someone nobody would want to represent in the future, and that I’d be setting my career on fire – in other words, making myself exactly as unrepresentable as Dawn had said I was, because if you can’t work with us… 

Since leaving Red Sofa, I’ve spoken to and heard about other former clients who have also had negative experiences with Dawn, and who have likewise been advised to keep quiet about it. And perhaps I would’ve stayed quiet, too, but after this past week, I feel it’s important to make it clear what kind of person she can be behind the scenes. I have no evidence for the claim that Dawn’s treatment of me resulted in Jennie switching agencies, but I suspect it was a motivating factor, and on that basis, knowing how willing she was to muscle in and take over from one of her own agents, I’d be deeply unsurprised if it turned out that Van Sant, Graham and Rutter all had additional, pre-existing reasons for wanting to leave Red Sofa in addition to Dawn’s tweets. I don’t say this to take away from the significance of three white agents choosing to depart on the basis of their support for the Black Lives Matter movement – that is a powerful statement, and something to be applauded. But as I’m already seeing their actions described as hypersensitive and disproportionate, I think it’s important to consider that, when something like this happens, it’s never just about a single thing said publicly, but about everything that has preceded it in private.

I don’t know what the future holds for Red Sofa Literary, but I wish Van Sant, Graham and Rutter all the best in finding new agency positions, and hope likewise that Dawn’s former clients find new and better representation. In speaking now, my intention isn’t to take attention away from the protests over the death of George Floyd, but rather to add my voice to the conversation around how real-world politics and actions continue to impact gatekeeping in SFF publishing.

Update, 1 June 2020, 7:00pm: 

Since publishing this piece, I’ve been privately contacted by another former Red Sofa agent, one who was with the agency during the period when I was represented by Jennie. With their permission, I’m sharing the message they sent me:

Hey, I wanted to say thank you so much for writing about Dawn. I’m horrified you had to go through that. I’m not sure if this is worth adding to your account, but both Jennie and Dawn, separately, communicated to me that your tweets had come out of nowhere (with no mention of the email), painting you as unreasonable, over-sensitive, and maybe even unstable. They didn’t even tell me about the Skype call. Only about a “polite ask” and you blowing up at them. I apologize for my part in this, in accepting their stories a face value. If there’s anything I can do to help and support you, please let me know. You’re brave and strong and you belong in SFF, and have more friends and power in the community than dawn ever did. One thing I’m certain of is that they didn’t tell people beyond the agency their version of events, so I’m confident you weren’t smeared anywhere.

In other words, not only was I lied about to Angry Robot, but also to other members of the Red Sofa staff. During the Skype conversation I had with Jennie following my original December email about the editorial issues, it was clear that she didn’t take my complaints seriously; that was frustrating at the time, but it’s even more so now to learn that I was being characterised as potentially unstable for raising those issues in the first place.

Update, 1 June 2020, 7:30pm:

Also with permission, I’m sharing this additional account of Dawn’s behaviour, which was sent to me privately by another former Red Sofa author:

I am so sorry Dawn put you through that. I had my own, but not nearly so awful experience with her. Shortish version: I had a different Red Sofa agent. Things started off fine, but a couple months into submission, the agent seemed to zone out. She’d give me contradictory info about editor replies, or she simply dropped into a black hole. When I got a R&R from Harper Voyager, I sent my agent the revised ms. but she never replied. I told her I needed her to be better about communication, and if that wasn’t possible, we needed to talk. The next thing I knew, Dawn emailed me, all shouty, saying the agency policy was to give updates only twice a year, and if I didn’t like that, she’d fire me as a client. I bit my tongue because…middle of submissions and all that. The book and its sequel sold, but my agent got more and more flaky. I finally parted ways with them, but Dawn was also a major part of my decision.

Lost In A Haunted Wood

I have a lot of thoughts right now, and I’m not sure how to express them. There’s so much going wrong in the world that on one level, it feels insincere or trivial to focus on anything other than the worst, most visceral horrors; but on another, there’s a point past which grief and fury becoming numbing. The angriest part of of me wants to wade into the wrench of things and wrangle sense from chaos, but my rational brain knows it’s impossible. I hate that I know it’s impossible, because what else but this do the people who could really change things think, to justify their inaction? I have words, and they feel empty. The world is full of indifferent walls and the tyrants who seek to build more of them; words, no matter how loudly intoned, bounce off them and fade into echoes.

Our governments are torturing children.

I could write essays detailing why particular policies and rhetoric being favoured by Australia, the UK and the US right now are inhumane, but I don’t have the strength for it. Some actions are so clearly evil that the prospect of explaining why to people claiming confusion about the matter makes me want to walk into the sea. I can’t go online without encountering adults who want to split hairs over why, in their view, it’s completely justifiable to steal the children of refugees and incarcerate them away from the parents they mean to deport, because even though they don’t want adult refugees they see no contradiction in keeping their babies indefinitely, in conditions that are proven to cause severe psychological damage, because – why? What the fuck is the end-game, here? People don’t seek asylum on a goddamn whim; they’re fleeing violence and terror, persecution and war and destruction; yet somehow the powers that be think that word of stolen kids will pass through some non-existent refugee grapevine and stop people coming in future? And even if it did, which it manifestly can’t and won’t, what the fuck do they plan to do with the ones they’ve taken?

Our governments are torturing children.

Refugees caged on Manus Island are committing suicide, their families left to learn of their deaths through the media. Disabled people of all ages are dying and will continue to die in the UK of gross neglect. None of this is conscionable; none of it need happen. Billionaires are privately funding enterprises that ought to be public because they can’t conceive of a better use for that much money while workers employed by their companies die sleeping in cars or collapse on the job from gross overwork or subsist on food stamps.

I want to say that the world can’t continue like this, but I know it can. It has before; we’re at a familiar crossroads, and the path down which we’re headed is slick with history’s blood. That’s why it’s so goddamn terrifying.

Please, let this be the turning point. Let’s fix this before it’s too late.

Our governments are torturing children.

The Disinformation Age

When I think about the state of global politics, I often imagine how it’s going to be viewed in the future.  My reflex is to think in terms of high school history textbooks, but that phrase evokes a specific type of educational setup that already feels anachronistic – that of overpriced, physical volumes written specifically for teaching teenagers a set curriculum, rather than because they represent good historical summaries in their own right. I think about our penchant for breaking the past down into neatly labelled epochs, and wonder how long it will take for some sharp-tongued future historian to look at the self-professed Information Age, as we once optimistically termed it, examine its trajectory through the first two decades of the new millennium, and conclude that it should be more fittingly known as the Disinformation Age.

With that in mind, here’s my hot take on what a sample chapter from such a historical summary might look like:

Chapter 9: Perprofial Media, Propaganda and Power

Perprofial, adj: something which is simultaneously personal, professional and political. 

