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branchandroot) wrote2005-03-05 01:40 pm
branchandroot) wrote2005-03-05 01:40 pm
Entry tags:
Manifesto on Wank
So, the discovery that Frienditto is run by the same people who run ljdrama and Encyclopedia Dramatica, and the accusations currently being tossed back and forth over the fd service, have finally crystalized some thoughts I've been turning over for a while. I want to try to get them down in a moderately coherent form, despite my own outrage.
*wishes self luck*
There is no excuse for wank comms.
I'm not going to phrase this in "I believe" terms, because I'm laying out an ethical judgement, here, and while that is invariably a personal endeavor, it is one that, by its nature, extends beyond just myself. I apply this to everyone, and not just as an opinion. There is no excuse.
The people who participate in wank comms, such as Fandom Wank, insist that they merely display a healthy sense of humor. That they are perfectly happy to have their own wanking mocked just as they mock others. And that anyone who posts on the internet should only expect to be targeted, because the internet is a public place.
The sense of humor argument is the one I find hardest to refute, actually, because it has a grain of truth. If, in the middle of some wank explosion, someone were to speak up and say "you know, we're all getting kind of shrill and behaving foolishly, and blowing the original disagreement out of proportion to the point where I'm laughing; congratulations, everyone", that might indeed have some beneficial effect on the wank in question. But only if it comes from the inside--from a participant in the forum affected. Because it isn't the business of anyone who is not affected. For a participant to go outside that forum to another, one which is not affected or involved, to say such a thing is not 'having a good healthy laugh at ourselves'. "Ourselves" does not apply when the participant has removed herself from that context. Instead, this is making fun of other people.
And that's a cruel thing to do. No matter how great or small, it is an immature activity and a cruel one.
That people like the FW members understand this perfectly well is demonstrated by their use of counter-wank as a disciplinary measure. Someone who posts something considered unacceptable is, in turn, mocked. For them to do this, and then say that they are happy to take what they dish out, is extremely disingenuous. To say that they can laugh at themselves, and why can't the people they mock just do the same, is verbal slight of hand that turns attention away from the manifest hurtfulness of what they are doing. That they all seek to avoid being mocked, and use mockery as an internal punishment for their own, shows very clearly that they know it hurts to be the target.
So why do they do it?
I have, by the way, no sympathy for the suggestion that FW is not as bad as it was two years ago, and that it's mostly a social comm now, where people compliment each other's icons. That's a load of bullshit, and the merest skim through the latest posts will show it.
Likewise, any statement that they confine themselves to mocking people who make public fools of themselves is, if not a technical lie, certainly just as disingenuous as the second argument. There is, for example, mockery posted, fairly recently, of some extremely personal matters that one of the members found on a couple of personal journals. When the embroiled parties protested, they were told they had invited this treatment by posting publically and unlocked, as if posting unlocked in an obscure individual journal were equivalent to posting in a community forum. It was implied that the insults levelled at their romantic lives and psychological stability, and the links back to the personal journals, posted in such a high-traffic community as FW, were exactly the same as those same comments and links would have been if made in the FW members' own personal journals.
I am reminded of this argument by the statements now being made that anyone who posts anything on the net, even locked, has no right to protest if the information becomes public. Because the net is a public place, and anyone who posts anything there, no matter how secured, is just asking for it to be publicized.
I am reminded of other arguments about victims "asking for it".
Nor do I consider this an unreasonable analogy to make. There is a voilation of personal integrity invovled. And the perpetrators are denying their responsibility by insisting that it is the victim's job to be aware of all risks and guard against them with such vigor that even the most aggressive perpetrator has no opening. That it is only the utterly, inhumanly blameless who have the right to respect.
And you know what pisses me off even more? If I posted this publicly, I have little doubt it would be pounced upon as Wank! and Drama! and promptly linked and reposted for mockery by people who would say "My God, she's so serious about it, can't she take a joke?" As if to make light of the pain they have caused. As if to say that, because it is "humor", they cannot be held culpable for the cruelty of it. As if to say the cruelty is deserved, because the target didn't behave with irreprochable reserve and purity.
Anyone who works with sexual assault issues or with women's rights issues should recognize this pattern. The fact that it is applied, here, to emotional rather than physical assault, and, usually, assault on a lesser scale, does nothing to alleviate my disgust with anyone who would employ the pattern to excuse themselves.
