WriterCon: *fail edition

[rm]

WriterCon has two types of programming: programming that is planned and panelists chosen by Con Programming, and programming organized by attendees and included on the official con schedule but not really endorsed or not by WriterCon. This, as you might imagine, can make things a little murky. I do like that both types of programming exist at the con, but I thought it needed more clarification in places. I explain this because it's necessary to some of the *fail issues I'm about to address.

I also want to note, in what I will go into in a separate post, that there were many, many things I loved about this con: including the focus on transformative works craft, the multi-fandom attendees and the really fantastic efforts of accommodation the Con Staff made towards folks with special needs, including dietary. I have never, ever felt like a con staff cared more about each of its attendees on an individual basis.

Which is why when fail came, I was like "woah, what the fuck?!"

Sadly, I think much of the fail is a product of the fact that people have become defensive. People are scared of these discussions, and I have to say while they are often unfun and heartbreaking (who wants to be the target of this stuff? who wants to realize they've hurt people or a community they care about no matter how inadvertently?) -- jeez they are not going to kill you, and they certainly aren't a reason to fail more.

Like most SF/F and fandom cons, only about 5% of the attendees were PoC. Honestly, this was more than I was expecting, and it was nice to see that these people were part of programming and not just on RaceFail-related topics. Also a plus -- lots of fliers for the Carl Brandon Society.

However, at more than one panel more than one person noticed folks avoiding calling on PoC attendees and had to step in and make sure those people got heard. FUCKED UP.

Of the official programming there was a single panel entitled "Evil in Our Midst: Dealing with racism, sexism and homophobia in fandom." Because of my flight schedule, I was only able to attend half of it. I have to assume it was placed towards the end of the con so that if it went badly, it wouldn't affect the mood of the whole con, but these issues can't be afterthoughts, and scheduling things in such a way to make sure the issue isn't infused throughout the con and prevents people from attending is really problematic. On the plus side, the attendance was pretty damn good anyway!

The panel was made up of a fantastically diverse group and was so able to encompass a lot of perspectives. However, the panel was moderated by a straight, white woman, and I couldn't figure that out. Did the PoC and queer folks need translation? Could they not speak for themselves? This was uncomfortable to me at the time, and has become increasingly more upsetting to me in my head (yes, there's the sexism angle, but because the con was more than 95% female, a white, straight woman in this case is totally a part of the dominant group and appointing her to the position of power was sort of creepy - no slight on her (ETA: who has subsequently posted some great stuff, linked to later in all this, about privilege -- so I get why she was chosen, but the impression is delivered sadly doesn't stop being problematic and I have to believe that other people on the panel would have been equally capable of moderating), I'm just not sure this was thought out super-well.

The panel was necessarily very 101-level although some really interesting stuff came up, including a discussion of Bollywood as a fandom (what does it mean when we fan an entire culture? are you wearing a saree because you like the aesthetic or because you're cosplaying? do you get how that impacts actual South Asian people?) and the usual vaguely derail-y things ("should our goal be not to offend anyone?").

Then I had to leave to catch my flight.

And then apparently other things happened that people who were there and people who were on the panel will address at more length and more accurately than me, but the phone call I got at the airport included the report that someone got up and said they felt marginalized for being straight and that they felt marginalized for being in a fandom and having a child, and I can't not address this. (ETA: I have subsequently learned that in small post-panel discussions the woman's point was actually about age-ism in fandom, which is a very real and legitimate problem, but hopefully those discussions also highlighted how incredibly fail-y and rude it was to say "am I not fucked up enough to be in fandom?" -- I'm not fucked up for being queer and my friends aren't fucked up for being transfolk or PoC: further insight into events here: http://community.livejournal.com/writercon/228157.html / http://rahirah.livejournal.com/411832.html (same post, different comments)).

I am queer every day. And every once in a while I get to hang out in a queer space, such that I don't have to worry if I'm dressing femininely enough to get through airport security or if kissing my girlfriend on my street corner at 11:30 at night is really the best fucking idea in the world.

And I get that feeling marginalized even for a minute is weird and can be heartrending. I get this specifically as it applies to fandom: a lot of us were outcasts growing up, a lot of us don't have face-to-face fannish communities to be a part of where we live, and when we go to a con, we want everyone to be just like us. We don't want to be outcasts -- not still, not again.

