this is not a test case

I think election week has had a detrimental effect on my temper. Yesterday I made myself delete a post on my level of exhaustion with the slasher == misogynist crap that magically pops up every so often with random uncited "But someone somewhere once said something about girlparts that could be construed as she thought they were icky!" and wow, five pages later, I put that away before something snapped.

However, this is the internet and while I totally thought I was topped out? It turns out I wasn't.

cereta posts here about the events that occurred during and after Wiscon this year. For a pretty thorough explanation, Angry Black Woman posts here about what happened. Short version:

A woman named Rachel Moss put a post on Something Awful mocking attendees not because of their politics or their feminism or their willingness to come to Wisconsin, but because they were too fat, too white, too male, or too black for her taste.

Not just a post. Pictures (faces blocked, badges not so much) of attendees.

Fannish community standards were created as a protective measure to fen from harassment that, as this has pretty much proven, still exists. We created it because we're fen, because our first reaction to being hit is to hit back as hard as we possibly can, because that shit hurts and no one wants to be around for a second punch. If we get rid of them first, they can't get us again.

(Or we vanish. For good.)

It was created to protect us, as much from each other as others. It gives everyone a quick, easy answer to the question. To protect our community. To make as safe as possible the spaces we created for ourselves.

It was not, and never has been, a way to protect the harassers. This isn't a fine line situation. This isn't even a grey spot of sliding scale. This was not the internet alone. This was real life, in the flesh, in a physical location, documented stalking of attendees and their children for the purposes of abusing them. Community standards are not a way to fuck each other over in RL and expect and require people to never talk about it.

This had nothing to do with fandom. RL harassment is not a protected fannish activity. Community standards do not apply.

...the posts I linked to say this a lot better. Go there.

ETA: Or go here, where coffeeandink gives an excellent, thorough, and well-measured response to the Unfunny Business post that I'm still--boggling over.