When Twitter, the first widespread micro-blogging platform, was launched in 2006, no one could have predicted that, barely eleven years later, this new perprofial medium would have irrevocably changed the political landscape. Earlier social media sites, such as Facebook, were foremost a digital extension of existing personal networks, with aspirational connections an afterthought; traditional blogging, by contrast, began as a form of mass broadcast diarising which steadily – though not without hiccups – osmosed the digital remnants of print-era journalism. But from the outset, Twitter was a platform whose users could both listen and be listened to, a sea of Janus-headed audience-performers whose fame might as easily precede that particular medium as be enabled by it, unless it was both or neither. The draw of enabling the unknown, the upcoming, the newly-minted and the long-established to all rub shoulders at the same party – or at least, to shout around each other from the variegated levels of an infinite, Escheresque ballroom – was considered just that: a draw, instead of – as it more properly was – a Brownian mob-theory engine running in 24/7 real time without anything like a Chinese wall, a fact-checker or a control group to filter the variables.

The true point at which Twitter stopped being a social media outlet and became a Trojan horse at the gates of the Fifth Estate is now a Sorites paradox. We might not be able to pinpoint the exact time and date of the transition, but such coordinates are vastly less important than the fact that the switch itself happened. What we can identify, however, is the moment when the extrajudicial nature of the power wielded by perprofial platforms became clear at a global level.

Though Donald Trump’s provocative online statements long preceded his tenure as president, and while they had consistently drawn commentary from all corners, the point at which his tweets were publicly categorised as a declaration of war by North Korean authorities was a definite Rubicon crossing. As Twitter could – and did – ban users for issuing threats of violence in violation of its Terms of Service, it was argued, then why should it allow a world leader to openly threaten war? If the “draw” of the platform was truly a democratising of the powerful and the powerless, then surely powerful figures should be held to the same standards as everyone else – or even, potentially, to more rigorous ones, given the far greater scope of the consequences afforded them by their fame.

But first, some context. At a time of resurgent global fascism and with educational institutions increasingly hampered by the anti-intellectual siege begun some sixty years earlier, when the theory of “creationism” was first pitched as a scientific alternative in American public schools, the zeitgeist was saturated with the steady repositioning of expertise as toxic to democracy. Early experiments in perprofial media, then called “reality television,” had steadily acclimated the public to the idea that personal narratives, no matter how uninformed, could be a professional undertaking – provided, of course, that they fit within an accepted sociopolitical framework, such as radical weight loss or the quest for fame. At the same time, the rise of the internet as a lawless space where anyone could create and promote their own content, regardless of its quality, created an explosion of self-serving informational feedback loops which, both intentionally and by accident, preyed on the uncritical fact-absorption of generations taught to accept that anything written down in an approved book – of which the screen was seemingly just a faster, more convenient extension – was necessarily true.

The commensurate decline of print-based journalism was the final nail in the coffin. To combat the sharp loss of revenue necessitated by a jump from an industry financed by a cornered market, lavish advertising revenue and a locked-in pay-per-issue model to the still-nebulous vagaries of digital journalism, where paid professional content existent on the same apparent footing as free amateur blogging, corners were cut. Specialists and sub-editors were let go, journalists were alternately asked or forced to become jacks of all trades, and content was recycled across multiple outlets. All of these changes were drastic enough to be noticeable even to the uninitiated; even so, the situation might still have been salvageable if not for the fact that, in looking to compete in this new environment, the bulk of traditional outlets made the mistake of assuming that the many digital amateurs of the blogsphere were, in aggregate, equivalent to their old nemesis, the tabloid press.

Scandal-sheets are a tradition as old as print journalism, with plenty of historical overlap between the one and the other. At some time or another, even the most reputable papers had all resorted to sensationalism – or at least, to real journalism layered with editorial steering – in an effort to wrest their readerships back from the tabloids, but always on the understanding that their legacy, their trustworthiness as institutions, was established enough to take the moral hit. But when this same tactic was tried again in digital environs, the effect was vastly different. Still struggling with web layouts and paywalls, most traditional papers were demonstrably harder and less intuitive to navigate than upstart blogs, and with not much more to boast in the way of originality (since they’d sacked so many writers) or technical accuracy (since they’d sacked so many editors), the decision to switch to tabloid, clickbait content – often by hiring from the same pool of amateur bloggers they were ultimately competing with, leveraging their decaying reputations as compensation for no or meagre pay in a job market newly seething with desperate, unemployed writers – backfired badly. Rather than reclaimed readerships, the effect was to cement the idea that the only real difference between professional news and amateur opinion wasn’t facts, or training, or integrity, but a simple matter of where you preferred to shop.

The internet had become an information marketplace – quite literally, in the case of Russia bulk-purchasing ads on Facebook in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election. In Britain, the success of the Leave vote in the Brexit referendum was attributed in part to voters having “had enough of experts” – the implication being that, contrary to the famous assertion of Isaac Asimov, many people really did think their ignorance was just as good as someone else’s knowledge. Though Asimov was speaking specifically of American anti-intellectualism and a false perception of democracy in the 1980s, his fears were just as applicable some forty years later, and arguably moreso, given the rise of perprofial media.

In the months prior to his careless declaration of war, then-president Trump made a point of lambasting what he called the “fake news media”, which label eventually came to encompass every and any publication, whether traditional or digital, which dared to criticise him; even his former ally, Fox News, was not exempt. In the immediate, messy aftermath of the collapse of print journalism, this claim rang just nebulously true enough to many that, with so many trusted papers having perjured themselves with tabloid tactics, Trump was able to situate himself as the One True Authority his followers could trust.

It’s important to note, however, that not just any politician, no matter how sociopathic or self-serving, could have pulled off the same trick. The ace in Trump’s sleeve was his pre-existing status as a king in the perprofial arena of reality television, which had already helped to re-contextualise democracy – or the baseline concept of a democratic institution, rather – as something in which expertise was only to be trusted if supported by success, where “success” meant “celebrity”. Under this doctrine, those who preached expertise, but whom the listener had never heard of, were considered suspect: true success meant fame, and if you weren’t famous for what you knew, then you must not really be knowledgeable. By the same token, celebrities who claimed expertise in fields beyond those for which they were famous were also criticised: it was fine to play football or act, for instance, but as neither skill was seen to have anything to do with politics, the act of speaking “out of turn” on such topics was dismissed as mere self-aggrandising. Actual facts had nothing to do with the matter, because “actual facts” as a concept was rendered temporarily liminal by the struggle between amateur and professional media.

With such “logic” to support him, Trump couldn’t lose. What did his lack of political qualifications matter? He’d still succeeded at getting into politics, which meant he must have learned by doing, which meant in turn that his fame, unlike that of other celebrities, made him an inviolate authority on political matters. Despite how fiercely he was opposed and resisted, his repeated, defensive cries of “fake news!” rang just true enough to sow doubt among those who might otherwise have opposed him.

And so to Twitter, and a declaration of war. By historical assumption, Trump as president ought to have been the most powerful man in the world, but by investing so much of that power in a perprofial platform – one to whose rules of conduct he was personally bound, without any exemption or extenuation on account of his office – he had, quite unthinkingly, agreed to let an international corporation place extrajudicial sanctions, not only on the office of the presidency, but through Trump as an individual and his investiture as the head of state, on a declaration of war.

