Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one day since I last started shit on Twitter...

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one day since I started shit on Twitter…

There’s a lot going on lately and since I’ve been accused of senseless shit-stirring and bullying, I thought I would get into the hows and whys.

For starters, if you’re not on twitter and have no idea what I’m talking about, bless, good work, save your sanity. Have you ever seen what a baby vulture looks like? You should google that, it’s incredible, and will make you happier than this tripe.

There are a few factors at play here. The largest is that conflict used to make me physically ill and as much as I wanted to wade into situations that needed calling out and shout down wrongs as I saw them being committed, I couldn’t. The physical toll was never worth the fight.

That has definitely changed, thanks to personal mental work, therapy, and the right cocktail of drugs, I’m not ashamed to admit. None was done for this reason, but instead to manage a deep, dangerous depression and daily panic attacks that left me wanting to hide in dark, small spaces. At least once a day I’d be so panicked I’d stop breathing and be frozen in place until I could calm down enough to get back to work.

Better living through chemistry and, as an aside, if you see yourself in the above, things can improve. I didn’t believe it either, yet here we are. I’m laughing again. I missed laughing.

The other factor was watching some of the things pass me by while I sat on the sidelines and the deep shame than accompanied that. Time after time, the burden was carried by BIPOC, and, most often, women. Women who already had to fight long-standing systemic racism & sexism in the publishing industry. Women brave enough to take a stand for what was right even when it risked their sales and contracts.

I am a successful, cishet white woman. I have no publishing contract. I have a successful career working full-time as well as a business that’s been profitable for 13 years now.  You could call my boss, the city, my friends, and tell them all about what I say online, and nothing would happen. At worst, they’d be confused. At best, they’d laugh at you and tell you to stick it up your ass.

I have nothing to lose. Letting writers of color do the heavy lifting is something I should feel ashamed of. It places the burden on people who already have an uphill battle. Watching a friend withdraw his name from consideration for an award while all the other white contenders just let the transgressions slip by uncommented on fucking hurt me. It hurt me so deep that I hadn’t fought beside him in that that I couldn’t even tell him. I’m still ashamed I sat that out, even though he likely doesn’t even know I cared.

Letting this trend continue chases people from the community, and stops them from engaging. It scares women, who become concerned for their own safety and sanity. It silences important, diverse voices, through sheer exhaustion. Voices that bring the equality and representation it’s so easy to say we need, and easier yet to not fight to keep involved.

So now that I can engage without making myself ill, I’m choosing to.

We’ve all had bad opinions, written dumb shit, and espoused harmful ideas. Products of our guardians and of a society that devalues anyone not a straight white man, it can be hard to age into a compassionate, open-minded adult without a strong guiding hand.

To that end, I’m thankful to everyone who ever called me out for my shitty comments and opinions (Thank you, Mickey, even this far down the road.) To rape survivors, who shared how rape jokes and stories made them feel. To my LGBTQA+ friends, who took the time to explain what mattered, and trusted me with their identity and concerns. To every minority who shared their encounters with cops, with assholes and racists, with angry men in grocery stores. Guys who speak about the pressures and consequences of toxic masculinity.  

Everyone that I finally learned to stop and listen to, and everyone that was patient and shared with me, taught me what equality meant. Listening and thinking and reflecting let me grow into a more compassionate human. I don’t want to hurt people, even accidentally. I don’t want to add to somebody’s struggles.

This should be where we are as a community. We should shut our mouths, open our arms, and listen to those around us until both our ranks and our fiction are as welcoming as they can be to everyone. In a field so long predominated by straight white men perpetually telling variations on the same stories, we’re long overdue for a change.

The same growing pains have swept through every community I’ve ever been involved in, and always with the same result. TTRPGs, Sci-Fi, stand-up--you name it. A group of die-hard white men (and a few scattered women) act like being asked to not be a sexist, racist, transphobic, exclusionary jagoff offends their very dedication to their art. That all stories deserve to be told and this is censorship and stop being a bully, Kristin. A dear friend even told me that including queer/trans/racist jokes in their set was being inclusive. That being an asshole to all marginalized groups was, essentially, the finest example of equality.

I’ve talked at length about aiming punches and why it’s important to punch up but since this isn’t “Gov throws down on stupid ass comedians insulting transwomen” I’ll skip it this time.

I can’t believe this actually has to be said, but perpetuating harmful content in your writing without hearing the voices and pleas of those it harms and accounting for that within your fiction is not just lazy. It’s not just ignorant, or apathetic. You are willfully doing harm, perpetuating a system that already penalizes people and authors for their gender, sexual orientation and color of their skin, and telling those people that you just don’t give a fuck.

