Sherman Alexie and Daniel Handler

Yesterday, NPR broke the Sherman Alexie story. It's been an odd one, even in this moment of "me too," because the allegations went public and then viral long before the story, followed by an Alexie statement that generated more news, and then finally the women's voices were heard. NPR did a great job.

I did a few days' reporting on the story after my Daniel Handler article went live, as people reached out to me. This meant that as the story emerged, but before NPR's story was published, I watched Alexie's statement land and generate news with some tiny inside knowledge. As a result, I had a few thoughts on the journalism issues of taking Alexie's statement as a simple apology.

It wasn't. It said: 1) He did bad things. 2) But not the worst things. 3) And then he smeared the source, a woman with whom he had an affair. That's not an apology and reporting it as such reinforces rape culture.

I wrote a short thread on the issue here:

It was not an apology. It admitted vague wrongdoing while denying specifically bad wrongdoing and smearing the source. Journalists, by reporting the smear/denial as an "apology" were then complicit. /4

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) March 6, 2018

Ideally, one would take such a statement and describe it more or less as I did, factually, rather than embracing Alexie's "apology" frame.

In my Daniel Handler story, I referenced a series of anonymous comments accusing Alexie. I received a little pushback on that, but felt confident in the appropriateness of citing it. I brought it up because of this twitter thread from Allie Jane Bruce, one of the women who talked about Handler.

Hi everyone.
Hope you're having a good night.
Here's an interview in which @DanielHandler and @Sherman_Alexie discuss their progressive, liberal, and Feminist views on sex, sexuality, sexual harassment, etc. While promoting their books.https://t.co/EwSavwI7uc

— Allie Jane Bruce (@alliejanebruce) February 14, 2018

Bruce writes, "What you will hear, if you listen, is two cis men who speak the language of liberalism, progressivism, and feminism *perfectly* and are capitalizing on it. Using it to promote themselves and their books."

We have a lot of work to do unraveling patriarchy (more on that in a forthcoming piece). Each field is going to have to reckon with how it promoted abusers to celebrity status and consider how to undo celebrity culture. One of my new mantras: community, not celebrity.

The work continues.

Handler Cancelled - Now Fight the "Free Speech" Framing

Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, has cancelled his plans to speak at Wesleyan for commencement, and will be replaced by Anita Hill. This is the correct outcome. If somehow you missed it, I wrote about Snicket and the allegations of sexual harassment last week.

Now the usual "free speech" folks are going to claim this is about intolerance for controversial speakers. We need to resist that framing. It's about not putting a sexual harasser on stage with a woman who has spent her career fighting sexual harassment and giving them both honors. Fight the category error.

More to come on this. In the meantime, I really think Handler should just cancel his public events for awhile, do some work, and then come out with an affirmative statement about how he's going to change his conduct, and then he should change his conduct.

Meanwhile, the silence from male authors on social media has been very, well, silent. Around this and far too many other abusers in their industry. Folks notice.

"I treat everyone the same."

I've been thinking about the way that "treating everyone the same" functions to magnify privilege and reinforce extant power dynamics, rather than promoting equality.

Two examples from divergent worlds. First, Daniel Handler's statement on Gwenda Bond's blog. At one point he writes, "As someone who’s been a struggling author, I take seriously the responsibilities of my visibility, and have always thought that treating all of my colleagues the same was the best way to dispel the unease that can come from a competitive or self-conscious environment." But of course, people aren't the same, and making dirty jokes at female authors you have just met in professional spaces has a different impact than in more intimate settings.

Then there's Quinn Norton, recently fired from the New York Times (within hours) when it emerged that she's a pal of Nazis and uses homophobic and racist slurs frequently. She compared Nazis to Meat Eaters (saying the latter are worse) in her tweets, and you can see my tweets on the vice-signaling going on by giving her a column.

I understand the impulse to quickly give Norton a column to explain herself. It's a good get. But I think it would be smarter to have a column on her - an interview, but also people who understand Weev's impact, people who study how de-radicalizing Nazis actually works.

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) February 27, 2018

But I'm struck by the safety she feels in treating everyone the same. She writes:

I was called a Nazi because of my friendship with the infamous neo-Nazi known on the internet as weev—his given name is Andrew Auernheimer; he helps run the anti-Semitic website The Daily Stormer. In my pacifism, I can’t reject a friendship, even when a friend has taken such a horrifying path. I am not the judge of who is capable of improving as a person. This philosophy also requires me to confront him about his terrible beliefs and their terrible consequences. I have been doing this since before his brief time as a cause célèbre in 2012—I believe it’d be hypocritical for me to turn away from this obligation. weev is just one of many terrible people I’ve cared for in my life. I don’t support what my terrible friend believes or does. But I strongly advocate for people with a good sense of themselves and their values to engage with their terrible friends, coworkers, and relatives, to lovingly confront them for as long as it takes, and it would be wrong to not do so myself. I had what I now see as the advantage of coming from a family of terrible people. This taught me that not everyone worthy of love is worthy of emulation. It also taught me that being given terrible ideas is not a destiny, and that intervention can change lives.

This is deeply ignorant of, for example, the way that weev is also trying to radicalize her. This is not how de-radicalization works. Moreover, there are people who are harmed by the Daily Stormer, which weev runs (the killer in Parkland had Nazi sympathies, for example. I'd be shocked if his web trail doesn't include Stormfront).

But it's the flip side of Handler's  treat everyone equally rudely and crudely approach. Treat everyone nicely, no matter what harms they do. Treat everyone the same, no matter what harms you do. Only a person who recklessly avoids understanding how human societies work could live by such a code.

And I doubt, if you dig deep enough, that they really do treat everyone the same. Norton finds being friends with Nazis interesting and she would like to tell you about it.

Treating everyone the same is something only a person absolutely convinced of their own safety can do.

Lemony Snicket and #MeToo

I wrote this today. A little context, including the fact that Wesleyan University intends to put him on stage with, of all people, Anita Hill /1 https://t.co/G9289DC6sj

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) February 22, 2018

A lot here on my latest article. More to come on Wesleyan, in particular, as I watch how this moves.