In the next chapter: racism, dogwhistles and spinning the Final Solution.

*

History is, of course, what we make of it. Right now, I just wish we weren’t making quite so much.

 

   

 

 

 

Shin Godzilla: Disasters, Tropes & Cultural Memory

Warning: spoilers for Shin Godzilla.

I’ve been wanting to see Shin Godzilla since it came out last year, and now that it’s available on iTunes, I’ve finally had the chance. Aside from the obvious draw inherent to any Godzilla movie, I’d been keen to see a new Japanese interpretation of an originally Japanese concept, given the fact that every other recent take has been American. As I loaded up the film, I acknowledged the irony in watching a disaster flick as a break from dealing with real-world disasters, but even so, I didn’t expect the film itself to be quite so bitingly apropos.

While Shin Godzilla pokes some fun at the foibles of Japanese bureaucracy, it also reads as an unsubtle fuck you to American disaster films in general and their Godzilla films in particular. From the opening scenes where the creature appears, the contrast with American tropes is pronounced. In so many natural disaster films – 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, Deep Impact, Armageddon, San Andreas – the Western narrative style centres by default on a small, usually ragtag band of outsiders collaborating to survive and, on occasion, figure things out, all while being thwarted by or acting beyond the government. There’s frequently a capitalist element where rich survivors try to edge out the poor, sequestering themselves in their own elite shelters: chaos and looting are depicted up close, as are their consequences. While you’ll occasionally see a helpful local authority figure, like a random policeman, trying to do good (however misguidedly), it’s always at a remove from any higher, more coordinated relief effort, and particularly in more SFFnal films, a belligerent army command is shown to pose nearly as much of a threat as the danger itself.

To an extent, this latter trope appears in Shin Godzilla, but to a much more moderated effect. When Japanese command initially tries to use force, the strike is aborted because of a handful of civilians in range of the blast, and even when a new attempt is made, there’s still an emphasis on chain of command, on minimising collateral damage and keeping the public safe. At the same time, there’s almost no on-the-ground civilian elements to the story: we see the public in flashes, their online commentary and mass evacuations, a few glimpses of individual suffering, but otherwise, the story stays with the people in charge of managing the disaster. Yes, the team brought together to work out a solution – which is ultimately scientific rather than military – are described as “pains-in-the-bureaucracy,” but they’re never in the position of having to hammer, bloody-fisted, on the doors of power in order to rate an audience. Rather, their assemblage is expedited and authorised the minute the established experts are proven inadequate.

When the Japanese troops mobilise to attack, we view them largely at a distance: as a group being addressed and following orders, not as individuals liable to jump the chain of command on a whim. As such, the contrast with American films is stark: there’s no hotshot awesome commander and his crack marine team to save the day, no sneering at the red tape that gets in the way of shooting stuff, no casual acceptance of casualties as a necessary evil, no yahooing about how the Big Bad is going to get its ass kicked, no casual discussion of nuking from the army. There’s just a lot of people working tirelessly in difficult conditions to save as many people as possible – and, once America and the UN sign a resolution to drop a nuclear bomb on Godzilla, and therefore Tokyo, if the Japanese can’t defeat it within a set timeframe, a bleak and furious terror at their country once more being subject to the evils of radiation.

In real life, Japan is a nation with extensive and well-practised disaster protocols; America is not. In real life, Japan has a wrenchingly personal history with nuclear warfare; America, despite being the cause of that history, does not.

Perhaps my take on Shin Godzilla would be different if I’d managed to watch it last year, but in the immediate wake of Hurricane Harvey, with Hurricane Irma already wreaking unprecedented damage in the Caribbean, and huge tracts of Washington, Portland and Las Angeles now on fire, I find myself unable to detach my viewing from the current political context. Because what the film hit home to me – what I couldn’t help but notice by comparison – is the deep American conviction that, when disaster strikes, the people are on their own. The rich will be prioritised, local services will be overwhelmed, and even when there’s ample scientific evidence to support an imminent threat, the political right will try to suppress it as dangerous, partisan nonsense.

In The Day After Tomorrow, which came out in 2004, an early plea to announce what’s happening and evacuate those in danger is summarily waved off by the Vice President, who’s more concerned about what might happen to the economy, and who thinks the scientists are being unnecessarily alarmist. This week, in the real America of 2017, Republican Rush Limbaugh told reporters that the threat of Hurricane Irma, now the largest storm ever recorded over the Atlantic Ocean, was being exaggerated by the “corrupted and politicised” media so that they and other businesses could profit from the “panic”.

In my latest Foz Rants piece for the Geek Girl Riot podcast, which I recorded weeks ago, I talk about how we’re so acclimated to certain political threats and plotlines appearing in blockbuster movies that, when they start to happen in real life, we’re conditioned to think of them as being fictional first, which leads us to view the truth as hyperbolic. Now that I’ve watched Shin Godzilla, which flash-cuts to a famous black-and-white photo of the aftermath of Hiroshima when the spectre of a nuclear strike is raised, I’m more convinced than ever of the vital, two-way link between narrative on the one hand and our collective cultural, historical consciousness on the other. I can’t imagine any Japanese equivalent to the moment in Independence Day when cheering American soldiers nuke the alien ship over Las Angeles, the consequences never discussed again despite the strike’s failure, because the pain of that legacy is too fully, too personally understood to be taken lightly.

At a cultural level, Japan is a nation that knows how to prepare for and respond to natural disasters. Right now, a frightening number of Americans – and an even more frightening number of American politicians – are still convinced that climate change is a hoax, that scientists are biased, and that only God is responsible for the weather. How can a nation prepare for a threat it won’t admit exists? How can it rebuild from the aftermath if it doubts there’ll be a next time?

Watching Shin Godzilla, I was most strongly reminded, not of any of the recent American versions, but The Martian. While the science in Shin Godzilla is clearly more handwavium than hard, it’s nonetheless a film in which scientific collaboration, teamwork and international cooperation save the day. The last, despite a denouement that pits Japan against an internationally imposed deadline, is of particular importance, as global networking still takes place across scientific and diplomatic back-channels. It’s a rare American disaster movie that acknowledges the existence or utility of other countries, especially non-Western ones, beyond shots of collapsing monuments, and even then, it’s usually in the context of the US naturally taking the global lead once they figure out a plan. The fact that the US routinely receives international aid in the wake of its own disasters is seemingly little-known in the country itself; that Texas’s Secretary of State recently appeared to turn down Canadian aid in the wake of Harvey, while now being called a misunderstanding, is nonetheless suggestive of confusion over this point.

As a film, Shin Godzilla isn’t without its weaknesses: the monster design is a clear homage to the original Japanese films, which means it occasionally looks more stop-motion comical than is ideal; there’s a bit too much cutting dramatically between office scenes at times; and the few sections of English-language dialogue are hilariously awkward in the mouths of American actors, because the word-choice and use of idiom remains purely Japanese. Even so, these are ultimately small complaints: there’s a dry, understated sense of humour evident throughout, even during some of the heavier moments, and while it’s not an action film in the American sense, I still found it both engaging and satisfying.

