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flaggerx · 4 years

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The Not-So-Great Society

Hey my Fellow White People. Have you seen the TV lately, the huge crowds around the White House, the site of Congressmen maced for no reason, reporters arrested for no reason, old men shoved to the ground and abandoned with skull fractures. Noticed that the demonstrations are taking place in almost every towns and in fact, have touched off demonstrations in Europe, in part because racism is not an exclusive to Americans.

But racism is real. No denying that now that we saw George Floyd murdered on that street by cops who saw him die and just didn't care. Or about EMT Brianna Taylor, shot to death in her own bed by cops making a no-knock arrest. We've been watching this movie since we watched Rodney King take a major beat-down in 1992. That's almost thirty years ago, with story after story of some unarmed black guy killed by the police. He ever heard of Amadur Diallo sodomized with broomstick in a New York City police station. Black men been killed for selling cigarettes. They've been shot for reaching for their wallet. Really, they've been shot for being black.

That's right, shot for being black. I mean, have you ever had to tell your kids what to do if they are pulled over or searched by the police? Have you ever had to have that 'talk'. We teach our kids that if they need help to Call the police. We trust they'll treat us fairly. And usually they do. Black parents can't do that.

That, my friends, is white privilege. We don't get pulled over for driving a nice car because someone who looks like us is supposed to drive a nice car. But if your LeVar Burton from Star Trek you get used to getting pulled over for driving a Bimmer then asked for your autograph when the cop turns out to be Trek fan. You have to learn to laugh it off. And you have to give your kids the talk.

Racism is real. If we've learned anything over the past few weeks we ought to have learned that our dreams of a “post-racial America” were as big a fantasy as anything Tolkien ever wrote. We are not a post-racial society, we are racist society. And that means you and me.

Yes, I know. You (hopefully) never joined the Ku Klux Klan or burned a cross. You don't hate black people. You hope they do well, really. But that's up to them. And that's where your thinking stops. But you may not actually know any, and you may never have listened to any. You may know a couple, but have you ever invited them over. Have you ever talked about race?

Because it's real. I mean, there are people who can pass as something else, but for the most part it's more obvious than gender. And most of us have some sot of prejudice. Maybe all of us, which means that being racist doesn't mean you're evil. (unless you are a cross burner). It means your human, full of foibles and weaknesses like the rest of us. And we can work on our weaknesses, but as any shrink'll tell you first, you must acknowledge they exist

And here's another thing, we have the policing we want! That's right, we wanted this. Oh, maybe we didn't want to watch George Floyd unable to breathe, but for the paste forty years our political system has been calling for exactly the kind of cops that killed him. We declared “war on crime” and “war on drugs” and we wanted aggressive warrior police, whose idea of a good day at work is to rack up a bunch of arrests, write more tickets and be a go getter who will get the bad guys. Really, America has been hoping for T.J. Hooker.

The intellectual backing for all of this what Criminologists call Deterrence Theory. The idea is that crimes have a certain benefit, therefore punishment must be stern enough to keep people from committing them. It fits well with the fundamental idea that only the Fear of God keeps people moral. Deterrence Theory has some advantages, it's simple, easily understood and makes intuitive sense. It really does a good job of explaining why honest people stay honest. The reason I don't drive ninety five-- deterrence theory. It works really well for people who have something to lose, which is most of us. I have a house, a good job, a cat, I mean why in the world would I want to put that at risk? I'm not twenty-two and feeling any need to impress any hot chicks, so deterrence theory works pretty well for me, and probably for you. But the problem with deterrence theory is if a little of it is good, more is not necessarily better.

And that's the theory that has dominated American political thinking for the past forty years. We wanted a “war on crime”. We wanted politicians who were “tough on crime”. Judicial races at the state and local level well all about 'toughness” and having a judge with “the strength to apply the death penalty”. Try being a politician who argues that maybe we should try another way and they are and were, labled “weak on crime” and very often lost the next election. And that's the idea behind laws with a mandatory minimum sentence. That's the idea behind “three strikes and your out” laws. The old maxim “don't do the crime if you can't afford to do the time” was all over the place, with the idea that if only we made the laws tough enough criminals would choose to go straight.

