Extensive report criticizing Laura J Mixon's report on Requires only that you hate

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Here is the link:

https://edouardbriereallard.wordpress.com/2015/09/01/a-critical-review-of-laura-j-mixons-essay/

It's realllllly long.

[sologdin]

nifty.  I recall thinking that the mixon report too readily conflated things like 'negative review' with 'attack' or 'threat.'  it's a specious form of argumentation that attempts to taint legitimate conduct by tying it to illegitimate.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Sologdin,

I don't care for "rage-blooging". Or "punching up". I don't think they help and ultimately make general discourse about difficult subjects more difficult. As such I will never be a defender of RH. I simply thought this deserves some air time too.

[AncalagonTheBlack]

wow,it really is an extensive report,guy has put a lot of work into this.Reading it now.


Thanks for the link Ser Scot.

[Clueless Northman]

It's not exactly ground-breaking that some victims develop Stockholm syndrome or are in some kind of co-dependant abusive relationship.

[Larry of the Lawn]

My favorite part:

 

In this case, if only a single victim is to be found, it seems RH is more worthy of the title than Bakker. It’s generally recognised as bad form for writers to respond to reviews, even more so when they identify the reviewer in question and unwittingly send their fans after them. Bakker’s output volume on RH, a simple reviewer at the time, is both impressive and troubling, particularly since from the little I have read of Bakker, he’s obviously typing with only one hand. I further find Mixon’s lack of comment on the behaviour of Bakker and Watts troubling, to say the least.

 

Everybody's taking shots at Bakker!

[sologdin]

it's a good article.  i'd like to see replies from mixon and her supporters, but if this article can't be answered, then she needs to give the hugo back.

[David Selig]

Is the link to RH's review of Silk by Kiernan working for you? It doesn't open for me. Anyway, the way it's described it's certainly not what I recall when I read it. She called the author racist in uncertain terms because one of the characters, an US teen, considered a Japanese stamp and an East Asian character exotic-looking. Which is beyond dumb and no wonder Kirnan was pissed off, and really shows how stupid most of RH's act was, her "reviewer persona" was completely unable to separate views expressed by the characters in a work of fiction with the views of the writers of the books where these characters appear.

[sologdin]

i don't recall the kiernan review in particular--though that was always one of RH's defects--equating text and author, inability to separate character from writer, &c.  (i can't access the review, either.) 

 

if all she did was designate the author racist in the review, even on the silly equation of text and author, that's not helping mixon's case much. 

[SilentRoamer]

Those comments regarding Bakker are actually pretty offensive - also completely unsubstantiated which is the main accusation the poster has of RH.

 

Double standards much...

[David Selig]

Well, she also called Kiernan "rape apologist" because Kiernan included a rape scene in a comic book she wrote, which lead to this awesome reply by Kiernan:

 

 

Under the guise of feminism, near as I could tell, the logic ran something like this: Writing rape scenes contributes to media normalization of rape and contributes to rape culture and therefore to actual rape itself. You write a rape scene, you may as well have committed the crime in real life. Which, of course, is precisely akin to blaming The Dark Knight Rising for James Eagan Holmes attack on that theater in Aurora, Colorado.

It works this way, folks who are too stupid to be allowed to read: Authors write about the real world, even when we are writing fantasy. In the real world, rape occurs. It is one of the great evils humanity can perpetrate upon humanity (rape against women and men), and, as such, it has a rightful and profoundly important place in literature, which seeks to examine and understand humanity. Or we can begin removing all manner of books from the shelves right now, beginning with those original faerie tales and mythologies, and proceeding to some of the greatest novels of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Shall we begin with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Let the Right One In, and, oh, hey, The Color Purple? The individual in question would likely say we should. Fortunately, she is just another twidiot, and there are smart people who fight censorship. If you don't want to read a book with a rape scene/s, do some research beforehand, and you can make an informed choice to avoid them.

And, if it means anything (and it may not), I was raped in 1992. It was never reported to the police. I was too afraid to do so. It just happened, in the dressing room of a club where I was dancing. That scene with Nuala, which I wrote seven years later, what I was doing is called catharsis, working through my fear, facing and killing my fear. Learning to live with it, even though I would always be haunted by that night. Understanding closure is a fantasy, and the best we can do is refuse to allow fear to crush and blind us and render us cripples. Is that TMI, and do you stand offended and aghast at my public admission? Then fuck you. And, also, see Tori Amos' "Me and a Gun"**, et al. Oh, and I don't buy that nonsense about "retraumatization," either, unless we're talking about an actual, real-world reoccurrence of the incident that created the first trauma.

http://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/898296.html

 

RH's complete inability or unwillingness to separate text and author is what made her such a terrible reviewer and was really assholish too. Calling people racist, rape apologists, and worse over and over again because they don't write about utopias and some of their characters aren't saints is really dumb and no wonder many writers didn't take it well.

[sologdin]

regarding Bakker are actually pretty offensive

she didn't much care for RSB's prologue and wrote a negative review on the basis of the first six pages, or so.  it wasn't what anyone should consider to be a worthy effort in literary criticism or a nuanced theoretical appreciation of gender politics or child sexual abuse (i think those were the objections).  that said, a negative review, even if unwarranted or subliterate, hardly constitutes an 'attack' or 'stalking.' 

