trying to sort things out

[mickeym]

This has been one hell of a weekend, hasn't it? (Weekend here loosely defined as 'from Thursday night forward'.)

I wasn't going to say anything in public because others have said things so much better than I feel I could, and I'm still not going to say much, because there's no way I can say the things I'm thinking as well as they've been articulated elsewhere. kroki_refur has an awesome post here, and drvsilla's is here.

One thing in particular stood out for me in Dru's post:

The flurry of initial post&comment reactions aren't what trouble me.

It's natural, if not always excusable, to get irrationally upset and unleash the hounds. To let anger and indignation speak, while simultaneously letting it mask messier, more raw emotions like hurt, humiliation and shock. As a friend, it's natural to default to SOP when a flister angsts mistreatment a/o the anonmeme: Stop. Drop. OH NOES. To offer support, humor or airy dismissal--and mean it--but to then move on.

The persistence troubles me greatly.

I've done the kneejerk reaction thing, many times. If a friend is hurting, you want to comfort them, support them, back them up. I still want to support my friends. But sometimes a situation, or a person, isn't best served by continued aggression, and this whole thing is one of those.

Here is another post that says things so much better than I ever could.

I'm uncomfortable all the time. I dislike conflict, and I try to stay out of it as much as possible. I hate being in a situation where I feel like I have to choose sides, because sometimes it's not as easy as doing that. But I've spent most of the weekend feeling uncertain and uncomfortable and mildly nauseous, and while I still feel that way, I think -- hope -- I'm doing the right thing, here. Not standing up AGAINST any one person in particular, but rather helping to spread the word that certain actions and stances aren't the right ones to take.

Editing to add this: hederahelix has an absolutely wonderful comment/point here. I'm going to c/p the text in here in this entry, because I want to be able to come back and look at it and re-read it, because she says so perfectly what I've been thinking and feeling, and felt unable to articulate:

I wasn't at Wincon 2008. The first I heard about all of this was beanside's post. But, obviously, as this whole thing got to be a bigger issue, I started following the discussions.

But your comment here made me want to respond because I think it gets at the heart of something that I see happen in a lot of different discussions in and our of fandom.

You say that no matter what you say, you'll face criticism for something, but you say that like criticism is always a bad thing when I don't think that's the case. After all, in fandom, we use beta readers to give us crit, right?

Now, I'm not saying that there aren't times when criticism is a bad thing. I've seen plenty of people (in fandom and outside of fandom) wield criticism like a passive aggressive weapon. I've even seen that happen in beta readings--of friends, and it's not pretty when it does.

But there are also a lot of people with less dysfunctional communication skills that sometimes use constructive criticism not as a weapon.

There are a lot of people who won't criticize someone unless they care about the person and/or who won't criticize something someone said if they believe that the speaker can't or won't hear it.

I think often in these debates, partly because journals are this weird semi-public, semi-private space, sometimes we feel like we want to rush out and support a friend when someone else has thrown a bag of stink on the person's front lawn.

But I don't think the people here who are sincerely telling thenyxie that they're troubled by her comments--and why they are troubled by her comments--are using criticism as a weapon. Those comments seem to me to be a model for the kind of criticism that is attempting to let people know that their mascara has run in the rain, and hey, maybe you want to clean that up before you go into your next meeting.

I guess I just heard in your comment that being called out on something reads to you always or mostly like a bad thing; one of the things I learned from activist work in a number of different contexts is that being called out isn't always meant to hurt. It's kind of like telling your friend that her skirt is tucked up in her underpants before she leaves the bathroom.

Yes, for that split second after you tell your friend that her ass is showing, she's going to feel awful, but it's better to tell her that than to let her wander around in public with her ass hanging out, right?


And yes, if she's just walked from her car on the street into the building with her skirt stuck like that, you're going to be the deliverer of news that is going to make her feel really crappy for a minute; but it's much better to make her feel crappy for a minute than to let her continue to walk around like that. Because when she sees her ass in the mirror later, she's going to feel doubly betrayed that not only did she just show her ass, but that you--her friend--let her keep doing it.

Criticism can sometimes be more like that; for those of us with a long track record of seeing people use it like a weapon--the poisoned keyboard of concern trolling, or the not-so-obvious shredding of something someone else did in order to make someone feel better--it can take a while before any criticism, even the constructive kind, feels like not a threat to us, but it's a skill that can be learned over time, and I find it helpful to remind myself of that when I start to feel down about having said something in public that came out differently from how I meant it and/or that I realized later wasn't an okay thing to say even if I hadn't intended for it to go wrong.

Comments

[cormallen.livejournal.com]

Oh, I like that a lot, Wendy. Thank you!