But above all, at this point in time – as I spend each morning worriedly checking the safety of various friends endangered by hurricane and flood and fire; as my mother calls to worry about the lack of rain as our own useless government dithers on climate science – what I found most refreshing was a film in which the authorities, despite their faults and foibles, were assumed and proven competent, even in the throes of crisis, and in which scientists were trusted rather than dismissed. Earlier this year, in response to an article we both read, my mother bought me a newly-released collection of the works of children’s poet Misuzu Kaneko, whose poem “Are You An Echo?” was used to buoy the Japanese public in the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami . Watching Shin Godzilla, it came back to me, and so I feel moved to end with it here.

May we all build better futures; may we all write better stories.

Are You An Echo?

If I say, “Let’s play?”
you say, “Let’s play!”

If I say, “Stupid!”
you say, “Stupid!”

If I say, “I don’t want to play anymore,”
you say, “I don’t want to play anymore.”

And then, after a while,
becoming lonely

I say, “Sorry.”
You say, “Sorry.”

Are you just an echo?
No, you are everyone.

 

 

 

Nevertheless, She Persisted

A poem by me, with apologies to Dylan Thomas:

Nevertheless, She Persisted

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Live women fighting we shall be one

With la Liberté and the French Joan;

When their hearts are picked clean and the clean hearts gone,

She shall wear laws at elbow and foot;

Though she go mad she will be sane,

Though she flees through the sea she shall rise again;

Though justice be lost the just shall not;

For nevertheless, she persisted.

.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Over the whinings of their greed

Men lying long have now lied windily;

Changing their tacks when stories give way,

Stacking their courts, yet we shall not break;

Faith in our hands shall snap in two

And the unicorn evils run them through;

Split all ends up she shan’t crack;

And nevertheless, she persisted.

.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

No more may Foxes cry in decline

Or news break loud to a silenced room;

Where fawned a follower may a follower no more

Bow his head to the blows of this reign;

Though she be mad and tough as nails,

Her headlines in characters hammer the dailies;

Break in the Sun ‘till the Sun breaks down,

As nevertheless, she persisted.

Dear Simon Sinek: STFU About Millennials

The last few weeks or so, I’ve seen the same video endlessly going around on Facebook: a snippet of an interview with Simon Sinek, who lays out what he believes to be the key problems with millennials in the workplace. Every time I see it shared, my blood pressure rises slightly, until today – joy of joys! – I finally saw and shared a piece rebutting it. As often happens on Facebook, a friend asked me why I disagreed with Sinek’s piece, as he’d enjoyed his TED talks. This is my response.

In his talk, Sinek touches on what he believes to be the four core issues handicapping millennials: internet addiction, bad parenting, an unfulfilled desire for meaningful work and a desire to have everything instantly. Now: demonstrably, some people are products of bad parenting, and the pernicious, lingering consequences of helicopter parenting, wherein overzealous, overprotective adults so rob their children of autonomy and instil in them such a fear of failure that they can’t healthily function as adults, is a very real phenomenon. Specifically in reference to Sinek’s claims about millennials all getting participation awards in school (which, ugh: not all of us fucking did, I don’t know a single person for whom that’s true, shut up with this goddamn trope), the psychological impact of praising children equally regardless of their actual achievements, such that they come to view all praise as meaningless and lose self-confidence as a result, is a well-documented phenomenon. But the idea that you can successfully accuse an entire global generation of suffering from the same hang-ups as a result of the same bad parenting stratagems, such that all millennials can be reasonably assumed to have this problem? That, right there, is some Grade-A bullshit.

Bad parenting isn’t a new thing. Plenty of baby boomers and members of older generations have been impacted by the various terrible fads and era-accepted practises their own parents fell prey to (like trying to electrocute the gay out of teenagers, for fucking instance), but while that might be a salient point to make in individual cases or in the specific context of tracking said parenting fads, it doesn’t actually set millennials apart in any meaningful way. Helicopter parenting might be comparatively new, but other forms of damage are not, and to act as though we’re the only generation to have ever dealt with the handicap of bad parenting, whether collectively or individually, is fucking absurd. But more to the point, the very specific phenomenon of helicopter parenting? Is, overwhelmingly, a product of white, well-off, middle- and-upper-class America, developed specifically in response to educational environments where standardised testing rules all futures and there isn’t really a viable social safety net if you fuck up, which leads to increased anxiety for children and parents both. While it undeniably appears in other countries and local contexts, and while it’s still a thing that happens to kids now, trying to erase its origins does no favours to anyone.

Similarly, the idea that millennials have all been ruined by the internet and don’t know how to have patience because we grew up with smartphones and social media is – you guessed it – bullshit. This is really a two-pronged point, tying into two of Sinek’s arguments: that we’re internet addicts who don’t know how to socialise properly, and that we’re obsessed with instant gratification, and as such, I’m going to address them together.

Yes, internet addiction is a problem for some, but it’s crucial to note it can and does affect people of all ages rather than being a millennial-only issue, just as it’s equally salient to point out that millennials aren’t the only ones using smartphones. I shouldn’t have to make such an obvious qualification, but apparently, I fucking do. That being said, the real problem here is that Sinek has seemingly no awareness of what social media actually is. I mean, the key word is right there in the title: social media, and yet he’s acting like it involves no human interaction whatsoever – as though we’re just playing with digital robots or complete strangers all the time instead of texting our parents about dinner or FaceTiming with friends or building professional networks on Twitter or interacting with our readerships on AO3 (for instance).

The idea, too, that millennials have their own social conventions different to his own, many of which reference a rich culture of online narratives, memes, debates and communities, does not seem to have occurred to him, because we’re not learning to do it face to face. Except that, uh, we fucking are, on account of how we still inhabit physical bodies and go to physical places every fucking day of our goddamn lives, do I really have to explain that this is a thing? Do I really have to explain the appeal of maintaining friendships where you’re emotionally close but the person lives hundreds or thousands of kilometres away? Do I really have to spell out the fact that proximal connections aren’t always meaningful ones, and that it actually makes a great deal of human sense to want to socialise with people we care about and who share our interests where possible rather than relying solely on the random admixture of people who share our schools and workplaces for fun?

The fact that Sinek talks blithely about how all millennials grew up with the internet and social media, as though those of us now in our fucking thirties don’t remember a time before home PCs were common (I first learned to type on an actual typewriter), is just ridiculous: Facebook started in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, tumblr in 2007 and Instagram in 2010. Meaning, most millennials – who, recall, were born between 1980 and 1995, which makes the youngest of us 21/22 and the eldest nearly forty – didn’t grow up with what is now considered social media throughout our teenage years, as Sinek asserts, because it didn’t really get started until we were out of high school. Before that, we had internet messageboards that were as likely to die overnight as to flourish, IRC chat, and the wild west of MSN forums, which was a whole different thing altogether. (Remember the joys of being hit on by adults as an underage teen in your first chatroom and realising only years later that those people were fucking paedophiles? Because I DO.)