Problem is that really didn't work, because if a little deterrence is good more really doesn't make a bit of difference. It just locks people up for a lot longer. The reasons for this are complex, but let me list a few. First of all, crime isn't exactly characterized by a lot of thought. Many crimes, those we deem “crimes of passion” are characterized by no thinking at all. Yet Deterrence theory would have you think that criminals performed some sort of mental calculus of the expected profit of the crime divided by the probability of being caught times the sentence multiplier. Criminals are rarely mathematicians. And when you think about it the difference between a four and a twenty year sentence is sort of abstract. Yes we can all say the sentence is five times longer. But does it really look that way in an act of criminal calculus? One year is a really long time. And no matter what you're likely beaten up and/or raped along the way. Prison is a thing to be avoided, so if you get that you probably won't commit crimes.

Unless you're Ted Bundy or Roger Stone and think you can get away with anything.

And the thing is when you're a criminal sometimes the term “sentence” is the LAST thing on a criminal's mind even when the sentence might include “death”. Any objective reading of the statistics between death penalty and non-death penalty states is that death deters no one at all. People are just as likely to murder when they can be killed for it and that was true before finding a humane way to off someone became very difficult to do. The Utah State Rifleers who executed Gay Gilmore didn't deter him. He did what he did because he had to do it.

Like drug addicts. Any medical professional will tell you that addiction is a chronic long-term condition not a sign of weak character. Take a heroin addict, and I've known a couple. They're nice most of the time until dope sick begins and then they will rob and steal because the only thing that matters in the whole wide world is not being dope sick any more. Addicts prostitute themselves, rob and steal, and deal in order to support their habit. They don't do it because they're bad people, they do it because they're addicts.

And that leads us to the second part of the traditional American approach to crime. There are Good People, who obey the Law, and Bad People who Don't.

The problem with this is it isn't effing true. True there are people who would leave a $100 bill lying on a sidewalk because it isn't theres. Not many, but they exist. As do sociopaths for whom the only thing that actually matters is their own personal gratification. But the rest of us are Somewhere in the Middle, and you know what makes the difference? How much money you have.

Yeah, it's true. Why steal if your wallet's full of money? Oh a few people do it for thrill-seeking, but again people with money don't steal. They spend. It's when you don't have money to spend that that $100 bill slips to picking any coins you find. And a lot of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. For a lot of Americans the car breaking down is a disaster, while for some it is an inconvenience. And they're usually the people driving the cars most likely to break down.

Employee theft is the biggest single problem in retail, for the simple reason that retail pays like crap. Many are near minimum wage workers who may have to hold multiple jobs to pay their bills. So think about working sixty or seventy hours a week and every time you put a little bit of money ahead you need glasses or the car breaks down, or if you have kids, they need something, and you can't really supervise them because you're working seventy hours a week and can't afford good day care.

That's how almost half of America lives. Don't think so? Read Barbara Eherenreich's Nickle and Dimed. Learn how the Lunch Counter Lady struggles to get by every single day of her life. Now look at her seventeen year old kid, who has had hand-me-down clothing most of his life except for a couple items, (say sneakers), who is a bit angry and has never met anyone but authority figures with a real stake in society.

Now lets make him that kid black. If we have learned one thing from the heavy black body count is that black people scare white Americans. If a politician wants to scare you on crime, he will always put up a picture of a mean looking black male. Always, like Ronald Reagan did with Willie Horton. Learn your campaign history, in American politics nobody is scarier than a black man.

We have learned that you can get pulled over for Driving While Black. Brianna Taylor was killed for Sleeping While Black. Or you can die for Jogging while Black as we have seen. Or get threatened for Birding while Black. Note I haven't had to go very far back for examples of all this. And the truth is Law Enforcement treats Black kids differently than they do white kids. White kids don't get racially profiled.