There is no excuse, and I'm sick of hearing people who have indulged their own pettiness and cruelty claim that they have done nothing wrong, and that it is the victim's fault.
*wishes self luck*
There is no excuse for wank comms.
I'm not going to phrase this in "I believe" terms, because I'm laying out an ethical judgement, here, and while that is invariably a personal endeavor, it is one that, by its nature, extends beyond just myself. I apply this to everyone, and not just as an opinion. There is no excuse.
The people who participate in wank comms, such as Fandom Wank, insist that they merely display a healthy sense of humor. That they are perfectly happy to have their own wanking mocked just as they mock others. And that anyone who posts on the internet should only expect to be targeted, because the internet is a public place.
The sense of humor argument is the one I find hardest to refute, actually, because it has a grain of truth. If, in the middle of some wank explosion, someone were to speak up and say "you know, we're all getting kind of shrill and behaving foolishly, and blowing the original disagreement out of proportion to the point where I'm laughing; congratulations, everyone", that might indeed have some beneficial effect on the wank in question. But only if it comes from the inside--from a participant in the forum affected. Because it isn't the business of anyone who is not affected. For a participant to go outside that forum to another, one which is not affected or involved, to say such a thing is not 'having a good healthy laugh at ourselves'. "Ourselves" does not apply when the participant has removed herself from that context. Instead, this is making fun of other people.
And that's a cruel thing to do. No matter how great or small, it is an immature activity and a cruel one.
That people like the FW members understand this perfectly well is demonstrated by their use of counter-wank as a disciplinary measure. Someone who posts something considered unacceptable is, in turn, mocked. For them to do this, and then say that they are happy to take what they dish out, is extremely disingenuous. To say that they can laugh at themselves, and why can't the people they mock just do the same, is verbal slight of hand that turns attention away from the manifest hurtfulness of what they are doing. That they all seek to avoid being mocked, and use mockery as an internal punishment for their own, shows very clearly that they know it hurts to be the target.
So why do they do it?
I have, by the way, no sympathy for the suggestion that FW is not as bad as it was two years ago, and that it's mostly a social comm now, where people compliment each other's icons. That's a load of bullshit, and the merest skim through the latest posts will show it.
Likewise, any statement that they confine themselves to mocking people who make public fools of themselves is, if not a technical lie, certainly just as disingenuous as the second argument. There is, for example, mockery posted, fairly recently, of some extremely personal matters that one of the members found on a couple of personal journals. When the embroiled parties protested, they were told they had invited this treatment by posting publically and unlocked, as if posting unlocked in an obscure individual journal were equivalent to posting in a community forum. It was implied that the insults levelled at their romantic lives and psychological stability, and the links back to the personal journals, posted in such a high-traffic community as FW, were exactly the same as those same comments and links would have been if made in the FW members' own personal journals.
I am reminded of this argument by the statements now being made that anyone who posts anything on the net, even locked, has no right to protest if the information becomes public. Because the net is a public place, and anyone who posts anything there, no matter how secured, is just asking for it to be publicized.
I am reminded of other arguments about victims "asking for it".
Nor do I consider this an unreasonable analogy to make. There is a voilation of personal integrity invovled. And the perpetrators are denying their responsibility by insisting that it is the victim's job to be aware of all risks and guard against them with such vigor that even the most aggressive perpetrator has no opening. That it is only the utterly, inhumanly blameless who have the right to respect.
And you know what pisses me off even more? If I posted this publicly, I have little doubt it would be pounced upon as Wank! and Drama! and promptly linked and reposted for mockery by people who would say "My God, she's so serious about it, can't she take a joke?" As if to make light of the pain they have caused. As if to say that, because it is "humor", they cannot be held culpable for the cruelty of it. As if to say the cruelty is deserved, because the target didn't behave with irreprochable reserve and purity.
Anyone who works with sexual assault issues or with women's rights issues should recognize this pattern. The fact that it is applied, here, to emotional rather than physical assault, and, usually, assault on a lesser scale, does nothing to alleviate my disgust with anyone who would employ the pattern to excuse themselves.
There is no excuse, and I'm sick of hearing people who have indulged their own pettiness and cruelty claim that they have done nothing wrong, and that it is the victim's fault.
