sasha_feather (
sasha_feather) wrote2014-10-11 05:03 pm
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Learning to recognize harassment: Anti-gas lighting
Not sure if I should post this locked or unlocked. I'm putting myself out there a lot with this post-- please don't link w/o permission.
Content note: discusses harassment/bullying and responses to it.
There is a sea change going on in society. It's happening at science fiction conventions; at tech and scientific conferences; in the atheist/skeptic communities; in gaming; in the library community; on college campuses; and no doubt elsewhere. I don't have the answers but I am a part of the conversation and I am learning a ton. I am mostly learning from people my age and younger. These folks are saying that what might be termed "low-level harassment" or bullying is not acceptable and should not be tolerated anywhere.
Activists are creating and using language such as microaggressions, gas lighting, mansplaining, trolling, and other terms to label common behaviors. I've seen tons of discussing about cat calling, for instance, and it even made it onto the Daily Show (thanks to JessicaJones Williams).
All this reading I've done, conversations, this cultural shift, has trained me. When I post about being upset (for instance, when I was yelled at by homophobes at the dog park) and friends say "that really sucks" and validate my experience-- that has worked to un-brainwash me and realize that yeah, this shit happens to me too and it is not acceptable, even if the wider society says it is.
Feminism and other activism movements, if you spend enough time in them, can un-brainwash you. But I think in this discussion in particular, the older wave of feminists are still brainwashed. Because many of them think that a certain level of harassment is acceptable.
I heard it from my mom when I got in an argument with her on the phone. I love and respect my mom A LOT but sometimes I think she is really wrong. "Sometimes in these situations you have to empower people to take care of it themselves."
But what if people can't take care of it themselves? What if they try to, and it doesn't work? That doesn't exactly encourage them to keep trying.
I hear it from older women who use this double-speak word "harmless". As in, "Oh him, he's harmless." If you hear that word, it is a major red flag. I don't know exactly what it means, but it does NOT mean that the person is question is not harmful. It may mean that he has not physically harmed the woman you are speaking to.
A couple of years ago I had two bad interactions with a person we code named "Prickly Pear". She was in the Dealer's Room and said some upsetting things to me, so I decided to avoid her and warned my friends (using the whisper network, basically) to also avoid her. I found out later that she had negative interactions with the Publications person and 2 registration volunteers. She got a hold of my phone number because I am an Access Coordinator, and someone gave it to her. I checked my voicemail late at night as I was leaving the convention, to hear a message where she yelled at me for long minutes about something disability / accommodation related. (I am very capable of working and dealing with difficult and upset people-- this was way above and beyond that.)
After this I refused to deal with her, and send
antarcticlust into talk to her. Antarcticlust eventually failed and got yet another person to deal with her, a long-time WisCon volunteer who is an attorney. It was antarcticlust who very helpfully labeled Prickly Pear's behaviors as "bullying".
Based upon all of these behaviors, Prickly Pear should have been kicked out of the convention. Instead, in what was the WisCon way, people bent over backward to accommodate this bully. The hotel tried to meet her accommodation demands (which we, the Access Team, said no to). One of the con chairs, an older woman, had tea with her to try to work it out.
Antarcticlust brought up the fact that we probably had code-of-conduct reasons to refuse her re-entry into our con, and did some work on this point. But instead, the WisCon leadership did nothing and just waited for her not to return. This is the way the way the old guard, the feminists we looked to for leadership, were carving out for us. This is they way they thought best to deal with such behavior. As a young(er) feminist, I looked to them for leadership.
As for me, I was so upset by being yelled at that I had one of the worst stomach aches of my life. I also called into question my authority as Access Chair (because the a con chair over-ruled me), even though
jesse_the_k backed me up on this and was offended on my behalf.
The point being, I thought all of this was normal and reasonable. WisCon is my "home" convention and the concom are my friends and colleagues. I didn't even recognize what happened as harassment until this year: 2 years later. (Aside: I certainly didn't recognize my brother's actions when we were teens as bullying until almost 10 years after those incidents. So I'm getting faster.)
I think when we get into these conversations; it can bring up a lot of baggage for all of us. We can get caught up in unexpected memories. And so we should be gentle with each other. It's uncomfortable to think about times when people have bullied us and no one stood up for us. It might feel like a betrayal. Or maybe we were the person being the bystander or even the bully.
