Humorless Strawfeminists Harsh Some Dude’s Squee, film at 11

[bodlon]

While I don't usually duck and cover on April 1 -- I actually enjoy well-executed pranks and faux product launches, and even the occasional questionable news article -- this year I spent most of the day away from the keys.

This might not have been a bad thing overall since a lot of my energy is spoken for at the moment and I might not have had the extra brain cycles to enjoy a lot of the jokes anyway, one thing that happened yesterday has managed to penetrate the busy and the brain haze: Lawrence Person's offensive post on the Locus site, Locus' response, and Person's reaction to the whole thing.

From what I can tell, here's what went down:

- Person posted an April 1 post in which Wiscon's organizers announce a burqua-only dress code for the upcoming convention.
- Sensible people decried it as offensive.
- Locus pulled the post, ended association with Person, and issued an apology to readers.

Person, who has posted a copy of the post on his blog, seems to have decided to embrace the whole thing, and has indulged in a bit of traffic statistic victory lapping.

I'm all for a bit of succès de scandale, but I'm skeptical that over 20,000 people seeing that that the problem essay is basically a heady mish-mash of Islamophobia and misogyny, or that Person goes straight for the "humorless feminist" stereotype, or that he is comparing this to Elizabeth Moon's infamous "Citizenship" post from 2010 as if that were a good thing is going to have a positive effect.

I will be the first to admit that the way we do social justice on the Internet can be flawed. Well-meaning allies do dumb things, people don't always understand differing cultural norms, folks get dogpiled for the wrong reasons, and the Internet frequently combines a long memory with an inability to forgive in really ugly ways. Really ugly. Even so, there's a difference between what might be rightly called "social justice fail" where someone gets hurt by the seething mass for asinine reasons and what's happening here.

There is nothing "radical" or "fringe" about inclusivity. Locus' decision to pull something that doesn't represent its values isn't an impingement on speech. That SF/F as a group of genres increasingly caters to diverse communities of people instead of just a particular kind of white guy may put a crimp in the style of people who'd really rather not deal with the rest of humanity as equals, but them's the breaks.

You can adapt to the plural public square -- which, gasp, includes women and Muslims -- and learn to include people even when they're different, or you can rage against it and alienate yourself. Expecting someone to maintain a basic level of civility and professional inclusion isn't a "petulant demand." It's basic common sense. Locus made the right call. Good on them.

And yeah, this all happened in the context of an April 1 post (which Person has apparently been doing for eleven years), but the fact remains: Person made an Islamophobic, misogynist post in the guise of a joke, and then expected all of us to be okay with that. We weren't. Disparagement humor has real effects. And no, "Don't be so sensitive!" isn't an acceptable response.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com

Comments

[pauamma]

Well-meaning allies do dumb things

Or even well-meaning members of the group being considered - see http://www.bu.edu/today/2013/muslim-for-a-day/ for an example.

[bodlon]

Ayup. Sometimes our attempts to "fail better" are...well, magnificent failures.

This is how we learn.