Tag Archives: Benjanun Sridankaew

Requires Hate: Hostile exploits of cultural vulnerabilties

The lid has now well and truly blown off in the Requires Hate affair.

This blog post from Laura Mixon, wife of SFWA president Steven Gould lays out all the gory details, and the comments are very illuminating.

A critical mass of SF professionals are now concluding that the rainbows and kittens “Benjanun Sriduangkaew” persona was a fake construct, her apologies cannot be taken at face value, and the SF community has been dealing with a malevolent manipulative sociopath and serial abuser. More and more of her victims are coming forward.

One thing needs to be made clear. Requires Hate was not a critic. A critic is an important part in the cultural ecosystem who forms part of a feedback loop that serves to make art better. She did not do that; her aim looks as though it to make room for her own writing by destroying the careers of potential rivals. She was allowed to get away with it for so long because she appropriated the language of social justice.

Her abuse didn’t take place in a vacuum. To use a software analogy, her behaviour is a hostile exploit of a critical vulnerability in the subculture. In particular, the rules of etiquette surrounding privilege-checking and tone arguments that have become commonplace in social justice spaces. Yes, they developed for perfectly good reasons to give voice to the marginalised, but they’d calcified and become open to abuse.

Some conservatives had actually been pointing this out for years, but they’d been ignored, largely because they were conservatives.

In recent years the SFF world has been forced to deal with problems of old-fashioned racism and male sexual predators. A lot of measures such as stricter convention harassment policies have been developed as a result. The virulently racist Vox Day was expelled from SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) for breaching their rules once too often. But the next predator doesn’t necessarily look like the last, and Requires Hate came from the opposite direction from the way everyone was looking. Too many people appear to have been blindsided.

Requires Hate has been described as being as bad as Vox Day. But she is actually a whole order of magnitude worse than Vox Day. It’s true that Vox Day is a vile bigot. But at the end of the day he’s just an internet blowhard. I haven’t seen any accusations the VD has directly stalked or engaged in sustained campaigns of harassment against anyone. RH is everything VD is, including the bigotry, but she’s guilty of far, far more than that.

It’s not hard to imagine some people wanting to use this as an opportunity to settle old scores. But I hope that the SFF community as a whole can move on. It cannot become the inclusive community it aspires to be if it continues to tolerate witch-hunts, bullying and the sort of abuse we’ve been seeing. Those who were willing to tolerate RH as long as it looked as though she was in their tent pissing out are part of the problem and I hope that they’ll recognise this and make amends.

The community needs to reject the more extreme forms of identity politics that see entire demographics that historically made up a big part of SF’s core community as an enemy. There must be far greater emphasis on human empathy.

It’s hard not to draw parallels with ongoing trainwreck of GamerGate at this point. It’s all part of the same wider culture war after all, and people who should have known better helped to enable Requires Hate because she pretended to be one of their side. The parallels with both sides of GamerGate are left an an exercise for the reader.

Posted in Science Fiction | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

The Outing of Requires Hate

Although I have been a reader of science fiction for many, many years, my fandom is music. And I’m glad it is.

Until very recently there was a book review blog called “Requires Only The You Hate”. It’s stock-in-trade was vitriolic reviews of science fiction novels, typically denouncing everything as racist and attacking the author rather than the work. The same blogger was also a notorious troll, posting under a number of identities over a period of a decade, and behaving as a serial harasser to a significant number of people, the majority of them women. Had she been operating in Britain she would very likely have been jailed. Her behaviour really was that bad.

Now her identity has been outed as a new writer under the name of Benjanun Sridankaew, whose new persona as a writer is all sweetness and light.

The whole thing is detailed here, if you have the stomach to read it. It’s nasty stuff.

She has now posted a public apology, but in a situation like this an apology can only be the first step on a long road to redemption. You can’t just wash away a past that bad overnight.

Whether or not we will see similar apologies from any of those who have enabled and encouraged her reign of terror over the past decade remains to be seen, and it has to be said that the list of people listed as supporting her over her victims contains one or two of the usual suspects. These are some of the same names that showed up in the Jonathan Ross debacle, including the one responsible for driving Ross’ wife off Twitter.

But the biggest problem is the subculture she operated within. What sort of subculture considers what can only be described as dehumanising hate-speech to be acceptable provided the target group is more “privileged”? Yet this is precisely the set of values that have taken over a significant part of the SFF world in recent years. It’s stated goals are to promote inclusivity and social justice, but without a commitment to human empathy it’s devolved into a frighteningly authoritarian form of identity politics. It’s created a perfect environment in which an abuser can hide; all they have to do cite the correct buzzwords and they’re given a free pass. There are parallels both with the collapse of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, and the abuse scandals that have seriously diminished the standing of the Roman Catholic Church.

When the whole Vox Day/SFWA and Hugo nominations things blew up, I was shocked that even a tiny minority would support someone who’s a known homophobic white supremacist rape apologist. But seeing later dramas unfold I’m beginning to understand why a long-term online friend who I’ve always considered a liberal would claim in the comments on this blog to be rooting for Larry Correia and Vox Day for the Hugo awards.

What happens next will be interesting. When SF’s default ideology was a militaristic frontier libertarianism and most books were written by white men with engineering degrees, too many voices got marginalised, and that was not a good thing. But now you’re left with a feeling it’s gone too far the other way, and the scene has adopted a set of values that meant it was only a matter of time before it all imploded. It’s had its revolution, now it’s reached the stage of the revolution eating its children.

SF would be a lot healthier if authors could put whatever politics they liked into the actual books, but SF as a whole didn’t favour one ideology over another. There will always be cliques and partisan sub-fandoms, that’s just human nature. And sometimes they’ll fight and there will be drama. But the bigger cultural war needs to end in a truce with both sides acknowledging the other’s right to exist.

I am still glad my chosen fandom is music. Music doesn’t have this nonsense nowadays.

Posted in Science Fiction | Tagged , , , | Comments Off
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