The point is to try and move forward. To find a new way. It is largely young people who are taking the bull by the horns on this one.
When my roommate sent me pages of vitriol, and I cried at work, it was my undergrad office mate, someone more than 10 years younger than me, who suggested that her behavior could be considered harassment.
It was my good neighbor, also younger than me, who said "you don't deserve to be treated like that."
I didn't learn these healing phrases from my elders. I'm learning them from the youth, and I'm listening.
Content note: discusses harassment/bullying and responses to it.
There is a sea change going on in society. It's happening at science fiction conventions; at tech and scientific conferences; in the atheist/skeptic communities; in gaming; in the library community; on college campuses; and no doubt elsewhere. I don't have the answers but I am a part of the conversation and I am learning a ton. I am mostly learning from people my age and younger. These folks are saying that what might be termed "low-level harassment" or bullying is not acceptable and should not be tolerated anywhere.
Activists are creating and using language such as microaggressions, gas lighting, mansplaining, trolling, and other terms to label common behaviors. I've seen tons of discussing about cat calling, for instance, and it even made it onto the Daily Show (thanks to Jessica
All this reading I've done, conversations, this cultural shift, has trained me. When I post about being upset (for instance, when I was yelled at by homophobes at the dog park) and friends say "that really sucks" and validate my experience-- that has worked to un-brainwash me and realize that yeah, this shit happens to me too and it is not acceptable, even if the wider society says it is.
Feminism and other activism movements, if you spend enough time in them, can un-brainwash you. But I think in this discussion in particular, the older wave of feminists are still brainwashed. Because many of them think that a certain level of harassment is acceptable.
I heard it from my mom when I got in an argument with her on the phone. I love and respect my mom A LOT but sometimes I think she is really wrong. "Sometimes in these situations you have to empower people to take care of it themselves."
But what if people can't take care of it themselves? What if they try to, and it doesn't work? That doesn't exactly encourage them to keep trying.
I hear it from older women who use this double-speak word "harmless". As in, "Oh him, he's harmless." If you hear that word, it is a major red flag. I don't know exactly what it means, but it does NOT mean that the person is question is not harmful. It may mean that he has not physically harmed the woman you are speaking to.
A couple of years ago I had two bad interactions with a person we code named "Prickly Pear". She was in the Dealer's Room and said some upsetting things to me, so I decided to avoid her and warned my friends (using the whisper network, basically) to also avoid her. I found out later that she had negative interactions with the Publications person and 2 registration volunteers. She got a hold of my phone number because I am an Access Coordinator, and someone gave it to her. I checked my voicemail late at night as I was leaving the convention, to hear a message where she yelled at me for long minutes about something disability / accommodation related. (I am very capable of working and dealing with difficult and upset people-- this was way above and beyond that.)
After this I refused to deal with her, and send
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Based upon all of these behaviors, Prickly Pear should have been kicked out of the convention. Instead, in what was the WisCon way, people bent over backward to accommodate this bully. The hotel tried to meet her accommodation demands (which we, the Access Team, said no to). One of the con chairs, an older woman, had tea with her to try to work it out.
Antarcticlust brought up the fact that we probably had code-of-conduct reasons to refuse her re-entry into our con, and did some work on this point. But instead, the WisCon leadership did nothing and just waited for her not to return. This is the way the way the old guard, the feminists we looked to for leadership, were carving out for us. This is they way they thought best to deal with such behavior. As a young(er) feminist, I looked to them for leadership.
As for me, I was so upset by being yelled at that I had one of the worst stomach aches of my life. I also called into question my authority as Access Chair (because the a con chair over-ruled me), even though
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
The point being, I thought all of this was normal and reasonable. WisCon is my "home" convention and the concom are my friends and colleagues. I didn't even recognize what happened as harassment until this year: 2 years later. (Aside: I certainly didn't recognize my brother's actions when we were teens as bullying until almost 10 years after those incidents. So I'm getting faster.)
I think when we get into these conversations; it can bring up a lot of baggage for all of us. We can get caught up in unexpected memories. And so we should be gentle with each other. It's uncomfortable to think about times when people have bullied us and no one stood up for us. It might feel like a betrayal. Or maybe we were the person being the bystander or even the bully.