And how would you feel if some cop pulled you over for no reason whatsoever, just to question you and to remind you that he has Power and you do not. Please don't tell me you won't bitch about. Now make it the fourth time and you have a young man who is just plain sick of it. Can you see the problems there?

Cops think that black people are more likely to commit crimes. Of course poor people are more likely to commit crimes and that's because they're poor. A rich white kid is likely to get off because his parents can afford good legal representation that the poor black kid can't and because they'll assume it's youthful folly, which all of us have engaged in to one extent or another. But if it's a black kid the very same cop is likely to assume that this is the beginning of a long career and he had better come down hard now so the kid knows he's in for a world of hurt.

And now our somewhat pissed off poor black kid has a criminal record. Now he is a Bad Guy. And if it was serious, he has a felony and a whole lot of career paths were just cut off. Now he's likely to stay poor because he lost his temper in the face of what was real bullshit.

Or maybe, because he's poor and because when he looks around the only homeboys who have any money are dealers. Ever seen Boys in the Hood? Yeah, it's fiction, but sometimes fiction can tell the truth more clearly and faithfully than dry statistics. Who has the money? Not Mom and Dad because if they did you wouldn't be living in the Hood. It's the dealers, the bangers and they come around looking for you, trying to make sure if You're In, or mess you up If you're Not.

And that takes us to the next part of American Jurisprudence. The Drug Laws are racist. If you want to argue otherwise then please explain why the penalties for crack cocaine, which affects primarily colored neighborhoods are so much more severe than for powdered cocaine, the drug of choice for rich white folks like Robin Williams (Cocaine addiction is a sign you're making too much money). To be fair, I don't think they were intended that way by many of the people who voted for them, but at the end of the day if they act in a racist way the question is entirely academic. Cops bust everyone for drugs, but the street dealers can be white, but often are not, and they get long mandatory sentences that takes them out of circulation for years. Which is perfect if you think they are Bad People, incapable of functioning in society.

I see them as functioning well, given where they started. Not every kid has professional parents like I did. Not every kid is born with a house full of books, ate a balanced diet for their entire life. Not every boy grows up surrounded by people who live in nice houses, eat steak regularly, have parents who always give them a straight answer or had a Mom who could be home for them when they were little. I always knew a kid could make it because my life is full of people who live good lives. Kids who grow up poor often don't have those role models, and maybe even don't have a Dad because Dad is in jail for dealing. And when the people who have money all operate outside the Law it makes sense to do that yourself.

So really, we as white Americans, the most privileged people on the face of the Earth, are screwing ti up for others. Black Americans didn't come her out of free will, like our ancestors did. They were taken here in chains by our ancestors, and so we are responsible for them being here. They are our fellow citizens with the same right to America's bounty and opportunity as anyone. But our theory of justice, our assumptions as a society have led to them being more likely to die for the color of our skin. And that is simply unacceptable. It violates every precept of the Declaration of Independence, every bit of what we say America stands for. We cannot paper this over or just tweak the system.

We need a different type of cop. We don't need to count busts or seek out men eager to jump into the “battlespace”. We need conciliators, listeners because we ask cops to be social workers far to often.

We need social workers and we need to value them, not look at the people who need them as being 'weak” or lazy. We are often contemptuous of those who are addicts or have other issues. Instead we need to see them as partners in creating a just society. We ask cops to do everything from write tickets to talk people out of jumping off buildings. They see is when we're bleeding from car accidents and console people whose children have been gunned down. They chase down and catch murderers. We need to stop idolizing the “hero cop” who charges into the building and honor more the guy who can calm the angry drunk. I'n not sure how to get from here to there, but where we are has failed. We need to realize that real economic opportunity must exist at the bottom for it to exist anywhere. We need to change at a fundamental level. We need to hold police accountable for their actions and we need police who will hold each other accountable. We cannot go on as we are. There are too many dead bodies, too many brown bodies locked away, to many struggling just to live for America to be a just society.