And then he pulls out the big guns, talking about how we get a dopamine rush when we post about ourselves online, and how this is the same brain chemical responsible for addiction, and this is why young people are glued to their phones and civilisation is ending. Which, again, yes: dopamine does what he says it does, but that is some fucking misleading bullshit, Simon Says, and do you know why? Because you also get a goddamn dopamine rush from talking about yourself in real life, too, Jesus fucking Christ, the internet is not the culprit here, to say nothing of the fact that smartphones do more than one goddamn thing. Sinek lambasts the idea of using your phone in bed, for instance, but I doubt he holds a similar grudge against reading in bed, which – surprise! – is what quite a lot of us are doing when we have our phones out of an evening, whether in the form of blogs or books or essays. If I was using a paperback book or a physical Kindle rather than the Kindle app on my iPhone, would he give a fuck? I suspect not.

Likewise, I doubt he has any particular grudge against watching movies (or TED talks, for that matter) in bed, which phones can also be used for. Would he care if I brought in my Nintendo DS or any other handheld system to bed and caught a few Pokemon before lights out? Would he care if I played Scrabble with a physical board instead of using Words With Friends? Would he care if I used the phone as a phone to call my mother and say goodnight instead of checking her Facebook and maybe posting a link to something I know will make her laugh? I don’t know, but unless you view a smartphone as something that’s wholly disconnected from people – which, uh, is kind of the literal antithesis of what a smartphone is and does – I don’t honestly see how you can claim that they’re tools for disconnection. Again, yes: some people can get addicted or overuse their phones, but that is not a millennial-exclusive problem, and fuck you very much for suggesting it magically is Because Reasons.

And do not even get me started on the total fuckery of millennials being accustomed to instant gratification because of the internet. Never mind the fact that, once again, people of any age are equally likely to become accustomed to fast internet as a thing and to update their expectations accordingly – bitch, do you know how long it used to take to download music with Kazaa using a 56k modem? Do you know how long it still takes to download entire games, or patches for games, or – for that matter – drive through fucking peak-hour traffic to get to and from work, or negotiate your toddler into not screaming because he can’t have a third juicebox? Because – oh, yeah – remember that thing where millennials stopped being teenagers quite a fucking while ago, and a fair few of us are now parents ourselves? Yeah. Apparently our interpersonal skills aren’t so completely terrible as to prevent us all from finding spouses and partners and co-parents for our tiny, screaming offspring, and if Mr Sinek would like to argue that learning patience is incompatible with being a millennial, I would like to cordially invite him to listen to a video, on loop, of my nearly four-year-old saying, “Mummy, look! A lizard! Mummy, there’s a lizard! Come look!” and see what it does for his temperament. (We live in Brisbane, Australia. There are geckos everywhere.)

But what really pisses me off about Sinek’s millennial-blaming is the idea that we’re all willing to quit our jobs because we don’t find meaning in them. Listen to me, Simon Sinek. Listen to me closely. You are, once again, confusing the very particular context of middle-class, predominantly white Americans from affluent backgrounds – which is to say, the kind of people who can afford to fucking quit in this economy – for a universal phenomenon. Ignore the fact that the global economy collapsed in 2008 without ever fully recovering: Brexit just happened in the UK, Australia is run by a coalition of racist dickheads and you’ve just elected a talking Cheeto who’s hellbent on stripping away your very meagre social safety nets as his first order of business – oh, and none of us can afford to buy houses and we’re the first generation not to earn more than our predecessors in quite a while, university costs in the States are an actual goddamn crime and most of us can’t make a living wage or even get a job in the fields we trained in.

But yeah, sure: let’s talk about the wealthy few who can afford to quit their corporate jobs because they feel unfulfilled. What do they have to feel unhappy about, really? It’s not like they’re working for corporations whose idea of HR is to hire oblivious white dudes like you to figure out why their younger employees, working longer hours for less pay in tightly monitored environments that strip their individuality and hate on unions as a sin against capitalism, in a context where the glass ceiling and wage gaps remain a goddamn issue, in a first world country that still doesn’t have guaranteed maternity leave and where quite literally nobody working minimum wage can afford to pay rent, which is fucking terrifying to consider if you’re worried about being fired, aren’t fitting in. Nah, bro – must be the fucking internet’s fault.

Not that long ago, Gen X was the one getting pilloried as a bunch of ambitionless slackers who didn’t know the meaning of hard work, but time is linear and complaining about the failures of younger generations is a habit as old as humanity, so now it’s apparently our turn. Bottom line: there’s a huge fucking difference between saying “there’s value in turning your phone off sometimes” and “millennials don’t know how to people because TECHNOLOGY”, and until Simon Sinek knows what it is, I’m frankly not interested in whatever it is he thinks he has to say.

Rape Is Not Biology

Trigger warning: this entire post is about rape.

I don’t want to talk about the US election. I’m neither American nor resident in America, but the thought of Cheeto Voldemort being elected president is still stressing me right the fuck out. If I had the emotional energy, I could write a lengthy essay on why that is, but I’m not that big of a masochist. This is only about the Republican nominee in a peripheral sense, viz: the extent to which his platform has necessitated endless new conversations about sexual harassment, sexual assault, rape and rape culture.

Because the argument that comes up time and again, over and over, in specific reference to women being assaulted by men, is this, or some permutation of it: but men are just wired that way. It’s evolution, instinct, a biological impulse to ensure the continuation of the species. Women just don’t understand testosterone, how hard it is for men to stop when they get going, to look but not touch, to restrain themselves. If women did understand, they wouldn’t act or dress like temptations, they’d see why they need to submit to the needs of their husbands and partners while remaining modest and chaste around other men. It’s just a fact of life.

Here is my response to that argument: bullshit.  

Has there ever been a stranger hermeneutical alliance than the one between Evangelical puritanism and red pill evopsychology? The only thing they share is a deeply entrenched misogyny: the idea that men are fundamentally entitled to do what they like with women in general, and women’s bodies in particular, because of something that happened at the dawn of human history. Nitpick all you want about the distinction between a cherished possession and a disposable object: they’re both still forms of dehumanisation. And so, as a consequence, the working definition of rape within those groups is whittled down to a horrifying nub. Under this schema, marital rape doesn’t exist; yes once means yes forever, and possessions in any case cannot say no. Corrective rape isn’t rape at all, but medicine: a therapeutic treatment for abnormality or recalcitrance. The only rape that functionally matters to such people could be better classed as a combination of theft and destruction of property: one man’s assault on something possessed by another, and therefore an insult to him above everything else (the woman herself is largely incidental, except inasmuch as she represents his status).

(If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, he said, perhaps I’d be dating her. He said, Grab them by the pussy. When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Or almost anything, even if you’re not famous. Serving three months of six a month rape sentence is, we’re told, a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action.)

So let’s set the record straight, shall we?

