Day 275: The Post I was Afraid to Make (but not for the reason I talked about being afraid before)

Today, I’m going to take a bit of a risk. Before I do, though, I want to preface with a few declarations:

1. I would never presume to claim that my experiences are more (or less) important or valid than anyone elses
2. I know that hearing a man talk about sexual harassment is tiresome, but I also think there’s value in knowing how some of us feel
3. Again, I know this post is going to seem like a “you need to check your privilege” moment. You are welcome to feel that way. I just feel like speaking from the heart.

Okay, all that said, what I want to talk about today starts with GamerGate and then weaves to Joss Whedon before stopping at my feet.

If you don’t know GamerGate, sweet X-mas, I don’t want to tell you the whole story right now. Google it. I am glad to discuss it sometime. I teach it in my classes. But the part of it I want to talk about here is the sort of “opening shot.” The ex-boyfriend of Zoe Quinn, the developer of Depression Quest, made a scathing blog post where he accused Zoe of infidelity and sleeping with a man to get a good review for her game. It ended up being that this blog post was factually inaccurate, and it spawned a whole host of ugly, inexcusable behaviors. All over lies.

But early on people presumed the post was true. And I, like many, thought this was a misogyny thing. Of course in the games world a story about a woman using her femininity to get noticed would gain traction because a large portion of the male gaming community is anti-woman or at least is anti-equality-for-women. That’s a sad fact. I want it to not be true. I work to counter it. But it’s true.

I wondered, however, how close this was to the famed Mandela Effect. It wouldn’t be precisely that; people weren’t mis-remembering. But what is it that happens when we take an account as true without challenging it, then others follow, then others follow. This sort of happened with James Frey and A Million Tiny Pieces, and it happened, initially, with this account about Zoe Quinn. It happens semi-frequently with followers of the current President, who has forgotten things like that Puerto Rico was a part of our country. Maybe this phenomenon is literally the “fake news” the President complains of.

Then there’s Joss Whedon.

Full disclosure: I don’t have a reason to think that Kai Cole is lying. In my heart, I want her story to be at least slightly inaccurate because Whedon is one of my heroes as a writer, and I really hate to think that he was a prick. I’m not trying to claim I know that anything Cole said is inaccurate, though. Let me stress that again before the next sentiment: I am NOT claiming that anything Cole wrote isn’t true.

That said, we’ve seen that of late there’s an uptick in men behaving badly being outed (Cosby and Weinstein being the biggest among them, if you don’t count the fact that our President bragged of grabbing women by the genitals and got a pass). In those cases, the accusations certainly appear to be true. Both of those guys are jerks of the highest order.

Here’s what bothers me:  I respect Kai Cole. But her post about Joss is just her personal opinion, shared after a relationship fell apart.

Whedon has been silent on the topic, so far as I can see, and that does speak a bit to the voracity of Cole’s comments. At the same time, it alarms ME that pretty much everyone is taking Cole’s essay as absolute truth and that people so quickly descended upon Joss.

I think part of this is that I see happening to him what is one of my own greatest fears, and I am not trying in any way to claim Joss Whedon didn’t do what is claimed by his ex. That’s not my point at all.

My point is that we live in a world where people are very quick to take things that exist in the gray as black-and-white. I can see the outrage, if Joss Whedon– Feminist Icon Guy– was a womanizer. I can see the juicy desire to blow him to bits over it and ruin his reputation.

But if you’re going to take down an Iconic creator, shouldn’t you be sure you’re working from a position of knowing the truth first?

I grew up as a feminist male in a place where being a feminist male wasn’t easy. I’m also a large person, and with that comes a weird sense of power dynamics. I’ve also almost always existed in spaces where power dynamics were switched up. I’m from a matrilineal culture, grew up with a single mother, went into a discipline (English) that is dominated by female scholars, and I did most of my early-life work in clerical and retail situations where the bulk of my co-workers were women. It’s only now as a games professor that I am surrounded by male colleagues, though our students are still majority female.

I really like women. In fact, I fit better in the mold of “feminine” than my wife (she’d be the first to point this out). Most personality tests show me more female than male.

But growing up as I did, I’ve always been terrified of the looming shadow of sexual harassment, because it is the great destroyer.

I have never, in my life, made an inappropriate comment to a woman on purpose. I’m sure I’ve slipped up before. Everyone does.