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swipestream · 5 years

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Sensor Sweep: Algernon Blackwood, Irish Dogs, Snipers, Battle Angel

RPG (Tenkar’s Tavern): We’re very excited to announce the next release in our Original Adventures Reincarnated line: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks! As with previous releases in the OAR series, this one will include scans of the original 1E editions, a conversion to 5E, and new 5E material filling in some gaps from the original 1E module.

OAR3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is slated for a September release. It will be solicited to distributors soon and will be available for pre-order once the book is at the printer.

Anime (Fantasy Literature): “They say if you try making anime for 3 days, you’ll never be able to quit and that in 3 days you’ll also be broke. But even if I were to go broke, I still don’t think I’d be able to quit.” These words from Tezuka, upon receiving an award late in life, express his passion for his work in anime, but he had an equal passion for manga.

Fiction (James Reasoner): I backed the Kickstarter for this anthology, and now that it’s been published and I’ve read it, I’m glad I did. It’s an excellent collection of military fiction, some with contemporary settings, some historical. I’ve always liked war stories, and these are very well done. My favorites are “A Place More Kind Than Home” by Ron Farina, a tale of a Marine coming home from Vietnam that does a perfect job of capturing the mid-Sixties era.

Fiction (DMR Books): So, there I was rereading my Altus Press edition of “The Moon Pool.” As I’ve noted elsewhere, this edition features all of the great Virgil Finlay illos for “The Moon Pool” as reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries. As I gazed once again upon Finlay’s striking illustration of the moment when Dr. Throckmartin’s colleague, Charles Stanton, is taken into/devoured by the Dweller in the Moon Pool, a thought occurred to me. The estates of Merritt and Finlay really missed the boat when they did not take the opportunity to have Finlay’s illo made into a black light poster.

Cinema (Jon Mollison): Up for some pro-Russian propaganda? I got a flick for you. Be warned, though. It’s half cool, half head-slapper. A Sniper’s War presents the story of Deki, a Serbian who enlists in the Russian backed “Ukrainian Separatist” movement that sprung up in the district between Ukraine proper and Russia proper during the big NATO-Russia standoff. He wanted to show his gratitude to Russia by shooting the NATO types that ruined the best country on earth – his beloved Albania. It’s a message film with an odd mix of messages. Part pro-Russia, part pro-Communist, and part pro-Orthodox Church.

Dogs (the Journal.ie): Paul Howard, the creator of Ross O’Carroll Kelly, once remarked that “the social contract between humans and dogs might be the best bit of business we have ever done”. I find it hard to disagree.

While cats briefly ruled social media in the early 2010s with a strong run of viral videos and memes, dogs have reclaimed their prime position since 2016. Some people attribute this to the simple goodness of dogs as being a welcome antidote to the avalanche of bad news which descended during that year.

Cinema (The Dark Herald): First things first.

I am approaching this subject from a place of familiarity. I first saw the Battle Angel OVA when I was stationed at Camp Lejeune better than twenty-five years ago. And there is no getting around it, this film is basically an expanded version of the OVA. Yes, I understand that its supposed to be about the first few books in the manga series but sorry, no. It’s the OVA with some background material thrown in. That was clearly and obviously the inspiration for the whole project. James Cameron is a nerd with a taste for hard science fiction, it’s hardly a surprise that he fell in love with Alita.

Fiction (DMR Books): Algernon Blackwood was born one hundred and fifty years ago today in the English shire of Kent. Blessed with a name seemingly custom-made for an author of weird fiction, he went on to influence generations of horror and fantasy writers.

As detailed in Mike Ashley’s Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life–a biography I highly recommend–Blackwood spent the first thirty years of his life roaming Europe and North America. After that, he made up for lost time, penning reams of tales–the exact count is still unknown–some of which are considered among the best in the entire weird fiction canon.

History (Men of the West): Hotel is a French term, derived from hostil, a lordly house, a palace. The designation Public House, signifying a house of public resort for refreshment and conviviality, is a modern substitute for Tavern, derived from the Latin taberna, a hut, a wooden booth; frequently also for Inn, or rather, as originally written, Inne, which expressed the Anglo-Saxon for a mansion. And here we may at once observe that by far the majority of our mediæval inns and Hostelries [see Hotel] grew out of the mansions of the nobility during the prolonged absence of their owners.