But I gotta tell you something -- and this isn't about bias and oppression and marginalization, it's just about life -- it's what I learned from fencing, from learning to fight: We all die alone. And we all fight alone. And we all live alone. On some level, we are always, always, always in a space where no one can know what we are feeling and how strange and terrible and lonely we are -- whether we're straight white guys or people of color or queer folks or a mom at a con.

And in being who I am -- someone who is melancholy and mournful, who views the solid presence of other people in my life as a one-in-a-billion craps shoot I can't believe I won -- you have all my compassion, all my love, all my sympathy and all my interest, because that is, innately, how I react to people who, like me, who know this nature of aloneness. You are beautiful to me.

But you need to step back. Because no, you are not marginalized or oppressed because you are part of the dominant group and people who are part of other groups are stepping up to say that we want some damn consideration. Nor are you marginalized or oppressed because you chose to have a kid. I spent most of the weekend with a woman who is second-generation fen and her baby; we wrote fic together, talked about slash and hung out with her wife. So no matter how different you may feel from what you perceive to be the majority of fandom, no one is being oppressed because they have a kid -- if someone's rude to you, that's actually something else -- the -ism's are something way beyond rudeness or you feeling awkward or out of place.

Look, I don't like being part of a marginalized group. It's not fun or romantic. Some of us -- both in these groups and outside of them -- have to learn this, just as many of us have to go through the thing where we learn there's nothing cool or fun about poverty or having to whore (as opposed to choosing to engage in sex work) to put food on the table or get the damn rent paid.

And that's about all I'm capable of saying without resorting to a great deal of obscenity, so I'm going to stop there on this particular part of the situation.

Moving on, I think no one is well-served by there just being one panel for the racism, homophobia and sexism conversations, as they are three very different things. Because transformative works fanishness is perceived as so female dominated (and probably is) the sexism discussion must largely be about internalized-sexism and that's a profoundly different conversation than the conversation about queer fetishization. And race issues are very different from that -- because I can look gender-conforming and straight going through airport security, while PoC don't suddenly get to be white when shopping, going through airport security or taking flack from asshole cosplayers who don't understand the idea of color-blind casting.

People who are family to me in the immediate sense (good friends and creative partners) and in the distant sense (fellow fen) are in pain over what happened, and so am I. It's upsetting, and as one of the panelists kept saying, we need to learn to listen harder and fail better.

The other case of (specific as opposed to atmospheric) *fail happened in a fan-led discussion that was about addressing slash how and whether it should take into consideration real, actual queer people. This panel also had much positive discussion, some of which started to get past a 101-level I thought, but the moderator had a clear agenda that, to me, felt like "those damn gays are meddling in our porn."

The discussion included a hand-out of potential discussion questions, many of which I found mind-blowingly offensive (I've made a deal with at least one other attendee that we're going to post them all with our answers on LJ over the next week or so), and the woman hosting the panel repeatedly snarked on our table (we were not the only queer people speaking up, but we could, rather legitimately, be perceived as a unified force, as it were) for being articulate and was particularly dismissive to the two PoC people at our table (and the combination of "articulate" and PoC is one of those very loaded, sneaky RaceFail things that happen sometimes and that was seriously, seriously sketchy).

I was shocked and appalled, and while some of this woman's viewpoint would have been potentially useful on a panel, to be an individual with an agenda on a sensitive issue with unvetted programming?!?!?! -- WOW. Not Okay.

Also, bisexuality is real. People not getting this came up all over the place -- in slash convos, in convos about internalized-sexism, in people chatting about Torchwood.

Finally, I want to return to the theme of defensiveness. We're now in a phase of this process, of talking about "the evil in our midst," wherein too many people are either bracing themselves for a fight because of the backlash the people speaking out are getting (I think of my table at the above-mentioned queer panel) -- which of course isn't necessarily constructive but something I think we have an unfortunate right to, or looking for a fight, because suddenly (like the straight person who said they felt marginalized in the first panel I talked about) they aren't part of the dominant group all the damn time.

Additionally, people need to stop dismissing conversations about these issues as wank. Wank is when we gossip about people's egos or get into flame wars about how someone behaved at a con or deal with things that make no sense to most of us: like Snape's Wives. Dealing with racism, sexism and homophobia = not wank.

