“Though I have scaled back those honest reviews, I miss them sometimes. I miss saying what I really think. I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t occasionally consider creating another persona, a pseudonym, who could speak the raging, blinding, ballsy truth I want to piss all over the internet some days…
Back in 1967, a writer named Alice Sheldon created a whole new life, an entire persona, called James Tiptree, Jr. She managed this fiction for many years. Robert Silverberg famously said of Tiptree, ‘It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.’
Sheldon found a particularly beautiful world in that persona, for many reasons, among them the cofidence ad freedom it brought. After she was outed as Tiptree in 1976 (after fans saw a letter of Tiptree’s about his mother dying in Chicago, they looked up the obituary and made the connection), she said ‘My secret world had been invaded ad the attractive figure of Tiptree — he did strike several people as attractive — was revealed as nothing but an old lady in Virginia.’
Being outed was devastating, but the secret, like all secrets, was bound to come out, and Sheldon must have known that as much as Requires Hate did when she decided to turn her hand at publishing fiction in the very venues she’d critiqued, befriending the very authors whose work she’d been shiv-grindingly reviewing for the lulz…
In my heart of hearts, I’d hoped it would all go away. God knows people like Harlan Ellison have been saying the dumbest, most abusive and hateful shit for years and no on seems to fucking care, even when they assault another writer onstage. But for some reason folks were really, really upset that a woman who ranted angrily on the internet for the entertainment value of a few hundred people was going to be successful by pure virtue of how great her writing was.
Somehow duping everyone into thinking they were some nice person was a hateful crime against humanity, as if we all haven’t been pretending to be somebody else on the internet ever since there was a fucking internet.
Doxxing — the revealing of someone’s personal information o the internet — to me always screams of punishment. It screams of anger. Of fighting hate with hate. Burning someone down to make yourself feel better. It’s someone screaming angrily that if they can’t be happy, no one can be happy…
We make excuses for men. We make room for men.
You should keep being Tiptree. You aren’t the same if you’re Sheldon. Sheldon is just an old woman from Virginia. We can burn burn Sheldon down and erase her.
In truth, many writers are assholes. They aren’t people you want to go to tea with. I don’t like people, generally. I find them exhausting. I don’t want to be friends with Harlan Ellison or Larry Correia or Orson Scott Card. Nick Mamatas has been one of the genre’s biggest fucking trolls for ten years, and nobody blacklisted him or sent around a petition, and when he’s got his asshole meter turned down, he too can be terribly entertaining on the internet…
We get angry for feeling hurt, for feeling duped, when the best way to respond when someone plays a masterful game is, quite simply, this:
‘Well played. You’re a remarkable writer. I wish you the greatest success in your career.’
We say that shit because we are fucking adults. Because the writing is good. We’re not here to be friends. I don’t like a lot of writers. But when their writing is not bullshit, I still read it, quite often. The persona may be a lie. All of them may be a lie. Shit, the work may even be a lie! But we are not in love with pixels on the internet; we are not in love with the ideas of people and their petty fucking feuds and scrambling attention-grabbing. We are in love with their work.” -Kameron Hurley, The Geek Feminist Revolution.