Fiction (Hi Lo Brow): J.-H. Rosny aîné’s children’s atavistic adventure La Guerre du feu (Quest for Fire).

At some point during the Ice Age, the people of Ulam — a proto-Franco-Belgian Neanderthal tribe — are attacked by a rival tribe, and their precious fire is stolen. (Although they know how to tend a flame, they can’t generate a new one.) The tribe’s leader promises a woman to whichever young warrior succeeds in bringing back life-giving fire to the tribe. This is a slim novella, but it is action-packed: Naoh, our protagonist, and his two comrades encounter monstrous beasts, alien hominid tribes (some of which appear to be proto-Asian, proto-Scottish, etc.), and must use their wits to overcome all sorts of obstacles.

Gaming (Sentinel Hill Press): Perhaps the most impressive memorial to Keith is the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s titanic radio play production of his Fungi from Yuggoth/Day of the Beast campaign for Call of Cthulhu – The Brotherhood of the Beast. They didn’t just bring it to life in audio form (complete with 4 different endings), but they produced a plethora of HPLHS-quality props that would be just as useful for a table-top game.

Comic Books (Barebonesez): When Pa passes, the three Cartwright boys (not Hoss, Little Joe, and Adam… the other Cartwright boys) find themselves with a heapin’ helpin’ of farm land to take care of. Aaron and Horace want to continue in the footsteps of their father, who made the land pay off for him, but third brother Jack wants to dump the dump as quick as possible.

Cinema (James Reasoner): I was surprised to come across a Clint Walker Western I hadn’t seen before, since he’s been a favorite of mine for many years. I was a big fan of his TV show CHEYENNE when I was a kid, and I remember watching YELLOWSTONE KELLY and other movies starring him at the Eagle Drive-In. FORT DOBBS was the first film in which he starred, and you could almost imagine it as being a longer episode of CHEYENNE.

Sensor Sweep: Algernon Blackwood, Irish Dogs, Snipers, Battle Angel published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog · 6 years

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Trolls thought I was a man. That saved me.

This post is part of Me, online, Mashable's ongoing series digging into online identities.

I was locked in my friends’ bathroom on the phone with my thesis adviser and staring at Reddit. It was snowing pretty hard and though there was a window with some theoretical light streaming in, I felt like I was under a blanket, the flashlight of my attention pointed at a screen that I refreshed and refreshed and refreshed. I was discussing the critical thesis component required for my graduate degree, an MFA in creative writing. It was titled Masculinity and the Making of the Modern Nerd. It was a mess.

“Does that make sense?” my adviser asked, or something like that. I don’t know, exactly, what she’d said, other than the paper didn’t work, because I was preoccupied. We need a Kotaku In Action Action, a user typed. And they were typing it about me. Refresh, refresh, refresh.

“Yes, I think. Sorry, something weird and bad is happening right now?”

She paused. “Are you okay?”

“I think so? I think I’m fine.”

SEE ALSO: The email problem no one is talking about: mistaken identity

I’d been the Geekery Editor at Autostraddle, a popular website primarily by and for queer women and non-binary folks, for some years. I’d both written about Gamergate and assigned others to write about it. My entire first novel? It was (and still is) about the phenomenon of weaponized nerds, radicalized young men (primarily white and western) terrorizing women over games. At Autostraddle, I’d written an essay in 2016 praising one of the central targets of Gamergate for doing as much good as can possibly be done in the wake of a harassment campaign against her, and then moving on with her gosh darn life like a woman on a mission.

I’d thought my biggest crime with this piece was writing it just a bit too saccharine; I was lavish with my compliments. The gamers on Kotaku in Action apparently thought it was more egregious than that — perhaps the worst offense in the entire world: that I might not be a "real nerd" at all.

