![[Trigger Warning] Laurie Mann shows her ass by excoriating fandom over the horrible treatment of Rene Walling](https://i0.wp.com/theangryblackwoman.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/icons/abw.jpg?resize=100%2C100){kind=icon}
Due to a discussion on Facebook started by Scott Edelman, I’ve spent the last couple of days arguing with people about Rene Walling and what constitutes “real” sexual harassment. I have a lot to say on this subject, but it’s going to require a longer blog post and a lot of crafting.
In the mean time, I’d like to point you to the blog of Laurie Mann, who posted a stunningly ridiculous and stupid post in which she wags a finger at all the bad fandom people who are just blowing this whole ReaderCon thing out of proportion.
I left a comment on that blog, but I doubt it will escape the moderation queue, thus I am posting it here. You really, really need to go over to Laurie’s blog and read her post1 before reading this because of context.
I always felt very safe in fandom.
This right here is the crux of everything that is wrong with your post, Laurie. Just because you have always felt safe does not mean that fandom is safe or that other women do. This entire post is you positing that your experiences trump everyone else’s and all these evil friends of Genevieve are just being soooo unfair. It’s bull.
I can think of a couple of times having long discussions with men, sometimes in their hotel rooms during SF conventions. A few of them came onto me – a kiss, a grope, whatever. I said no, and we just resumed our conversation.
UM. Laurie. This is not in any way okay. Yes, it’s good that when you said no they stopped, but what the hell is it with you thinking it’s just fine for them to have groped and kissed you without permission? That’s the way you wrote it. That you were with them, they touched you, you said no.
Perhaps you’ve been socialized to think that this is just harmless flirting and, as long as they back off when you tell them to, all is copacetic. I’m here to tell you it is not. There is never a scenario in which someone touches you un-accidentally without your permission and that’s okay.
Here again we come to the real problem with your entire post and attitude: you have decided that certain boundaries are okay and attempting to say that anyone who feels differently is just blowing things out of proportion. You don’t get to decide that for others.
No meant no, but an unwanted kiss did not mean I’d just been raped.
It did mean you’d just been sexually assaulted. And I know you’re going to say “That does not rise to the level of ‘real’ sexual assault and by saying it does you belittle people who have actually been assaulted!” so I’m going to head you off by saying: Nope, wrong. Just because a grope is not rape doesn’t mean it’s not a violation and wrong. There is no getting around this.
Sexual assault is not a matter of degrees. It’s a violation of boundaries without consent. Period.
Fannish women knew how to stand up for themselves, right?
And yet you are angry at a fannish woman and her female and male friends standing up for herself because we’re a mob. It’s okay okay to stand up for yourself alone.
At the same time, I never heard about a woman being raped at a con.
Because you’ve never heard of it, it never happens. I’m so glad that your reality is the only reality, Laurie. It makes the world so much easier to live in!
Do you know how ridiculous you sound? Just because you knew women in college that got raped but didn’t hear from fannish women who were raped does not mean that the latter did not happen.
Perhaps the fannish women you know or don’t know didn’t tell you about their rapes or didn’t announce it. And perhaps they didn’t do so because women LIKE YOU would trot out of the filk room to say you’d never heard of anyone being raped at a con, plus that guy is totally nice and all, so obviously they must be wrong about their own experiences.
Why do you insist on invalidating other people’s experiences, Laurie? Oh right, because it makes your reality that much less real and more like a fantasy you made up.
Can I also point out that you’ve been told by multiple people at this point that your little summary of what happened at ReaderCon is both incomplete and inaccurate, yet I have not seen you correct it here on this blog post. That’s class, Laurie.
You ask for people to be respectful of each other, but you have not been respectful of the person who had to deal with the harassment at the con or of anyone who has ever had to deal with harassment, sexual assault, rape, and more.
Instead you’re sitting up here defending Rene Walling.
Keep being classy, Laurie Mann. You’re going on my list of people to avoid at cons.