Calling people racist, rape apologists, and worse over and over again because they don't write about utopias and some of their characters aren't saints is really dumb and no wonder many writers didn't take it well.

no doubt.

i love how kiernan says 'censorship.' goodness. they need to get over themselves; they ain't solzhenitsyn.

[SilentRoamer]

hey Solo,

 

I was more calling out the double standards of that article. Calling out Mixon on unsubstantiated claims and then proceeds to do the same about Bakker. Clearly not a fan but calling out Bakker "fanboys" and insinuating Bakker writes one handed is double standards to me. Never mind one handedness maybe the author should look to two faces.

[Brendan Moody]

This report (whose author has zero online or fandom history prior to turning up in vigorous defense of Sriduangkaew, and is very possibly a sock identity for one of her other defenders) has pretty clearly been in the making for a while; the reason the links don't work is that they date from a time when archived versions of the Requires Hate blog were still available. Sriduangkaew has since changed the blog's robots.txt settings to hide those archived versions. Which says a lot about the credibility of claims that she didn't do anything offensive.

 

I have no investment in Mixon, her report, or her Hugo, so I'm not going to wade through 60,000 words of case-by-case quibbling that attempts to minimize and obfuscate obnoxious behavior that I witnessed for myself in real time. Certain of Sriduankaew's behaviors would be defensible as acerbic reviewing if they existed in an isolated context. But they don't. They exist in a context of violent and scatological rhetoric, interpersonal toxicity, and persistent harassment. This is someone who just the other day tweeted that an anon meme that's critical of her should "drown in your own fucking vomit, you worthless wastes of oxygen." I'm hardly one for discourse policing, but there's a limit somewhere.

[David Selig]

I read a bit more and frankly, the whole thing seems a waste of time. The double standards are everywhere. RH blatantly insulting and threatening numerous writers in her reviews is "performance rage/punching-up", so no big deal, but if any of them or their readers takes exception and replies in a similar way, that's racist abuse against a poor PoC so it's really terrible. This identity politics "logic" is something I consider really stupid.

[sologdin]

are there a bunch of non-functioning URLs? i note that most of the ROH blog posts are dead now.


SR--

i hear you. the understanding of RSB is subliterate in both ROH and in this piece.


dave--

my understanding of the article is that mixon locates 29 victims, but this piece identifies only several of them as involving violent rhetoric. much of it involves an equivocation between 'attack' and 'negative' opinion. the article also disputes the mixon conclusion that ROH targeted women, persons of color, and so on--this is achieved by excluding by definition many items about male authors, white authors, and so on. i recall some nasty things that she said about joe abercrombie and mark lawrence, but mixon wasn't interested in them as victims of attacks/stalking, probably because they would inflate the white male victim count, which would've been contrary to her narrative.

[SilentRoamer]

Most of the links just don't work rendering the whole thing an opinion piece.

 

I suspect RH or one of her supporters has probably done this - seems like a lot of effort to go to over something which is old news.

[Brendan Moody]

Part of the reason I'm not especially invested in Mixon's report (although I appreciate the visibility it and Martin's signal boost brought to Sriduangkaew's behavior) is that I think it was a mistake to use the tools of statistical analysis on a largely-deleted body of online writings. It's simply not possible to be precise about which bile was targeted at what, and you're limited to what particular people who speak up happen to have remembered and/or screencapped, and so you open yourself up to (frankly asinine) rules-lawyering about what percentage of her targets can be labeled "punching up," where you draw the line between harsh reviews and insults, etc. The value of Mixon's work is in the underlying data, which demonstrate the full range of Sriduangkaew's behavior, not in graphs and figures.

 

I do think that it's pretty tacky for people who present themselves as caring about the place of women and POC in SFF to spend a great deal of time arguing over just how disproportionately Sriduangkaew targeted those groups, as if there's some magic number of women and POC that would be acceptable as collateral damage in some imagined battle against straight white dudes. Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Tricia Sullivan, Cindy Pon, Athena Andreadis, Rachel Manija Brown, and many others deserve better than that.

[Larry of the Lawn]

Those comments regarding Bakker are actually pretty offensive - also completely unsubstantiated which is the main accusation the poster has of RH.
 
Double standards much...

Yeah the guy says that while implying he hasn't even read any Bakker, just that he'd read.about him. Looking forward to taking an afternoon next week and digging into report a bit more.

[Clueless Northman]

the reason the links don't work is that they date from a time when archived versions of the Requires Hate blog were still available.

I wonder why this has been released now, and not before the Hugo results, when voting was still underway. Could've had an effect on the result.
Or did the writer wait to see if Mixon got No-Awarded, and decided to publish that piece now that she actually got the award?

i recall some nasty things that she said about joe abercrombie and mark lawrence, but mixon wasn't interested in them as victims of attacks/stalking, probably because they would inflate the white male victim count, which would've been contrary to her narrative.

Or because that's "punching up", and therefore "fair game" to many people? (which imho is silly, when you review a work of art, you review it based on its merits, and you should take care your review is as less influenced as possible by the author)