Rape doesn’t happen because men are inherently programmed to rape; if it did, there’d be no such thing as a female rapist, and no such thing as a man who’d never struggled not to rape, let alone failed to contemplate it. Rape doesn’t happen because of a biological instinct for procreation; if it did, there’d be no such thing as the rape of pregnant women, the paedophilic rape of children, the rape of the elderly, oral rape or anal rape or any other form of rape that can’t possibly result in a future child; no rape where the rapist bothered to use a condom, or rape where the rapist knew his victim was on birth control. Rape doesn’t happen because women are drunk or dressed immodestly; if it did, then sober, modestly-dressed women, like nuns and Muslimahs in hijabs and burqas, would never be victims. Rape doesn’t happen because women are allowed to interact with men to whom they’re not related; if it did, there’d be no such thing as incestuous rape, the rape of children by adult family members or abuse between siblings or cousins. Rape doesn’t happen because it’s impossible for men to stop having sex once they’ve started; if it did, there’d be no such thing as men who stop when a partner changes their mind, let alone men who change their minds themselves. Rape doesn’t happen as an inevitable consequence of men and women working or socialising together; if it did, then situational rape in all male or predominantly male environments, like armies and prisons and boarding schools and clergical settings, wouldn’t happen; nor would it be possible for women to rape other women.

Rape happens because rapists decide to rape. That’s it. End of story. Period.

The rapist’s decision can be opportunistic or premeditated. Sometimes, the rapist understands that what they’re doing is rape. Sometimes, the rapist tries to justify their actions to avoid that understanding, whether by blaming the victim, claiming their assault was somehow necessary or inevitable or a thing they were entitled to do, or dismissing the consequences of it as unimportant. Sometimes, the rapist doesn’t realise that they’re a rapist – because their victim froze up and stopped fighting and they figured that was as good as a yes; because nobody ever told them that getting a girl too drunk to say no and fucking her while she’s unconscious is rape, not something to high five about the next morning; because they think of rape as a stranger in the bushes, not one partner pressuring another until they give in and lie still for something they didn’t want; because they’ve failed to connect their understanding of the crime to the fact of their own actions. That some rapists genuinely don’t realise that they’re rapists – that learning otherwise can appal them after the fact – is a tragedy of culture and education both. Even so, the lack of malicious intention no more stops it from being rape than a careless driver’s lack of callousness stops them from committing vehicular manslaughter. It might impact what happens afterwards – sentencing, the ability of those who were hurt to move on with their lives – but it doesn’t change what we call the crime itself, let alone prevent it from being a criminal action. Rape is rape is rape. I shouldn’t have to say it, but I do.

We all do.

Rapists rape because they see their victim as a conquest or an object, not a person; because they care more about their own pleasure than their victim’s consent; because they want to control or punish or dominate someone who can’t fight back; because they don’t think they’ll get caught; because they feel entitled to someone else’s body; because they get off on the idea of being able to take what they want by force; because they don’t think anyone in general, or the victim in particular, should be allowed to say no to them; because they see their victim, or their victim’s body, as a means to an end; because they think that wanting something badly enough entitles them to take it by force; because they want to reinforce the victim’s (in their eyes) lesser status; because they want to believe that it’s all for the victim’s own good. These are not reasons in the literal sense, because rape is never a reasoned action, however extensively premeditated or calmly executed it might be; rather, they are justifications, excuses produced to defend the indefensible.

Because rape, whatever the rapist claims, invariably boils down to just three motives: power, control and dehumanisation. A rapist thinks, I am stronger than you; therefore, I can do what I want – that is power. A rapist thinks, I am more important than you; therefore, I can do what I want to you – that is control. A rapist thinks, I am more human than you; therefore, I can do what I want to you and feel I am justified. – that is dehumanisation. Everything on top of that is a lie constructed to cast their actions in a better light, whether internally or in the eyes of others, or to make the victim doubt themselves.

If rape is only ever about biology and bodies and a primal male response to the sight of tempting womanflesh – if rape is only ever an impulse, never a calculated act intended to hurt or degrade another person – then nobody would ever threaten a stranger with rape because of something they said or did or wrote; it would simply make no sense. The very act of making a rape threat belies the claim, often made by the very same person in the very same breath, that rape is an ungovernable impulse, just as claiming that someone is “too ugly to rape” belies the adjacent belief that rapists don’t choose their victims. The whole genre of rape-as-threat-and-insult, in fact, completely undermines every “moral” or “scientific” excuse such adherents invariably employ when subsequently challenged to defend themselves. If rape can be used as a threat or a punishment, then clearly, it can arise from calculated viciousness, and isn’t just an accident of nature. If rape is awful and vile enough that you routinely wish it on your worst enemies, then clearly, we’re within our grounds to consider it a serious crime.

Rape is rape. It is not biology, and it certainly isn’t morality. Learn the fucking difference.

Pun intentional.

 

 

Brexit: History Has Its Eyes On You

Let me tell you what I wish I’d known

When I was young and dreamed of glory:

You have no control

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.

– Lin-Manuel Miranda, “History Has Its Eyes On You”, Hamilton

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As the Brexit vote and its consequences reverberate through the internet, I listen to Hamilton’s”History Has Its Eyes On You”, and of all possible things, I find myself remembering the morning of 9/11. I was fifteen years old, and as I stumbled through my parents’ bedroom to their en-suite to get ready for school, despite my habitual bleariness, I was conscious that they were both unnaturally still, frozen in bed as they listened to the radio. I remember my mother saying, unprompted, “Something terrible has happened in the world,” my stomach lurching at the graveness of her tone. I remember how, at school that day, the attacks were all anyone could talk about; how even the most diffident students begged our history teacher for permission to watch George Bush’s address on the TV in our classroom. Above all else, I remember the sense, not of fear, but of irrevocable change beyond my control: the knowledge that something material to all our futures had happened – was in the process of happening still – and yet we were expected to carry on as usual.

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I remember thinking about documentaries we’d watched in history or which I’d seen at home, segments where various adults were asked to give their eyewitness accounts of events that happened in their youth, and imagined being one day called on to do likewise. Where were you when it happened? How did you feel? What did you say? Did you know, then, what stretched out before you? What were the details? I was years away from wanting children, but I still wondered what I might say to my own hypothetical offspring, if some future history teacher asked them to interview a parent about the momentous events which they (meaning I) had lived through. And I thought of the propaganda posters I’d so recently studied for my own modern history class – that classic image of the beslippered pater familias sitting in his armchair, two cherubic children at his feet, and a pained, distant expression on his face as his daughter asked, “Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?”

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Neither one is a comparable situation to the Brexit vote, of course. (I hope.). But that feeling of history having its eyes on me – on all of us – is one of which I’ve felt increasingly conscious ever since the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party gained unprecedented power in Greece in 2015. I find myself thinking again of those high school history lessons, where Edmund Burke’s adage that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it first became a part of my awareness, a tritely profound observation that nonetheless remains relevant, and of all the early warning signs that preceded both world wars. Perhaps it’s just the consequence of having grown to adulthood in the spectre of 9/11, American politics the long shadow cast constantly over my Australian shoulder, but since then, I’ve never lost the awareness that my local world is only an engine part in a bigger and more complex machine.