[Trigger Warning] Laurie Mann shows her ass by excoriating fandom over the horrible treatment of Rene Walling -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman
Footnotes
- As much as you can stomach, anyway
I read the comments. Probably a bad choice. This stood out for me:
Uhmmmm, okay, fine, don’t make this a feminist issue. Make it a public safety issue. Make it a don’t be a dick issue. I don’t freaking care WHAT YOU LABEL IT, but don’t make freaking excuses and dismiss other people who say it’s happening because YOU don’t want to look weak. All you do is look like an ass and allow it to keep happening.
*rages in a corner*
“Sexual assault is not a matter of degrees. It’s a violation of boundaries without consent. Period.”
—
Then you should be in favor of one penalty for people who transgress boundaries, whether rape or an awkward attempt at a kiss. 25 years to life? What should that penalty be?
Ariel, I enjoyed how high you had to go to make that leap of logic. Too bad the Olympics are over.
I’ll help you out with understanding my point since it seems to have passed you by.
The person who wrote the post I’m responding to is attempting to make the case that person A kissing person B without permission is not rape, thus it shouldn’t be taken seriously. It’s the favorite argument of people who want to downplay sexual assault. Like: it’s not worth getting worked up over unless it’s rape.
This is the same line of thinking that flows into the whole “legitimate rape” conversation. And as any right thinking person knows, folks who start trying to label some rapes as “legitimate” while others aren’t are complete and total assholes who do not deserve a hearing in polite company.
Whether the sexual assault involves physical force or penetration or involves a person laying hands on your genitals without permission, it is still sexual assault.
Does that mean the punishment for rape should be the same as the punishment for forcing a kiss on a person? No. However, both deserve punishment. The degree of severity determines punishment. However, the degree of severity does not determine whether it’s a sexual assault or not.
Does that help you?
Ah, yes, the “but you jerks want to put people in jail for making googly eyes at women at cons!” objection.
No. No we don’t want to jail people for 25 years for trying to kiss someone who doesn’t want it. But we do want the recipients of such unwanted behavior to be able to tell someone about it and have that someone say “that shit’s fucked up” rather than “well maybe you shouldn’t have been wearing that corset top if you didn’t want guys to come on to you at a con, oh and also, quit overreacting, geez.”
‘Sexual’ is just a malleable legal concept like ‘reasonable’ and ‘dishonest’, which allows culture to inform what is and isn’t a crime. I don’t think you can draw any bright lines. Social kissing is very common in some places, so I can totally see people reasonably arguing that kissing isn’t sexual assault.
I very much agree with your main point: just because Laurie Mann is happy with things as they are, and hasn’t experienced what she sees as harassment is no reason why other people should see things the same way. Or that others should accept behavior that she considers acceptable.
However, I do want to pick one small nit with the following:
This amounts to telling her what she should consider okay or not-okay for herself, which IMHO is not OK. Unless you have some evidence that her ability to run her own life is compromised, ISTM that she is the final arbiter of what is OK — for her.
It seems to me that, just as Laurie should not be telling other people that they should be OK with, say, being groped w/o prior permission, we should not be telling Laurie that she should not be.
It is certainly true that men (or women, if they want to do this stuff) should assume “explicit permission required in advance” as the default. And Laurie Mann (or anybody else) has no business telling anyone else that it is OK to do this stuff to anybody who is _not_ OK with it. What’s more, society, or subsocieties (such as ReaderCon) may decide that they are not OK with that stuff going on in their public spaces, even between consenting adults, because it appears to legitimize sexual harassment and assault.
But anyone who is mature enough to be allowed out in society without a leash should be able to recognize that behavior that is acceptable to one person (or a few) may not be acceptable to everyone, and to learn what behaviors they should use with people they don’t know to avoid offending them (or worse.) Laurie Mann being OK with Rene Walling (or whoever) groping her without permission does not make it OK for Rene Walling (or anyone) to do the same thing to anyone else without their permission.
