polemics

Pushing Last War in Albion until tomorrow – was just about to image it up when this crossed my desk, and I want to deal with it.

So, in the wake of Dark Water, the site usvsth3m ran a piece entitled “16 sexually confusing feelings that Doctor Who fans have had since The Mistress revealed her secret.” It’s a fun piece that reveals the pathetically blinkered attitudes of a lot of Doctor Who fans for what they are, which is to say the attitudes of sexist, homophobic, and transphobic assholes. It’s a sobering reminder of the at times appalling attitudes of orthodox and longstanding fandom, and was absolutely something worth doing. And to their credit, they played nice and clipped usernames, thus avoiding publicly naming and shaming people for their actions, not that publicly naming and shaming the person who said that they felt “as though something sacred has been violated” because the Master was a woman now would have been in the least bit unreasonable.

Which is probably why the forum tried to demand that the site take the article down and banned the writer over it on the supposed grounds that they’re a “private” forum and that one needs permission of people to quote their posts off-site. Like the entirely sensible people they are, usvsth3m aren’t backing down in the least, and more power to them.

But let’s be clear here. GallifreyBase’s claim that they’re a “private” forum is absolutely ludicrous given that they have open registration and nearly 80,000 members, which is to say, about the entire population of Bath. The forum is private in the same way that the Jumbotron at Yankee Stadium is private, except that Yankee Stadium only has a capacity of about 52,000.

What this amounts to is the largest single community of Doctor Who fans declaring that they have the right to have their views go uncommented on and unreported on. It amounts to a declaration that scholarly research and ethnography on Doctor Who fandom is forbidden. It amounts to a declaration that journalists can’t cover Doctor Who fandom. It is a morally indefensible position that actively aims to have a chilling effect on entirely legitimate topics of media research and journalism.

I’m sure that many of you are members of GallifreyBase. If so, please use their Contact Us form to tell them your views on their efforts to stifle freedom of speech.

And seriously, check out usvsth3m. They’re a lovely mixture of fun “wants to go viral” content and leftist politics. And really, in a war between a cesspit embodying the worst aspects of Doctor Who fandom and a site with an interactive “Slap Michael Gove” game there’s only one side you can possibly be on.

Back tomorrow with the start of our coverage of the fantastic “Swamp Thing attacks Gotham City” arc.…

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I had this draft lying around, so I figured, let’s do some Tuesday content, eh? I’ve already written the so-called “Definitive Moffat and Feminism Post,” which was intended as a sort of preliminary mission statement summing up my take on the Moffat/feminism controversy prior to my covering the Moffat era, and which instead went kind of viral and became the most read thing I’ve ever put on this blog. And I’ve talked about some of these issues in isolation – people looking to see my argument in a detailed form, particularly my feminist readings of specific Moffat stories, will probably find my posts on (deep breath) Joking Apart, Coupling, The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, Girl in the Fireplace, Blink, The Beast Below, A Good Man Goes to War, Let’s Kill Hitler, The Wedding of River Song, and The Angels Take Manhattan enlightening. I am not going to retrace the feminist reading of the Moffat era that I’ve made in those posts here in detail, although there’s no real reason that anyone should have to read those posts to get the argument I am making here.

More broadly, however, I would politely point to the fact that I have nearly a dozen existent essays on topics related to Moffat and feminism as evidence that this is an issue I have thought about somewhat extensively. Perhaps more to the point, I would note that my opinions on Moffat’s work are based on having seen literally every episode of television he has ever written, having listened to nearly every DVD commentary track he has ever recorded, and having read countless interviews with him conducted over the course of around twenty years. I am reasonably confident, between my qualifications as a PhD in media studies and this level of background research, that I am among the, oh, let’s say fifty people in the world most qualified to speak authoritatively on the subject of Steven Moffat’s career. I do not say all of this as some sort of prima facie evidence that I am correct, but rather to note that this is not a debate in which I am an idle participant.

These disclaimers seem to me necessary because the suggestion that Steven Moffat is misogynistic has become quite widespread, to the point where it’s often taken as a sort of assumption such that the only debate is “how misogynistic.” This claim, despite its popularity, is, in my view, incorrect, not simply on the level of “it is something I disagree with,” but on the level of “it is possible to factually disprove this claim.”

This, then, is my attempt to conclusively refute the claim that Steven Moffat is misogynistic, and, in a related but distinct move, definitively demonstrate that he is, by any reasonable standard, a feminist writer.…

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A bit ago, someone gave me cause to write a brief thing about Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and particularly the way in which his character is handled after the moment he sexually assaults Buffy towards the end of Season Six

Here, for me, is the interesting thing about Spike. And I don’t think this is quite the reading that Whedon intended for Spike, but I think it’s close, and makes Spike an astonishing metaphor for rape culture and what it does. And, actually, the sort of approach to rape culture that could only really be pioneered by a feminist man, which interests me on several levels.

I mean, let’s be unambiguous here. Rape culture, as an idea and a critique, needed to be developed by women. Men are a support class in feminism, and this is as it should be. That’s the point. But equally, there are perspectives within the discussion that are both male and relevant. And I think the depiction of Spike is one of them.