But because of how I grew up and who I’ve been around, I’m not likely to enter personal space uninvited. I like to give reassuring hugs but I don’t initiate them. I never comment on a woman’s appearance (other than my wife) out of fear of being misinterpreted. I rarely meet one-on-one with female students. I don’t talk about sex in public.

I have four deep fears in my life: one is suffering brain damage, one is getting that weird thing called locked in syndrome, one is watching the people I love die, and the last one is having my life ripped apart by a false-accusation of sexual misconduct. These are things I don’t see a way to recover from, things that would essentially end my life as I know it.

So when I see Joss Whedon’s ex-wife bear her soul, I feel for her. I  really do. I want her to be heard and be comforted. But another part of me sees one of my role-models as a writer being burned down to the ground, and I don’t see the evidence for that… yet.

When Zoe Quinn’s asshole ex came for her, my first comment was “wait, now, that seems wrong,” and I went looking for evidence. There wasn’t any.

when Joss Whedon’s ex came for him, my first thought was “wait, that seems wrong,” and I went looking for evidence. All I can find is a bunch of people commenting on Cole’s essay and notes that Whedon refused to comment out of respect for his kids.

Again, I am not writing this to defend my hero. If you knew the list of heroes and role-models that I’ve seen fall into the muck, you’d know I’m beyond doing that.

And I am not at all sure that we didn’t hear the truth from Cole.

What concerns me is that right now we live in a world where women, people of color and the LGBT community are under siege from the political establishment.

At the same time, when a moment comes where those communities are asked to scrutinize a white man in their midst, they appear to have taken the chance to behave JUST LIKE THE WHITE MEN THEY HATE.

I’ll judge Joss Whedon, even though I love his work and used to have three different posters from his shows on my office walls.
I’ll stand in judgment of any man who does what Cole accused Joss Whedon of doing.

 

But perhaps I’m too “Aristotle” to be someone who fights the tradition. I need more evidence than the heartfelt account of the person claiming to be wronged.

I’m not saying her thoughts aren’t valid. I keep stressing that because I know what this might look like. I’m willing to believe everything she said was true.

But I’ve also, as a confidant, heard numerous break-up and divorce discussions, and in my experience no one is honest about these things. I don’t think it’s that anyone means to lie; I think it’s that with that high level of emotion and violation our minds recast events. I say “our,”  because I’ve talked about breakups in my past, too, and while I don’t remember my accounts in the moment, I am pretty sure I wasn’t fair at the time and that the way I saw it was real to me but not what really happened. For example, in grad school, I watched two of my friends break up and one went all-out-scorched earth on the other. When they made up, I couldn’t be their friend anymore, because I couldn’t be in the room with both of them and comprehend how the person who all but destroyed the other’s life could let all that go and expect me, as the person who listened to all the venting, to believe their romantic relationship was stable (they did end up breaking up again, but that’s not really the point). But they both said, over and over, that they “got past it.” It happens. I get that. It’s human nature. But crowds shouldn’t latch onto that feeling and run with it. No one deserves to have a legion of people adopt the opinion of an ex and rampage through their life.

It scares me that we’d dismantle a man based on any one account.

If that makes me a bad feminist, I guess I’m a bad feminist.

But if I wouldn’t abide it being done to Zoe Quinn, I don’t think Joss Whedon being a man means I shouldn’t offer him the same benefit of doubt. I need to know that everything I have seen from Whedon is wrong if I’m expected to believe that he’s a womanizing fake who manipulates people with his feminism. People are expecting a hard 180 based on the amount of noise one essay caused. I don’t see it.

And I pray that if anyone ever accuses me the headline isn’t “fat professor violates woman.” I hope that people would stop to realize it was me, to look for evidence of what actually happened. I hope they’d look to see that I’ve always been careful and kind, always known when to keep my distance, never willfully gone to far, even to be playful.

I know that my fearing this is nothing like a woman fearing abuse. I’m not equating that. Please don’t read it that way. But I do still have what I believe is a valid fear, because it digs into the core of me. It’s a nightmare that rattles around my skull.

In short, I hope we aren’t all sinking to the level of those we rage against. We shouldn’t be Donald Trumping people in hopes we can out Donald Trump the Donald Trumps.

If we do that, no one wins. And we’re all just enemies.