So what good came out of all of this for me personally:
- I have even more love and respect for my friends, especially having watched ones who don't want to have to be the educators on these issues do it anyway.
- I met some really cool new people.
- I did see people have ah-hah! moments.
- I did learn that there are actually large swathes of fandom that missed the RaceFail thing entirely, and so were just sort of getting caught up on how big the problems are.
- I did see the larger community of the con close ranks against fail when it happened.
- I feel more confident in the value of my being willing to talk about this stuff. I don't like falling on this grenade over and over again, but since no one expects me to be "nice" or "non-threatening" or "look the other way" I have more latitude to say what needs to be said.
- I have new frameworks for the discussion.
- Hey, the Carl Brandon society totally deserves my money.

Comments

[laura47.livejournal.com]

*siiiiiiiiigh*

Also, bisexuality is real. People not getting this came up all over the place -- in slash convos, in convos about internalized-sexism, in people chatting about Torchwood.

I don't understand these people! I still remember when I was 17 and my mother said she didn't believe in bisexuality, and my friends laughed and laughed afterwards and compared bisexuality to the tooth fairy and santa claus, and... I was just so horrified to discover that it's there in people i consider otherwise reasonable. One of my best friends, who is about to come visit me, we still argue, because he asserts that female bisexuality is real, but male bisexuality is 99% of the time guys who are on their way from straight to gay, or straight and just trying to be bi and will give up. I've sopped arguing. He cites science (he has a phd in chemisty), i cite experience, we move on with our lives. *sigh*

[ophymirage.livejournal.com]

because he asserts that female bisexuality is real, but male bisexuality is 99% of the time guys who are on their way from straight to gay, or straight and just trying to be bi and will give up.

Wow. just Wow. That's clearly a PhD in SCIENCE! (said in dramatic voice)

I don't think I can even twist my brain far enough to encompass the illogic... Does he.. hum. Does he think it's to do with variant evolutionary behaviours, Dawkins-style, or something? or hormone balances? (I'm trying to even come up with a way that chemistry would somehow apply..)

[laura47.livejournal.com]

oh, he never said his chemistry applied, i'm not even sure why i put that in, he's... he's not a quack full of pseudoscience about anything else. it's been long enough since we bothered to argue that i've forgotten his reasons, i can ask when he gets here wednesday. :-) i do remember his quoting some sorts of studies.

[ashbet]

Geesh. My boyfriend has encountered this type of attitude from gay men -- that's he's "really gay" and just hasn't figured it out yet. Er, no, he's *bisexual* and very happy with that identity, kthx.

(But, yeah -- it's one reason why he's had fewer relationships with men than with women -- a lot of men don't accept him as a bisexual male, and that's frustrating and patronizing.)

And as a bisexual female, I've been accused of "experimenting," "wanting to have it all," etc. I'm fairly vehement about identifying myself as bi and poly, because I could otherwise disappear behind the curtain of privilege because I'm married to (another) man. My awesome girlfriend needs props too, dammit!

I can't get into the mindset of "bisexuality doesn't exist" -- it's mindbending!

-- A <3

[laura47.livejournal.com]

especially if you are bi AND poly, you are just criminally indecisive and unable to commit! what is WRONG with you! [/sarcasm]

do you get the icky feeling of inhabiting straight privilege you don't want when you look to casual observers to be heterosexual because you happen to be with your boyfriend? I don't know what is to be done about that one.

[ashbet]

*nods* Yes -- and I also worry about being excessively TMI if I correct people about my relationship status . . . but I'd rather do that than be invisible :/

-- A <3

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Those sort of assumptions/prejudices are always cock-centric. If you're a guy, you're just fooling yourself by saying you like women, too, because once you have a taste of The Cock, you're gay, end of story. If you're a woman, you're just fooling around/showing off for guys, and you'll always go back to The Cock.

Mmm...misogyny.

[goseaward.livejournal.com]

I know there was some study a while back where they measured levels of erection in men on viewing straight and gay porn, and the guys had a bifurcated distribution (some only reacted to men, some only reacted to women). Of course, that assumes that a basic bodily response is the "real" response, and any emotional/mental reactions are "false" responses, so it's complete BS, but whatever :D Anyway, that might be what he was referring to...

(Also, basically all the women showed physical arousal at everything, so.)