Finally, from the point of view of someone wanting to “get closer” to someone else, knowing that some (unspecified) people don’t need to be asked in advance doesn’t really change how you need to deal with people. Unless someone has told you beforehand that you shouldn’t ask, you’re going to need to ask first, anyway (unless you’re a mind reader.)
James, that’s a bit of a reach. I don’t know about where you come from but where I come from, people know the difference between social kissing and sexual kissing. Heck, my parents live in France where people kiss each other socially all the time. I’ve never heard anyone describe a peck on the cheeks as sexual assault. (That’s not to say that it can’t be plain old assault, though.)
How do they know the difference? I agree in some places some types of kissing is considered social and not sexual, but that’s not some sort of objective judgement – it’s just a culturally specific drawing of a line at one point on a spectrum. Give the same behavior a shot in Saudi Arabia and see what they think of the distinction.
So, randomly kissing someone without giving a shit whether they want you to, or even knowing damn well that they don’t want you to, isn’t sexual assault because there’s social kissing in some cultures? Never mind whether the culture you’re in actually has such a thing. Heck, there are contexts where breast touching isn’t sexual (the doctor’s office, breastfeeding a baby), so groping someone against their will must not be sexual assault either. And there are contexts where someone could take my car without asking and it wouldn’t be theft, so, gee, I guess there’s no such thing as car theft either. Everything is just all totally subjective and arbitrary, so let’s not call things by definitions that apply to the context in which they actually happened, because in some completely different context, that definition might not apply.
But she *wasn’t* okay with it. She told them to stop.
AMM @6, Mann wasn’t saying ‘here are my boundaries’. She was saying that because she, personally, is not bothered by an unwanted grope and because she, personally, always had people stop after being told to, that getting worked up about an unwanted kiss or a grope is wrong and Hurts All Fandom.
Which is really her point, of course. Don’t make the boys angry and don’t admit there are any flaws in our beloved community.
KellyK, that’s the point – people are usually familiar with what are the normal social boundaries for their culture. We use complex context-based social cues. To a certain extent they are arbitrary, but they’re also fairly stable and predictable. We recognise that a breast exam is not the same as a grope, and a voluntary social kiss is not the same as a sexual assault.
Most of the time, when people transgress those boundaries, and especially when they transgress the social cues that are telling them their actions are unwelcome, it’s because they’re choosing to disregard the cues, not because they don’t know them. If someone shows that they generally know how to observe those normal social boundaries and then they transgress them anway, then lines about social kissing or whatever aren’t an explanation, they’re an excuse.
Maybe I’m misreading angry black woman, but I felt like she was saying this is the objective line that you should not cross because that action is wrong regardless of cultural preferences. Rather than this is a partly arbitrary, but also fairly stable and predictable, line you should cross because it’s our current cultural consensus.
I think there’s a confusion about the context. Angry black woman isn’t okay with it, in the sense that she thinks it is wrong, a violation, and should be criminal. Laurie’s isn’t okay with it in the sense that she think’s it unpleasant and would rather it didn’t happen, but she doesn’t think it’s an unreasonable action , a violation or should be a crime. They’re both not okay, but there’s a big difference between their positions.
Actually, I think that ABW’s main point is that Laurie should not be insisting that other women view unwanted contact the way she (Laurie) does.
ABW also comes across (to me) as saying that her position is the One True Way to look at it and that Laurie is wrong not to be more upset when she (Laurie) suffers unwanted contact, and that is what I thought was going too far.
I do think that what is going on here is people trying to change the social rules. In the past, men groping unwilling women was something that you weren’t supposed to get upset about (viz. Isaac Asimov), and women who did get upset were told it was their problem. People, especially women, are now trying to change that rule so that groping unwilling women will be considered unacceptable.
Ms. Sunlight, I was disagreeing with james (and his assertion that you can’t call a clearly sexual unwanted kiss sexual assault, because there are contexts where kissing isn’t sexual), not with you!