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I have plenty of scathing things to say about the current state of secondary education in Australia, but it was a modern history unit on the Israel-Palestine conflict that inspired the core of my early university studies: Arabic as a language, the Arab World, Islam and the Middle East, Biblical Studies. Then as now, I understood that, whatever my personal atheism, it was the religious, political and cultural schisms developed over centuries between Judaism, Christianity and Islam that had ultimately shaped the modern world, and in light of that fateful day in September 2001 – in light of the history assignment for which I subsequently won a school award, cutting endless newspaper clippings on conflict in the Middle East to explain how each event went back to what we’d studied about pogroms and Zionism, the UN and oil and the Sykes-Picot Agreement – I wanted to try and understand the foundations of the present.

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I am, by nature, a storyteller. Narrative has patterns, and though we construct them knowingly in fiction, still they echo naturally in life, whose permutations are often far stranger than anything we can dream up. I look at where the world is poised, on the brink of men like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, Malcolm Turnbull and Boris Johnson, and for an instant the very air is textbook paper, a blurring of time and distance and a whisper of darkest timelines. I am a mater familias in an armchair as yet unbuilt, and as my son looks up from whatever device goes on to replace the common iPad, I hear him ask, “Who did YOU vote for in 2016, mummy?” I imagine a homework sheet that asks him to list the date of Jo Cox’s death the same way I once listed Emily Davison’s, and with as much bland dispassion. I wonder if his history module will cover the Orlando massacre, assuming it isn’t deemed too volatile for junior study, the same way I never learned in school that the queer prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, once freed, were immediately rearrested – homosexuality was still considered a crime, you see, even by the Allies.

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I wonder how many teenagers throughout the UK and Europe checked the results of the Brexit vote on their phones today, on laptops, in class, and watched it all with that same spectre of wrenching helplessness that I once did, as their future was altered without their say-so. Overwhelmingly, it was young people who voted Remain, and older folks who voted Leave, and while the result is a tragedy for all of them alike – regardless of how or whether they voted, older Britons have just been screwed out of their pensions as the pound falls to a 31 year low, a span longer than my lifetime – it’s the young whose futures have just been overwritten. Scotland might yet break from the UK, just as other countries might yet break from the EU; Canada is a lone bastion of Western political sanity right now, but everything else is disintegrating. To quote another poet:

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Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. 

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I don’t know where the world is headed; only that it scares me. We’ve fought through so much to achieve even the fragments of unity and fellowship we now possess, and yet the backlash against it has been so violent, so continuous, as to defy belief. It’s barely been two months since I left the UK, and already it appears unrecognisable, a distorted funhouse reflection trying desperately to possess the body that cast it. Perhaps the only way out is through, but at this point, I can’t imagine that we’re going to get there painlessly.

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I wonder who’ll live, who’ll die. Who’ll tell this story.

On Wheels & Gendercoding

I’ve heard it said that “little boys just love things with wheels”, as though it makes any sense at all that one gender would have an inherent predisposition towards a particular human invention. In defence of this argument, people usually point to things like Hot Wheels, the Cars movie – all these films and franchises that little boys clearly love, as though the fact that many girls also like these things is merely incidental.

Here’s the other side of it: can you name a single TV show, game or toy line whose wheeled characters are predominantly female? No? Me neither. Plenty have one or two female characters, but every example I can think of is male-dominated, their merchandise sold and marketed almost exclusively in the boys’ aisle of the toy store.

But imagine, for a moment, that this wasn’t the case. Imagine we suddenly saw a glut of anthropomorphised car-and-wheeled-machine shows whose character lineup was 80-90% female – and more, if this fact was clearly emphasised in accordance with current gender colour-coding, the characters predominantly pastel-coloured, white and pink and blue and purple. Imagine if everyone who says “boys just love cars” was suddenly forced to account for why little girls were enjoying those shows and toys, while many (but not all) boys eschewed them.

The usual pat answer in such instances is, “oh, but girls love ANYTHING if it’s pink!”, as though this sort of innate colour preference makes any more sense than the idea of boys inherently loving vehicles, never mind the fact that pink being coded as a feminine colour is, historically speaking, a new development, less than a century old, and not some holdover from Time Immemorial. What we’d be seeing, rather, is evidence of girls enjoying feminine cars and boys enjoying masculine ones – meaning, in other words, that the initial divide had nothing to do with cars, per se, and everything to do with how cars were perceived.

At this point, people usually snort. “So girls like girl things and boys like boy things? We already knew that!” Except that, by changing the social coding, you literally just turned a boy thing into a girl thing – or at least, created a valid feminine permutation of it – with no harm done to anyone. “Boy things” is not an immutable category, but a social construct. We market cars exclusively to boys, then act as though it’s a biological inevitability that boys prefer cars. We segregate toy aisles by gender, making damn sure pink things only appear in the products meant for girls, then claim innate feminine colour-preference as the reason why girls play with them.

Here’s the thing about gender colour-coding: we don’t always do it on purpose, because it’s usually deeply internalised, so when it gets brought up in relation to kids, we assume it doesn’t matter. We assume, wrongly, that children are being more objective in their assessment of colour and meaning than we are as adults; that seeing stuff coded as being “for boys” or “for girls” has no impact on their choices, and that they’re acting instead on some deeper, intrinsic instinct.

So, let’s consider – is there other social colour-coding we expect children to tacitly notice, understand and act upon, even if we only ever explain it briefly, or in passing? Some other practice or practises to act as a reasonable yardstick against which to compare the gendering of their toys and clothes?

Yes. Yes, there is.

By the time they start school, we expect little kids to understand that green means go and red means stop, that a yellow light means wait but that flashing yellow lights mean a warning, but also, in different contexts, that red means low battery, green means full and yellow sometimes means charging. Whether through films or real life, they likely also know that black clothes are for serious things, and that white is a wedding dress colour – that’s if they’re Western, of course; they might just as easily know that red and gold are lucky colours for important days, and that white is the colour of mourning. At school, they might belong to a house with its own colour; at the least, they’ll know the school colours from their uniform, distinct from those of neighbouring schools at various sports competitions. They’ll know the colour of their country’s flag, and maybe the country’s colours, if they’re different (Australia’s flag is red, white and blue, but our colours are green and gold), and if they follow a sport, they won’t just know the colours of their own team, but that of rival teams, too.

So why is it so hard to imagine they’ll also learn that pink means girl and blue means boy – especially when it’s reinforced by the gender-balance of characters in particular toys and narratives – and react accordingly?

At the shops two days ago, my toddler wanted to try out a tricycle. A pink model sat beside a blue one; after a moment of deliberation, he chose the blue – and when he was done, he went straight back to the pink one, wanting to try them both. Given that he’d already had one ride, it would’ve been an expedient shortcut to say, “No, that one’s for girls,” and use that as an excuse to move him on, except that, no, that’s bullshit. It’s exactly those sorts of small remarks that teach kids about gender colour-coding: even if it’s not expressed as a negative, it tells them there are some things, or some variants of things, there’s no point asking for in future; that they can only ever have the one version. Instead, I told him, “Yes, the pink one’s nice too, isn’t it!” and let him look it over again before we continued onwards.

