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writerkitIt's become a thing to laugh at the Harper's Letter. "Cancel culture doesn't exist!" you cry. "People who can get published in Harper's are the opposite of cancelled! Clearly nothing is happening!"
But see, there's a contradiction with cancellation: the people who have a platform loud enough to tell you it's happening are the people who are affected by it the least. It is absolutely happening-- you're just never hearing again from the people it's happening to severely enough that they actually lost their platform. The recent example that springs to mind is Isabel Fall, who we haven't heard from again after she was harassed off the internet for writing a messy, complicated story about gender, and who was forced to come out as trans to try to defend herself from the onslaught, which didn't precisely work-- and a lot of the people who were doing the harassing, instead of recognizing they'd done something wrong, blamed Neil Clarke for not including that she's trans in the author bio, especially since her birth year includes a Nazi dogwhistle number. That's the problem with "internet mob as justice"-- sooner or later you're going to get it wrong.
(As an aside, I asked at the time "What message does this send to the trans people who *did* find something to identify with in it? 'Your stories are wrong''. Just recently I discovered that in the aftermath there was an Atlantic article which included the reporter's encounter with someone who wanted sensitivity-writing classes in writing her own gender, because she was concerned about getting it wrong if she just wrote from personal experiences-- after all, look what happened to Isabel Fall!)
Or look at what happened to Amelie Wen Zhao. She was writing a book heavily inspired by modern slavery as practiced in Asia and Eastern Europe and was accused of (and initially pulled her book over) writing an inaccurate portrayal of American chattel slavery, which wasn't even something she was *trying* to portray in the first place.
Over in fanfiction-land, this has progressively escalated over time-- it used to be that if you were writing fics about certain subjects you had to give some details of what happened to you to be "allowed" to write such things free of harassment, since the only reason it was valid to write such fics was processing trauma. Now they seem to have escalated to "people writing such things need to do it privately" and have started suggesting that writing romance about teenage characters makes one a pedophile, because writing about fictional teenagers in a romantic or sexual context, to them, means you must be thinking about real teenagers that way too. They also suggest that any story in which an amoral character is not immediately called out in the text is inappropriate because the author is then "glorifying" whatever the behavior is. And again, this is accompanied by quite a lot of harassment online and sometimes threats and "you should kill yourself" type messaging.
I guarantee you there are writers who are looking at all of that and saying "if this is what's going to happen to me for trying to write about my experiences which do not fit the established social justice orthodoxy, I'm not going to write." But you'll never hear about them, because they either were harassed off the internet while still too small for you to hear about it, or they never wrote at all.
(And if, after all this, you still want to argue about it? You might also consider that the signatories on that list were not just Rowling or people confined to the Ivory Tower. Also included were Margaret Atwood, who has had her books banned in several countries, and Salman Rushdie, who's survived actual assassination attempts for his speech. Are you really going to try to suggest the guy someone tried to kill over this stuff is out of touch with what it looks like?)
But see, there's a contradiction with cancellation: the people who have a platform loud enough to tell you it's happening are the people who are affected by it the least. It is absolutely happening-- you're just never hearing again from the people it's happening to severely enough that they actually lost their platform. The recent example that springs to mind is Isabel Fall, who we haven't heard from again after she was harassed off the internet for writing a messy, complicated story about gender, and who was forced to come out as trans to try to defend herself from the onslaught, which didn't precisely work-- and a lot of the people who were doing the harassing, instead of recognizing they'd done something wrong, blamed Neil Clarke for not including that she's trans in the author bio, especially since her birth year includes a Nazi dogwhistle number. That's the problem with "internet mob as justice"-- sooner or later you're going to get it wrong.
(As an aside, I asked at the time "What message does this send to the trans people who *did* find something to identify with in it? 'Your stories are wrong''. Just recently I discovered that in the aftermath there was an Atlantic article which included the reporter's encounter with someone who wanted sensitivity-writing classes in writing her own gender, because she was concerned about getting it wrong if she just wrote from personal experiences-- after all, look what happened to Isabel Fall!)
Or look at what happened to Amelie Wen Zhao. She was writing a book heavily inspired by modern slavery as practiced in Asia and Eastern Europe and was accused of (and initially pulled her book over) writing an inaccurate portrayal of American chattel slavery, which wasn't even something she was *trying* to portray in the first place.
Over in fanfiction-land, this has progressively escalated over time-- it used to be that if you were writing fics about certain subjects you had to give some details of what happened to you to be "allowed" to write such things free of harassment, since the only reason it was valid to write such fics was processing trauma. Now they seem to have escalated to "people writing such things need to do it privately" and have started suggesting that writing romance about teenage characters makes one a pedophile, because writing about fictional teenagers in a romantic or sexual context, to them, means you must be thinking about real teenagers that way too. They also suggest that any story in which an amoral character is not immediately called out in the text is inappropriate because the author is then "glorifying" whatever the behavior is. And again, this is accompanied by quite a lot of harassment online and sometimes threats and "you should kill yourself" type messaging.
I guarantee you there are writers who are looking at all of that and saying "if this is what's going to happen to me for trying to write about my experiences which do not fit the established social justice orthodoxy, I'm not going to write." But you'll never hear about them, because they either were harassed off the internet while still too small for you to hear about it, or they never wrote at all.
(And if, after all this, you still want to argue about it? You might also consider that the signatories on that list were not just Rowling or people confined to the Ivory Tower. Also included were Margaret Atwood, who has had her books banned in several countries, and Salman Rushdie, who's survived actual assassination attempts for his speech. Are you really going to try to suggest the guy someone tried to kill over this stuff is out of touch with what it looks like?)
no subject
Date: 2020-07-22 04:36 pm (UTC)And the identity thing I described is supposed to mean: People who were just straight cis people from the wealthy middle class last week, who were ignorant about anything going the wrong way in the world (not even heard of child labor or something like that), and now, as they suddenly got pointed at other personality developments than theirs and "social justice", they become burning fanatics this week, wanting to tell you "they were always this way" (although you know yourself what kind of indifferent potatoes they were still last week).
Leaving behind strong doubts about their seriousness because such turns in personality are totally unrealistic.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-22 05:30 pm (UTC)Also that sort of dramatic personality change seems fairly normal for adolescents. *What* they change into will be shaped for environment-- but "I finally found something that UNDERSTANDS ME" is a pretty standard developmental phase that was not originated by social justice culture. The ability to damage to others with it is shaped by Tumblr and the internet.