Hi. My $.02 (AM)
I saw your comment and that you'd privileged me with friending, so I hope you don't mind if I chime in with my experiences...
Two summers ago I learned of the existence of FW quite by accident, when someone who lurked on my site for no reason that made any sense went and made fun of a private, intense, ethical-theological-mythological argument among us regulars, which caused a long FW thread which then got back to us, nyah nyah style. The details aren't relevant, particularly - it was extremely serious stuff, on the ethical side, and we were also using references from works that we were all extremely serious about, and some of it was pretty intensive technical metaphysics, and when you talk about religion or philosophy or fiction, there's a lot of emotion involved. But this was my tiny, obscure, no-hit backwater board, not GAFF or any other high traffic community.
I pretty much blew it off - I have enemies, from fandom, because being a defiant canonista on ffnet will do that, and also so will being opinionated and cocky, if they're not popular opinions, oh well, I'm not impressed with you guys either. And forgot about them. But I had at that time a requirement that was pretty important: let me know if you link to something on my site, because at that time I had very small site, and had to be careful about bandwidth. Even if you're just going to tear it apart, let me know so I can monitor.
And they did it again, and they didn't. So I was pretty ticked, but again, it was just personal, I could afford to overlook it. But then I found a little more about FW - that they bragged about making people cry, and take down their sites. And there wasn't any point to it - they weren't *critics*, they didn't get in fights about style or plot or canon or anything like that - they just found people they thought uncool, and pointed and jeered.
So I set up a trap, to put their claims of having a sense of humor and not taking selves so seriously, to the test. (There must be some kitsune in my family tree, somewhere.)
I wrote a pompous, mock-anthropological "dissertation" examining them. I tore into the pieces that the first and repeat offender had written on her own site, line by line, by her own standards. I used as many polysyllabic words as I could pack into it without the FTP breaking down! checked my monthly bandwidth, posted it on my little site, - and then I waited.
Sure enough, they went crazy. They were besides themselves. It was downloaded hundreds of times in a few hours. They couldn't stay away. How they howled and mocked me! And then I put up the second half, - showing how I'd suckered them, saying why I had done it, that they were vicious losers, posting the numbers for how many times they had downloaded it in how few hours showing that they *did* care very much what I thought of them, that I had the power, and I thought they were pathetic, and I would happily make them dance to my tune if they didn't learn from this. And I took down the link to the "tar-baby" posts, but not the posts themselves. (I warned them that if they tried to troll-flood my boards I would make *another* example of them, too.)
And then I forgot about them, until someone reminded me later. I keep forgetting about them, except sometimes when I check my site stats, I see that those files keep getting downloaded... I got a couple thank-you emails for standing up to them, but except when something like this happens, I forget they exist, because they're boring. So much more fun to fight about real issues.
But you can't just ignore bullies - they *don't* go away. If it had only been me, I would not have punished them, but I'm older and don't care so much. It was them ganging up on the weak and then celebrating it - blaiming the victims as you say - not a fair fight - and I *knew* they wouldn't be able to take what they dished out.
Re: Hi. My $.02 (AM)
Not at all, welcome!
Besides, I think I may be in love. That's brilliant; what a way to turn it around on them.
And there wasn't any point to it - they weren't *critics*, they didn't get in fights about style or plot or canon or anything like that
Yes, I think that's one of the things that annoys me the most about wank comms and Sue hunting comms and at least half the badfic comms. And even several of the meta comms, which are allegedly havens for analysis. There's nothing productive about what they do, not even in the tooth-and-claw academic manner. It's just so uselessly petty.
*grins* I can just imagine the screams. *wicked laugh*
Well,
SnarkSue business at the beginning! The difference between the very-appropriately named "Wank" communities - because that is what they are doing, far more than what they are mocking - and canon-debating ones, is that the former don't care about what they're fighting over, and that is an uncrossable gulf. In fact, what attracts their mockery-antennae, like blood in the water, is passion: people caring so much about something that they don't care how they look to outsiders any more, who make themselves Wild Men by the fierceness of their love. This is intolerable to the mavens of society: there is nothing a society hostess of the Gilded Age hated more, than people talking politics or religion at a dinner party. Fandom is both. (And both are fandoms, to sound paradoxical.)They have to tear those who care to pieces, because they are a reproach to them. How dare they have such passion, such heat, such delight in something that they care if someone hurts it, in their eyes? And so, like vampires, like sharks, they must crush and drain all the life out of those who do - and they usually succeed, because few of us, particularly younger fen, are able to truly not care about being mocked by the normals. I'm lucky - I'm older, and I've always been insane, so it isn't a temptation. (I tried being a mundane for a year, in college. I nearly killed myself with boredom and the stress of pretending.)