You are coding into your fiction that their truths don’t matter to you. That you wanting to revert to these lazy, sexist, racist, transphobic, homophobic, tropes and stories is more important than their actual experiences, those of their parents, and those of generation after generation before them.

You, my friend, are being a willful and willfully ignorant asshole.

As a caveat, we all fuck up. I’ve fucked up. Again, I am grateful to everyone who pointed at my fuck-ups and went, “No.” And what do we do when we fuck up? We hear what we’re being told. We apologize if we need to and if somebody is gracious enough to hear it.

And then we fucking do better next time. That’s the gift of writing. We get a next time to do better. Be better. Make better choices. Be an ally, not an enemy.

On that note, I want to talk about something that surprised me yesterday. In a DM with a fellow author, I mentioned that the men fighting everything I’ve been talking about signaled that, as a woman, they are not safe people to be around, and he responded that he’d never thought about it like that.

I do not fault that author. I get it. Much as I’ll never know the life of macro- and micro-aggressions that accompanies being a woman of color, I do not expect men to understand the caution women in general have to exercise when it comes to judging men. I thought I would explain that part in particular as it will inevitably lead to cries of “I’m a safe man!” and “Not me!” and “I haven’t done anything but I’m being painted as an abuser!”

Women are very keyed into men and have to make constant calculations and adjustments about a man’s perceived threat level. This is often born of a lifetime of experience, mistakes, and abuses suffered.

I was alone in a car one night with a man. I laughed at something, and he almost broke my wrist. It was our first date. If I had told my parents about that, they would have said it was my fault for being in the car alone at night with him. Instead, I bought tickets for friends to come to every remaining night of our show so he could never get me alone again.

We learn that men aren’t safe, and not to ignore warning signs. Red flags flap for a reason, and we learn to heed them. When that happened? I was a teen. I was ignorant, and excited by this older guy interested in me. I learned. I became cautious.

One thing in particular we learn to pay attention to is whether or not men stop to consider womens’ experiences and the threat men pose to us. This includes hearing us when we ask to stop being fridged. When we ask to be portrayed as anything but sex objects. When we ask to stop being mere motivation for men to do big brave things.

Women are asking to stop being as motivational of an object as a stolen car. You want to know how to write well-rounded, strong women?

First, have you stopped to consider that we’re fully actualized people instead of objects to be owned?

Men who can’t even hear that much without getting sand in their taint are immature and willfully ignorant.

Men who hear that and fly into a self-righteous rage about how they’re being bullied, cancelled, targeted and discriminated against might as well be a peacock with a whole tail of red flags.

What would they do if laughed at alone in a car at night? Break my wrist? Something worse? Nothing at all?

I don’t know. But I know enough to not get in a car with them, or let a friend get into an elevator alone at a convention with them. Am I saying they’re abusers? No. Am I saying that they’ve shown enough warning signs that I’d feel unsafe alone with them? Jesus Christ, yes. Unequivocally.

But why bother, and especially on twitter? Because people are watching. Younger and/or newer writers are out there, seeing what’s going on and what the community is like. I want the shitty content and behavior I’ve been calling out to be seen as unacceptable. Credit to the community, it already is to a large degree. But letting assholes shout on unchallenged just because I know they’re an asshole is a dangerous gambit, because the next observer might not catch it.

These voices can come off as alluring. The speakers may seem like easy friends to make. And why wouldn’t you feel bad for this struggling author who is being bullied and targeted by gang of playground mean kids who are trying to control voices in the industry? What bullshit! They seem so nice and earnest and welcoming, they surely must be the victim they say they are.

As long as you ease nicely into their ideology and never question their claims of bad-assery.

I want this community to do better. I want everyone to be accountable for what they say and the way they choose define themselves. I’m going to tell my friends as much as I will a stranger that their behavior is unacceptable, and their stories are problematic. I want to see convention panels full of women that aren’t titled shit like Women in Crime Fiction and panels with BIPOC on topics other than diversity. I want rapists and abusers named, shamed and shunned instead of their victims ignored, doxxed and blacklisted.

I want you to answer for the words you choose to use, and the labels you claim without merit.

I want people to know that their lazy, harmful bullshit will not be quietly tolerated.

I am angry.

I am no longer afraid. I have spent so long afraid that it broke something inside of me.

I am done letting shitty men be shitty just because they’re men. I am done listening to guys talk about how fucking brilliant they are and how everyone else is wrong for not seeing it.

I am fucking over it. You cannot hurt me. You cannot touch me. There is no publisher you can complain to, no insult you can hurl, no one who will hear you whine except the echo chamber housing your circle jerk.

I’ve got infinite matches and a line of bridges. May the flames burn out the darkness until a new brighter day dawns.