[laura47.livejournal.com]

(Also, basically all the women showed physical arousal at everything, so)

well, we all know what indescriminate hordogs women are. :-)

i actually tried to bring this up when friend was visiting, but we'd all been drinking and it wound up with me going to bed because me and my partner were shouting about evolutionary psychology. :-)

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

The most recent study I read about apparently showed pictures to men with some gizmo attached to their private area to see whether pictures of one gender or both caused swelling there. They assume that if the photo doesn't cause an automatic increase in blood flow to the member, then the attraction isn't "real". (I have lots of problems with the assumptions behind this logic.)

Personally I think it's just another case of people who pay attention only to the studies that seem to agree with what they already wanted to believe. But they say it measures something objective, so it's more reliable than subjective measures like people's personal experiences and feelings.

[subsiding-leaf.livejournal.com]

Where did you read this study? I can almost guarantee that if it's in a pop science magazine, they have greatly oversimplified the results and jumped to conclusions. The study in question most likely talks about this way of measuring sexual arousal to demonstrate that there are differences in the way men respond to sexual images of one gender or another, not that lack of response meant their mental attraction is not "real."

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

I read about the study, did not read the study itself. I mentioned it because I had it cited to me by several people who cited it as a reason they don't believe in male sexuality. They pointed me to brief articles on the web about the study; I didn't see an easy way to get to the study itself and, frankly, wasn't that interested. As I noted in the comment you commented on, I have problems with that conclusion.

Even within one gender, there are so many variables about what type of body shape and what types of pose, camera angle, and so on guys find a turn-on. And that's before the fact that people often find social and mental aspects more important than the purely physical. Assuming you can determine gender orientation with a motion detector and a set of pictures seems hopelessly simplistic and naive to me. There's more variables than gender in arousal. It's, IMHO, similar to assuming that if you grab a white powder in the kitchen to cook with, it doesn't matter if the powder is flour or sugar or something else.

I absolutely agree that this interpretation of the study, even if it and it's conclusions were accurately reported (and I make no guarantees of that), jumps to unwarranted conclusions.

This comment was, like, a month ago, and the thread is huge. But as I remember, I had been grumbling about people who not only interpreted this study as meaning there are no real male bisexuals, but dismissed anything and everything I said about real life experiences of bi people because there was "science" that they felt proved their opinion to be true.

It bothers me when people claim to base their opinions in science, and ignore evidence that does not match their preconceived conclusions. And even moreso when they want to use "science" to deny people the right to recognition of an important part of their identity.

[subsiding-leaf.livejournal.com]

I know the thread was a month ago, and I apologize for jumping in so belatedly. It's just that people using science to support their bigoted claims is something that drives me, as a scientist, up a wall, so I had to jump in. I also get really frustrated when people blame the scientists for pop media's oversimplified interpretations of their results, so I guess this entire thread hit a nerve. In general, we appear to agree on the essentials.

I'm aware of the type of study you cite, if not the specifics of that particular one, and rest assured the authors - if not those people who are citing it to you - know that the situation is more complicated than that. The only conclusion they will draw is that there are differences in arousal among their male subjects. The purpose of the study would not be an attempt to determine gender orientation using such a test, because that information would be reported by their subjects.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't mind it being a month late. That just makes it harder for me to recall exactly what prompted my comments, and with that thread being so very long and cluttered, I couldn't easily peek to see.

I found the conversations with the people who claimed this study "proved" there were no male bisexuals very frustrating. They wouldn't accept any definition of bisexuality but their own, and used the scientific study as a prop to basically give themselves permission to not listen to anyone else. "...drives me up a wall" is, thus, pretty accurate for me too! (-:

[subsiding-leaf.livejournal.com]

There was also a study where sexually arousing imagery were shown to men & women identifying themselves as bi-, hetero-, or homosexual, who then also got an MRI scan. Bisexual men's brains responded more strongly to images of male sexual imagery vs. female sexual imagery, similar to the brains of gay men. Women, as you said, had brain activation with all sexual imagery. But all that says is that there are sex differences in the brains of men & women. Sex differences do NOT equal gender identity, and no offense to your friend, but if he's trying to use these types of results to demonstrate that bisexual men don't exist, he's totally misguided/misinformed/misunderstanding the data.

I'm sorry, this is a really late response, but people using scientific results to support bigoted ideas and then others blaming the science, rather than the people, for their bigoted ideas irks me a great deal. Which is not to say that you are doing the latter.