Even in toy shops that don’t overtly name their aisles according to gender, look at how the colouration works. There are pink aisles, and then there’s everything-else aisles. Pink Lego isn’t sold alongside the regular kind, nor pink-dressed dolls beside action figures – until you start mixing the colour placements, they’re always going to read as coded, because that’s exactly what they are. And increasingly, the problem persists, not because we’re worried about girls turning into tomboys – although there’s certainly still pushback on that count – but because we’re deathly afraid of feminising boys. On some deeply sexist level of the social backbrain, the logic seems to go, we can understand girls wanting to branch out into masculine fields, because masculine is better. But boys wanting to go the other way is viewed as regressive at best, and transgressive at worst – as though the real goal of equality is the eradication of the traditionally feminine and not, as is actually the case, its destigmatisation.

Cars aren’t inherently masculine. Pink isn’t fundamentally feminine. We’ve merely coded them that way – and until we acknowledge how easily kids interpret and internalise that code, we need to stop pretending their choices are happening in a vacuum.

How Patriarchy Works

It starts like this: women are lesser. Not quite worthy, not fully equal to men. The ultimate justification for this varies, but always hinges on an inherent, inferior difference of the mind, body, soul, whether singly or in combination; feminine virtues, if they exist, are subordinate virtues. Individually, women are dangerous; collectively, they require protection. (Unless, of course, it’s the other way around.) And yet no society can do without them, if it means to continue: a necessary evil. Women cannot be wholly abrogated, and so must instead be taught the importance of serving men, which makes their labour a resource. (An almost Marxist impulse, this: controlling the means of production.) There is, of course, perversity in the execution; call it a type of glitch. Among such men, the ability to attract women is frequently more valued than the ability – or say rather, willingness – to support them once attached. Caveat emptor, then: women, attracted, are a resource; women, attached, a burden. (This is not unusual, in the scheme of things: by definition, a resource diminishes with use, and needs must be replenished.)

Social bonding, of course, has never been aimed purely at the opposite sex. Possession of resources confers status within a peer group, provided such possession is at least perceieved to exist, regardless of actuality. Possession unwitnessed or doubted confers no advantages, while attachment – as distinct from attraction – is a double-edged sword, on the grounds that it invokes the spectre of a different type of parity, a new set of priorities. Attachment in this system is the end-game of attraction, but cannot be universally acknowledged as such, lest it call its own rules into question. After all, if attachment is truly desireable – if women attached become, not burdens to men, but assets – then a pattern of serial attraction with no attachment speaks more of failure than skill. (Women are resources either way; the difference is in their treatment. Serial attachment, by contrast, is something else altogether: women might still be assets, but more in the sesnse of possession than helpmeet.)

Remember: women are not quite equal, which serves to see them differentiated, culturally and legally, from men. But women are also held to have a weakening effect on men: their foibles are potentially contagious, if men treat them laxly, with too great a degree of indulgence. As such, men cannot rest on their laurels, but must actively assert their difference to, and superiority over, women, lest complacency upend the applecart. More, they must be seen to thus assert themselves, such that their personhood becomes deeply vested in, not just a preference for masculinity, but the performance of it.

That being so, there’s no utility in attracting women by taking an interest in what they like, not least because such a concession implies that a supposedly passive resource in fact has an active preference to be courted. Feigned interest is an acceptable ploy to use, but only temporarily: genuine concern for unmasculine interests devalues your peer-personhood too much to be worth the risk, and anyway, if such things were objectively important or worthwhile, they wouldn’t be left to women. (In the event that something is done by both men and women, of course, the male contribution is always more important. Women who succeed in such arenas are to be congratulated for their emulation of value, but not allowed to mistake their lesser contribution for a greater one.)

The ability to attract women is therefore predicated on the successful performance of masculinity as graded by other men. As such, the system depends on women being, not just a resource, but one primarily controlled and apportioned by men – otherwise, they might value their own, inferior preferences ahead of more masculine priorities. A similar danger is therefore presented by men who, for whatever reason, refuse to support the hierarchy of giving the most resources to the most masculine men. Masculinity must self-police against such individuals, lest the whole house of cards collapse: a refusal to defer to the masculinity of others becomes a failure of masculinity in oneself, and therefore a failure of personhood. The apex of this failure – or nadir, rather – is for a man to be so unmasculine as to be like a woman. Under this system, there is no worse insult – even, somewhat paradoxically, for women themselves.

Of necessity, ferocious importance is thus attached to determining what is – or is not – masculine. It’s here we hit an interesting bifurcation as, regardless of any additional moral/spiritual failings, women are frequently held to be both the physically weaker and intellectually inferior sex, thereby presenting men with two different ways to show their masculine prowess. However, in deference to the need to establish a heierarchy of masculinity – and it must be a hierarchy, or else all men would be equally entitled to the same share of feminine resources, with no means of distinguishing their peer-superiority – these avenues are traditionally pitted against each other. The ascendency at any given time of strength over intellect, or intellect over strength, is based on a mix of history, environment and context: the habits of the past, the needs of the present, and the specifics of control. Overlap between the two groups, or at least a deep respect for those who excel in both skillsets, is usually reserved for instances where there’s an immediate practical benefit to cooperation; otherwise, the competition – both presently and historically – is fierce.

Where one type of masculinity is perceived to be in ascendence, such that its adherents are similarly perceived to hold the greater share of resources – which is to say, women – there is a corresponding tendency for the secondary masculinity to go on the defensive. After all, if attracting women is the ultimate proof of masculinity – representing, as it does, the deference of other men in handing those women over (or at least, not arguing their dispersal) – then a failure to attract women – or the attraction of fewer women, or women deemed less valuable – lays such men open to the charge of being unmasculine; or worse, of being like women themselves. As this system can levy no greater insult, a response must therefore be made.

A scarcity of women in a secondary masculine group is therefore framed, not as a lack of desireable resources, but as the absence of an unwanted burden. Women do not understand masculinity and male pursuits; ergo, seeking to attract them takes valuable time away from real male work, be it soldiering or science. If strength is in ascendency, women are stupid to seek it; if intelligence, they are weak to want it. This is why secondary male environments are often more hostile to women than those with greater (masculine) social power: their antagonism serves both to protect against accusations of effeminacy and to redefine the ability to attract women as a negative, the gateway to a destructive, feminizing influence. Should this logic eventually effect a change in the masculine hierarchy, the effect is not revolutionary, but is rather a slow reversal: the teams might change goalposts, as it were, but they’re still playing the same game.

This is patriarchal logic laid bare: a simple, biased premise serving as a foundation for greater, later abuses. If women cannot be fully trusted, either morally or with their own self-governance, then systems must be established for men to both use and control them. That we (mostly) decry this underpinning logic, especially when phrased so baldly, doesn’t change the fact that such patriarchal systems have long since become habit, a locked-in aspect of our cultural upbringing. Sometimes, we don’t even recognise them, let alone consider that they still have a negative impact despite our intentions or other social changes. Pushback against these systems, which are seen as normative, is therefore viewed by some, not as a step towards equality, but bias towards a group who – surely! – are equal enough already.

Equal enough. A paradox whose brevity speaks volumes.