When we fight over canon vs fanon, it's ultimately a Platonic clash: two contending versions of the Ideal, both defended because each side believes in their own Form of the original. But I have *infinitely* more in common with the rankest Suvian offender, than with any of the ravening FW horde. We joust in deadly earnest: they would destroy the tournament from spite.
Why bother? It's just fanfic--no, it's always never "just" anything. All kinds of things are going on, primarily applied critical theory:
Coming from an academic background, where literary criticism is as vicious and cutthroat and often as pointlessly-personal as FW, but even when it isn't tends to get wrapped up in lofty technical terms, and *rarely* does it have any real-world impact, it is rather wonderful (in all archaic and modern senses of the word) to me to see how a rough-and-ready critical theory can take shape with the rapidity and vigour of a soccer match. Something is happening on all sides - the offense, the defense, the onlookers - when canon battles are waged in realtime in public forae. It's almost like the ancients with their drama contests and a dash of Celtic bards' "flyting" thrown in.
It also serves as a beginning critical thinking and ethical socialization training: forcing people who have not likely ever been obliged to it nor will be in school, to think about the implications of what they say and do, that even a Secondary Reality exists apart and has its rules, that they are not entitled to admiration, but must earn it, that art is work, and if you want just the praises but none of the tomatoes then you don't - imo - belong publishing your stuff. The fact that most Sue-Hunters are ex-Sue-Writers is a dead giveaway that this is something different from FW: instead of getting bored with the fandom and then going away and sneering at it (embittered ex-fen, when professional, go and write snotty reviews of LOTR for the London Review of Books - it's the same thing), reborn canonistas want to understand, to appreciate what they were too self-caught-up-in as "Lady Greenleaf" or "UltimateSeiyuQueen" to notice, and to be able to appreciate other stories and work towards improving their own.)
One is a regression, the other is a crude, uncouth, yet vigorous school of art. --But then, there's a reason why I always despite being highly verbal, identified with uncouth, direct characters like Chewie as a kid (as well as with old wizards like Gandalf and Ben) - Some of us are destined to have Monkey as our avatar, whether we realize it or not.
Think of it as Wookie Soccer
Re: Think of it as Wookie Soccer
This is a discussion I was just having with some other fen--about Sues and the hunting thereof. Our conclusion was that there are, loosely, two kinds of Sue writers. One quickly becomes a reformed Sue writer, who, as you say, has seen the light of canon and wishes to spread it with evangelical fervor. That one wrote Sues out of inexperience, generally, starting with what she knew as any writer tends to. I find that tiresome, because they're as rigid and doctrinaire as any other convert and I have yet to meet any who are capable of holding any kind of dialogue on the subject. They're much more the walking-billboard types. But, I suppose, I can always hope they grow up to be articulate disputants at some point.
The other kind, though, is the one who writes what I call Stories That Are Not Stories. That's the one who doesn't give a flying fig about the art and craft of writing or, really, about canon--those things have no bearing on her goals. She writes something that looks, superficially, like a story but is, in fact, much closer to a personals ad. It's there as a gesture of contact and community, using the form which has become so highly valued in fandom. And I honestly think it's unreasonable to demand that they conform to the same standards as people who write Stories That Are Stories.
I'm a big believer in the influence of utility. If someone wants to write good stories about the world and characters of Fandom Whatever, then, yes, I think the combat of canon v fanon is entirely justified and appropriate, and I'll just be over here getting my cleats on. But if the point is socialization, or the heart-comfort-food of folding the story around oneself, or a wish fulfillment lark... I think trying to deny the validity of those projects is just as much a denial of the passion that goes into this thing of ours as the naysayers at FW.
I probably wont read them. But I'm not about to say that they have no right to exist. And that is precisely what the vast majority of Sue hunting comms and individual members thereof are saying.
*blinks* And I wrote all that before coffee. I must go remedy this...