The point is to try and move forward. To find a new way. It is largely young people who are taking the bull by the horns on this one.
When my roommate sent me pages of vitriol, and I cried at work, it was my undergrad office mate, someone more than 10 years younger than me, who suggested that her behavior could be considered harassment.
It was my good neighbor, also younger than me, who said "you don't deserve to be treated like that."
I didn't learn these healing phrases from my elders. I'm learning them from the youth, and I'm listening.
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WRT 'harmless' (yeah, right), I can't help thinking of it in work terms: yeah, we try and make sure that if bits fall off the plane it'll still get you home, but mostly we try not to have them fall off in the first place!
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And we all do fail from time to time.
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I think one of the most valuable life lessons that came out of the purely technological side of my job was having failure mechanisms for when the failure mechanisms failed!
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I agree with everything you say in this post, and yet I'm struggling with this, thinking in terms of WisCon and also in terms of the parts of academia that are home to me, where I've seen similar microaggressions play out in somewhat different ways. It may be that I'm in an in-between place on a generational shift with this. But I feel worried about the times when one person's calling out of injustice is another person's bullying; I feel worried about how power structures might play out in the identification of bullying when things are not clear cut or when there are multiple ways of looking at the same situation. I think about experiences I've had like one where I worked with an older woman in academia who is famously awful to work with; in some lights, the ways she treated me as a younger woman scholar were borderline harassment, yet the ways I have since seen her referred to by senior men academics, who mock her in ways they never would if she were a man or had a higher-status job, are also undeniably bullying.
I worry about how hard it is to hold all the realities together at the same time in a way that does justice to everyone... I don't really know what to do with my worry other than to keep thinking about it, talking about it, and reading what people are writing about all this stuff... I suppose I am posting to see if anyone else is worrying too / has things to say that might help me worry in more productive directions!
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I think in the case of the woman you talk about in academia-- that's so common. I've heard people say that it's women who are the toughest to work for, sometimes, because they have had to make themselves so tough in order to make it. I don't know what the answers are.
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<3<3, and that makes total sense. Hope I didn't derail too much with worrying over the bigger pictures...
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I never heard the term "gaslighting" until about five years ago, so I couldn't identify it when it happened to me in a relationship as a teen. The term "mansplaining" didn't even exist until fairly recently -- I remember calling someone out for it in 1994, but I had no term for it beyond "being an ass." It was the Broken Stair essay that really crystallized for me what was wrong with that approach, though, and to recognize that I'd participated in it.
Your story about the Prickly Pear makes me think about another term I feel like I've heard a lot more in the last decade than when I was younger -- "boundaries." As in, you tried to set them with the Prickly Pear, and got undermined by people who think tea and sympathy is the solution to everything.
And it made me think about how there are still some gaps in our language, like we need one for the phenomenon where people assume that if there's a conflict then of course both sides must be contributing and the solution is cooperation and compromise, which is, in fact, often but not always true. Sometimes, one person is just being toxic, unreasonable, or bullying -- and the solution is boundaries, not reconciliation.
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Yes, omg, yes!
Thank you for this very helpful comment. I'm slightly younger than you but do feel "in between" these two generations.
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I've definitely been explicitly warned off of confronting bullying and microaggressive behavior by members of the older generation of feminists, from colleagues to fandom people to my own parents. I get the impression that the instinct is to protect yourself, to protect me, from the consequences of pushing back, and that is absolutely a legitimate fear-- the personal, professional, emotional, and physical consequences are very real. I know that I definitely take the measure of how safe I am in a situation before confronting that sort of behavior either on the spot or after the fact. When I hear when I get pushback from older-generation feminists is: the risk of consequences is not worth confronting each individual incident. That chafes my ass rather a bit. Yes, sometimes it will never be safe and it's important to remember that and protect ourselves and each other. However a system of oppression is built of individual incidents of violence (using the broad definition of violence here), and those incidents going unchallenged legitimizes the behavior. In this way, every little thing does count, every interaction does matter, and every chance we have to validate each other and say "this is not acceptable and it won't be tolerated" is important.
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I appreciate the fierceness that the newer brigades can bring, because I know that my years of fighting for respect and boundaries have left me a little weary at times. Go, you! I gladly carry part of the load when I can.
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http://ursulav.livejournal.com/1603249.html