Preserving the sanctity of the big tent
This week, you announced a decision so mind-numbingly shameful, it’s a wonder that the collective spleens of everyone involved didn’t spontaneously combust from the overload of self-loathing. I speak, of course, of your Neville Chamberlain-esque choice to cancel a panel on harassment in online spaces, featuring Katherine Cross, Caroline Sinders, and Randi Harper, due to (and I can’t believe I have to type this) overwhelming harassment from those opposed to said panel — i.e., Gamergate (a group you conveniently allowed to have their own panel without following any of the listed application rules, in a fascinating display of fear-profiteering that would make Dick Cheney blush).
Then, you inexplicably tried to justify the unjustifiable, with one of the most mealy-mouthed, corporate nothing speak emails I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading; all in the hopes that this would somehow explain your craven actions.
Behold that email:
On the one hand, we are an event that prides itself on being a big tent and a marketplace of diverse people and diverse ideas. On the other hand, preserving the sanctity of that big tent at SXSW Interactive necessitates that we keep the dialogue civil and respectful — so that people can agree, disagree and embrace new ways of thinking in a safe and secure place. We have already received numerous threats of violence regarding this panel, so a civil and respectful environment seems unlikely in March in Austin. For this reason, we have also canceled other sessions at the 2016 event that focused on the GamerGate controversy. We are strong believers in community at SXSW — and a healthy community sometimes requires strong management. Preserving the sanctity of the big tent is more important than preserving any particular session.
That’s quite something, isn’t it. “Preserving the sanctity of the big tent” is so important it’s worth letting harassers harass them out of holding a panel. What about the women the harassers have been harassing for more than a year? Oh who cares about them – they don’t belong in the big tent.
First off, the panel was not on Gamergate, did not mention Gamergate, and the only tangential relation it had with Gamergate was that the odorous denizens of that particular hashtag have made it their mission to try and ruin the lives of the women involved in the panel (among others). The fact you felt the need to connect it to Gamergate shows quite clearly where the pressure to silence these voices came from.
Second, and perhaps more pertinently, you run a festival that features A-list celebrities and tech magnates worth collective billions, superstar athletes, and some of the biggest music acts in the world, and you’re telling me you can’t provide security for a panel of three women? That it’s beyond your resources to hire any sort of police presence when you shut down entire sections of Austin at a time? That the unceasing vitriol these brave individuals face on a daily basis is just too much for your tender feelings to deal with, when you’ve experienced the merest fraction of that torrent of filth they’re forced to endure?
And then he gets really angry.
It’s great stuff.
Bravo! That’s the way to tell them. But if a woman had said it – she would be a hyperreactive whiny bitch who needed to be raped.
“Preserving the sanctity of the big tent”.
Wow does that make my skin crawl…
Principles override circumstances.
(The ideological ethos in a nutshell)
Iknklast, what you said about the consequences of a woman saying those very same things is all too true.
Every woman who has spent time on twitter and have been harrassed (what outspoken women haven’t been harrassed there?) should try the following experiment on twitter. Make a new twitter account using a man’s name. Choose a picture not of a person but one with masculine bent. Use that account at least a week, but longer is better. I did thst for an entire month. Not only was i treated with respect even when arguing with antifeminists, gamergaters and even mra’s, in stark contrast to when i used my usual account, but over time even i gained much more confidence and argued much more fiercely… and was STILL treated with respect. To say it was eye opening is an understatement. It was also depressing as hell. Still, i think it was an important exercise to see how starkly different one is treated when everyone believes you to be male. Btw, i was careful in my language to not accidentally reveal my actual sex. What still amazes me was how much my own confidence increased while i was being treated like an intelligent human being who actually KNEW STUFF, and in knowing that i wouldn’t be harassed just for being female. Just try it…. it is important for women to really get a sense of just how much better men are treated…. to experience it.
There is no doubt in my mind that the panel was only threatened because they were women. A male panel, even if the discussion was of how awful gamergate is, would not have received those threats. Women are despised by that group and many others. Utterly despised.
