It feels awful for people to consider that things they’ve done all their lives, with the best of intentions, could be bad. Most people consider themselves good people. The person who doesn’t drink is a person who’s taken a stance on drinking. For most of us, drinking isn’t a stance; it’s just what grown-ups do. We do it because it seems perfectly natural, and we get pissed off when people imply that it isn’t. Maybe they aren’t judging us, but they’ve passed a judgment on something we do.
sion, and why are you still trying to have one? This isn’t someone who refuses to know how the sausage is made. This is someone who denies, while they eat it, that the sausage is even a sausage. It doesn’t seem fruitful to engage with people in this state. But I’m going to suggest we engage with them anyway, especially when there is an audience.
Take the Internet, for example. It isn’t just a forum; it’s a document. At any given time there are dozens, If you’re a teetotaler, an atheist, or a vegetarian, this hundreds, sometimes thousands of people reading, behavior has probably annoyed you. If you’re an some of them young and new to the medium. What environmentalist, it has probably gotten in the way of happens when somebody makes an unwittingly-bigyour work. But if you’re queer, female, or non-white, oted statement and nobody picks it up and unpacks it has probably been personally damaging. Take the it? What are we saying about its appropriateness? example of Anita Sarkeesian, who was reported to YouTube as a terrorist because angry people didn’t If you choose to pick it up, you can’t hold much hope want her to make videos about feminism. These same that you’ll convince your detractor. They’re not genpeople sent her daily rape and death threats and made erally in agreeable moods. Even if it happens from a video game about beating her.3 time to time, you can’t frame your argument for that purpose. So frame it for the audience. Use it as an Sometimes it can be scary for a white person to opportunity to talk to the people listening. Let them consider that they have profited off of racism, for a know that if they choose to make statements like man to consider that what he likes and how he acts is these, someone will hold them accountable. damaging to women, for straight people to consider that gender is not as simple as they may have thought. The thing is, if you are seeking to make the world, or Some people wrestle with this, and reconsider what at least the web, a safer and more accepting place, you kind of white, straight, or male person they want to don’t need the permission of the people who disagree be. I’d wager this is where most allies come from. with you. But some people get angry instead. Of course, nobody wants to consider themselves sexist, racist, or transphobic. So it is absolutely imperative to believe that the things being critiqued are not actually sexism, racism, and transphobia. The people bringing these things up must be wrong or lying. Because if they’re not, what does it say about us? People drunk on AngryJack have the only goal of proving to themselves that the other person can be dismissed, hence the willingness to leapfrog between contradictory arguments or to ignore a body of arguments because they find the speaker unserious. Engaging with a person in this state is not the same thing as having a discussion, because only one of you is having a discussion. The other is explaining that there is no discussion, there has never been a discus-
The intent is to bring that world about with or without them. 1. #1reasonwhy was dedicated to women, mostly those in the games industry, sharing stories about the ways women get treated in tech that discourage them from entering the field. Every single woman in gaming that I follow on Twitter had something to add to it.
2. Jay Smooth addressed the differences between trolling and actual anger in his video Why You Should Feed The Trolls If You Damn Well Need To: http://www.illdoctrine.com/2012/06/why_you_should_feed_ the_trolls.html 3 http://www.feministfrequency.com/2012/12/ tedxwomen-talk-on-sexist-harassment-cyber-mobs/