I struggle to explain Kotaku in Action every time I have to, because it truly defies explanation and has the many heads of a hydra collective. It’s the Reddit forum that perpetuated GamerGate, a place to coordinate targeted rape- and death-threats against women in the games industry — when a user says “Kotaku In Action Action,” it is likely to these types of activities they are referring.

It is synonymous with the alt-right (and strategically so). It’s full of (mostly) dudes with no sense of culture or community outside their homogenous gaming forums; these rootless young men long to be a part of something bigger, something greater and so, Kotaku in Action it is. A place on the internet that’s part of the Manosphere and also includes Pick Up Artists, Incels, and Men’s Rights Activists. A place so toxic that its creator recently tried to shut it down, calling it a “viral cancer,” and Reddit, in its infinite wisdom, decided to save it. A place that I’ve spent years researching in service of my fiction; I often say it is the butthole of the internet, and I’ve spent the last four years giving the world wide web a proctology exam.

When I was first alerted to the thread, I was scared. I’m no stranger to a good hate pile-on—I do work on the internet, after all, and writing for the queer community often means antagonizing some harsh critics, both without and within. The GamerGaters, though? I’d spent two years flying under the radar of these fine, upstanding gentlemen internet terrorists. I wrote for queer women, for non-binary folks. I thought that must be the reason why: They were uninterested in what I had to say because I was never saying it to a mainstream audience, to the normal set of gamers, and so I never got hit. I thought I must not be a threat; that wasn't quite it. I was wearing armor. Armor I had no idea I'd ever put on.

I was filled with too much nervous energy after seeing the thread to stay in my apartment, so I went to the Strand and stress-bought a Virginia Woolf Saint Candle, a Moleskine notebook I didn’t need, and a book on drawing happy people. When it was time for me to get back to my own space, I found I didn’t want to. My head was filled with all the stories, the doxxing, the SWATting, the things that can happen if you walk through the digital world as boldly female. It’s dangerous to go alone; I didn’t want to be alone. I told my Dungeons and Dragons group what was going on — I figured they’d be the most likely to understand, being a group of gamers. And that’s how I wound up locked in my dungeon master’s bathroom, talking to my adviser as I watched the comments build up on Reddit.

The guy spends way too long jerking himself off in the first paragraph about how much of a nerd he is.

When I was growing up, in the 80s, geek and nerd was a derogatory slur. I don't get the desire to identify with labels the popular people tried to shame us with... Anyhow, the term "geekery" makes my skin crawl. I guarantee you this guy knows fuck all about the history and intricacies of the various so-called "geek" interests.

I'm guessing he was alone for Valentine's Day.

They were mean — but they weren't threatening. There was only the one. The rest — just grousing. I'd seen much worse happen to other folks. To more feminine folks. Refresh, refresh, refresh.

I came out as trans last fall, but I’ve looked like this for a long time: close-cropped hair, chest flattened by a binder, every stitch of clothing I own from the men’s department. My fellow queer writers had seen me coming for years. But at the time this was happening in 2016? I was still white-knuckled from clinging to the sisterhood. Even though I’d get “excuse me, sir?” while walking about in public, right up until the point I opened my mouth to speak. Even though, more than once, folks had been very concerned when they happened upon me in the women’s room. Even though literally all my (repressed) internal barometers pointed to “not a woman.”

I love my family, my queers; we are a people used to existing in the strange gray area. We are a people used to taking slurs from the mouths of hate-filled adversaries and tattooing them on the soft muscles of our hearts, making celebration and community out of words meant to hurt us. I figured I was just a failure at femininity; that the definition of woman was broad and that my masculinity fit within it. Those are all true things, they’re just not true for me. Still, it was shocking to see, this assumption that I was a man — a popular man, at that!

It's annoying to me when popular hacks call themselves nerds. Especially because having been a nerd back when the word meant social outcast. It was them who came in and caused all beatings and insults.

Back in my friend’s bathroom, my adviser asked, incredulously, “They think you’re a guy?”

“I think so,” I replied and I read her some of the comments.

“How?”