@BarbsWire,
It is a thoroughly fucked up system. I may not express this well, but my prevailing thought while reading the article “If men could get pregnant, abortions would be legal” was “You’re goddamn right it’d be legal.”
Such has been my conditioning from my 30+ year “experiment” of arguing as a man. If I had some unwanted, life-threatening, blood-sucking blastocyst attached to one of my major organs, and wanted a doctor to get it the hell out of my body
1) I’d rain holy hell on anyone trying to stand between me and my medical decisions
2) I’d expect to be listened to (and, more, taken seriously in proportion to the volume and intensity with which I expressed myself)
3) I’d expect the “violent reaction” from those who disagreed to be no more than angry muttering amongst themselves
4) Most importantly, I’d expect to win based solely on having the strongest case.
So, yeah, if men got pregnant, I have no doubt that abortions would be as legal as vasectomies; and as easy to get as “I’ll have the #2 today” from the urologist’s menu of outpatient surgeries.
All of which really hammered the point home for me: women are doing all those things I just said I’d do. They’ve always been doing those things. And god-damn-it-all, look where it’s gotten them. Just how fucked up, how rotten to the core the whole system is, hits me with the thought: “ok, that sounds like a well-and-good way to get that abortion if you were pregnant…. but what if you were pregnant, and a woman, and nobody gave a crap about your arguments?”
That was some extremely nice contempt, and deservedly so. A panel on harassment harassed out of existence? Fucking amazing that nothing twigged up in their minds that maybe, just maybe, there is harassment and that the harassment panel may have a point.
My son actually tried this experiment in reverse. He gamed as a woman. And as a man in the same setting at a different time. His results were predictable, and eye-opening, even to someone like my son who was already fairly enlightened about the issue. The amount of hate he got was intense – and he wasn’t even talking about feminism or the rights of women, he was just playing a game as a woman.
If people really want to know when I feel like a woman, it is when being met with blistering contempt, bored indifference, or violent hostility toward some activity I am performing or some argument I am making. I feel it in my classroom when I have my students draw a picture of a typical scientist, and they all draw men (beards are required to be a scientist, apparently), even though there is a woman standing in front of them, a trained scientist who has published scientific research, and is in the process of teaching them about science. At those times, I actually do feel like a woman, with my personhood totally stripped from me.
[…] a comment by iknlast on Preserving the sanctity of the big […]
I use a non-gendered ‘nym most places on the net. I think that my gender is largely irrelevant to many (if not most) of the ideas I am trying to put forward (and I confess to taking perverse pleasure in (oh-so-politely) correcting those who have assumed the incorrect gender, based on their perception).
But, somewhat meta (and related to some other discussion threads), I noticed that, for all the bile and invective in that piece, though Kluwe does call the SXSW organizers “a sad accumulation of fears squirming inside the skins of what could have been human beings”, he does not say that he’s glad they will die, hopes they die, or suggests that they should kill themselves. Rather he “hope[s] that one day, all of you will take stock of your lives and determine whether or not you are the people you wish to be”.
Theo Bromine, I have a name (in real life) that could be either male or female. In addition, I have a somewhat deep voice, and am often mistaken for a man on the telephone. Sometimes I (oh-so-politely) correct the individual addressing me as “Mr” and I always note a change in their attitude. Not only am I a woman suddenly to them, but I am a woman who corrected them, which is quite verboten even on a subject that should be so innocuous as which pronoun I prefer. I find I often achieve my goal easier and with less fuss if I let them continue to assume I am male.
In a rare reversal of that siuation, I was talking to a mid-60’s white male of slightly right-centre views (by local standards) who has a first name that could be interpreted as either male or female. Commenting on a web forum that women seemed not to be getting a fair shake in some areas of business saw him being abused for being a fat hairy communist dyke. As he said to me “only one of those is true.”
The fact that the reaction was as it was pretty much confirmed his original statement. The irony of that seemed lost on the abuser.