I explained it to her; it had happened before, this confusion. When I identified as a woman, I published under the name “Ali,” which, for half of this world, isn’t a woman’s name at all. My photo was next to my byline and people didn’t really read what the website was about if they found it from an outside source. I wrote largely about technology; my longest-running column was titled Queer Your Tech. A lot of folks (wrongly) consider that some “boy-stuff.”

She didn’t believe me until months later, when I was taking over her website from her former designer (I maintain the websites of a few authors I know). As he was passing me all the information I needed, he conducted the entire transaction calling me “he” in all the emails. HE THINKS YOU’RE A DUDE my adviser texted me, privately. In digital space, where I never have to open my physical mouth, where I am simply a collection of characters on a screen, no one ever looks at me with their eyebrow raised; no one ever corrects themselves. I am whatever I am assumed first to be. And I’m doing and saying the “boy-stuff.”

“Yup,” I responded. “I told you.”

Eventually, I did come out of the bathroom. I waited. These were tamer than the reports of what happened to the women who crossed the GamerGaters. I was expecting the worst — surely, if it hadn't happened yet, the worst would be coming and it was only a matter of time. I waited through the night for something to happen.

And nothing ever did.

“Do they even know you spent the entirety of seventh grade eating lunch in the guidance counselor’s office because you were too unpopular to eat in the cafeteria?” my friend Laura said from my couch the next day. “You — you’ve never been cool. Except to me, you were cool to me.” Laura and I have known each other since the fourth grade. She stuck with me through my obsession with the musical Cats and my childhood assertion that I was an alien from Saturn. And now, she was volunteering to be my questing buddy. To keep her eye on the thread, to make sure I was safe, so I wouldn’t have to keep refreshing it.

“It’s taking everything I’ve got not to jump on and say something to these people.”

“Don’t do that. That’ll make it worse.”

What I meant was: Don’t do that, they’ll figure out I’m one of the things they hate. Because I’d developed a hypothesis, one that keeps proving itself even now, years later. I said things they disliked, disagreed with. They called me an SJW (social justice warrior), but I looked masculine enough that the Kotaku in Action Action never materialized.

Looking like a dude was armor; it played on the subconscious prioritization of all things manly. I’ve watched queer femme authors get harassed so intensely that they have to leave the internet, and many of them aren’t even trying to poke the GamerGaters. The cause isn’t in the content, or the severity of the imagined offense. It’s in the gender presentation of the author. Those that the heteronormative world deems masculine people can talk; those they deem feminine people better watch their backs.

And the things about the way I present online one might perceive as feminine (allying myself with women, the over-prooving of my right to speak on a subject) were but small scratches in an armor built of clipper cuts and and computer-speak. “Boy stuff.” The reason I was never considered a threat wasn’t because of who I was speaking to; it was because of who I was — ultimately, not like those “other girls.” Weaponized nerds use their masculinity as a sword; now I know I can wield masculinity as armor to go questing in the darkest caves, in the buttholes of the internet. My masculinity allowed their eyes to slide right over me. Allowed isn’t even the right word; encouraged, perhaps.

Two years later and not much has changed. It’s still happening; I am one variant, one echo of it. It wasn’t the masculine half of #PlaneBae that got chased off the internet, for instance. This isn’t a phenomenon isolated to me, or to queers, or to 2016, or to GamerGate. This is just the way it is, out there, on the internet. I could’ve identified as trans at the time this happened, instead of as a woman, and it wouldn’t have mattered. It’s the nature of being squeezed into two dimensional space while being squashed by the patriarchy. I am whatever people assume me first to be. I am safer online because of it.

A.E. Osworth is the Managing Editor of Scholar and Feminist Online at Barnard College and Part-Time Faculty with The New School’s Creative Writing Department, where they teach digital storytelling. You can find their writing at Autostraddle, where they contribute regularly, and Argot Magazine, where they are a columnist. You can also catch up with them on Twitter or Instagram.

WATCH: Meet the 10-year-old drag kid shaping the future of drag youth

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