The key thing, to me, about the bathroom rape scene is what Spike does next, which is to go on an extended quest for his soul. Because this ties into an important thematic narrative about vampires in Buffy, which is that they are true monsters. There are clearly shells of people wrapped up in them, but they’re explicitly irredeemable. Angel, somewhere or other, describes the demonic aspect of vampires as taking everything you are and twisting it, and fine, but let’s dig deeper here and note that the overall sense is that vampires are slaves to some external narrative about what vampires do.

Because it’s not just hunger in Buffy. It’s not just that vampires feed on innocents and have to. It’s not just temptation. These are the usual themes of vampire fiction, but Buffy mostly avoids them. Vampires in Buffy are visibly compelled into a larger narrative of evil deeds. They seem unable to resist becoming servants of powerful overlords with schemes for, at best, world domination, and at worst, things like the complete destruction of the planet. The state of soullessness means enslavement to a particular cultural narrative.

This is the recurring narrative for Spike. Even when he starts to redeem himself in Season Four, he’s redeemed by external force: by a chip in his brain that keeps him from indulging in the worst aspects of the narrative that his demon prescribes for him. It makes him less bad, but only in an instrumental way, in the same way that criminalizing rape sometimes locks predators up before they harm a second or third or fifth or twelfth person, but does fuck all to actually stop them from their first rape.

But somewhere in the course of his story, in looking in horror at what he’s done to Buffy, he changes. He rejects the narrative prescribed for him and seeks the power to write his own narrative. With Angel, the soul becomes a binary switch. Have one and you’re good, don’t have one and you’re not.…

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A week or two ago there was a bit of a to-do within American comics fandom when Brian Wood, a prominent writer often praised for his commitment to feminism and his well-written female characters, was accused of sexual harassment by Tess Fowler, an illustrator and artist. This has been the occasion for a lot of hand-wringing about the chronic problem of harassment at conventions, which mostly seems to consist of people making blog posts about how this is a serious issue. There’s very little sense of what can be done.

So here’s a suggestion: by default, we should believe the victims. On a basic, human, personal level, if someone makes an accusation of abuse, assault, or harassment, we should believe them.

Here’s what happens instead. Fowler’s account of what happened was, inevitably, picked over by large swaths of the male-dominated comics fandom who were eager to minimize the severity of what Wood did or to find a way to blame her for it. All of this is accompanied by lots of skepticism, usually with phrases like that Wood is “innocent until proven guilty” or that it’s “his word against hers.”

It’s not, of course. Fowler noted that she had several people who had e-mailed her with similar experiences. I’ve seen at least one person come forward with a similar allegation against Wood. There’s a pattern of behavior on Brian Wood’s part that’s disturbing, to say the least.

But never mind the specifics. Let’s look at some of the usual canards that get brought out around this point in the discussion, just in the abstract case. Because this isn’t really about Brian Wood. “Innocent until proven guilty,” for instance. Which is an important principle… in criminal law. It’s there because the standards by which the state can declare that someone ought be locked up in prison really should be high. If we are, as a society, going to sanction violence against people then we need to have serious safeguards. And one of them is that we wait until there’s proof in a court of law, beyond a reasonable doubt, of guilt.

But that’s not the standard that should apply to everyday interactions. If a guy at a comics convention offers to take you up to his room and you know that three people have reported that he’s sexually harassed them or assaulted them, you’re not unreasonable for deciding that you don’t want to go up there. Even if he’s never been “proven” guilty. And you’re not unreasonable for thinking that if someone knows that the guy chatting you up has a litany of accusations against him they should probably warn you about it.

Similarly, the “his word against hers” line. Yes, it is. But once you have an accusation of assault or harassment, the person being accused has a pretty obvious reason to deny it regardless of what actually happened. Whereas the victim… doesn’t really. I mean, yes, false accusations happen occasionally. But they’re very, very rare – much rarer than the rate at which sexual assault and harassment take place.…

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Back on Wednesday, in an interstitial post, I mentioned that I’d been permabanned from Wikipedia and made some appropriately dark mutterings about this. But since the issue has continued to be contentious on Wikipedia I wanted to make a more detailed response, if only because the arbitration committee persists in making the suggestion that I haven’t “answered their questions.” (This, in practice, is much like the political tactic of declaring that one’s opponent has to answer questions, in that the questions are never stated and the answers are never acknowledged.) Indeed, the committee is currently misrepresenting what I’ve said and done in a variety of ways, and so it seems worthwhile to turn the spotlight on this body again and look at what passes for decision making on Wikipedia.

Let’s start with the basic facts. In my post entitled “Wikipedia Goes All-In on Transphobia,” which is, at the time of writing, my fourth most-read post on the blog and is thus linked on the sidebar, I revealed that an editor who was accusing people of conflicts of interest over the discussion on what the appropriate name for the article about Chelsea Manning should be on the basis that they knew trans people, and who engaged in disturbing and stalkerish behavior towards several editors was, in fact, an employee of the US Military. I did so by revealing their name and workplace.

Since Wikipedia is currently removing all links to that post (which was used as the main source for a Guardian article on the subject, incidentally, and which Brad Patrick, the former legal representative for Wikipedia, praised and shared), I won’t mention the editor by name here, just because, well, I want the people still arguing about this on Wikipedia to have the ability to link to what I’m saying here in order to dispel some of what can charitably be called the misrepresentations of what I’ve done. Regardless, yeah, I doxed a dude.

Shortly after the post went up I received the following e-mail from a member of the arbitration committee.

Please contact the Arbitration Committee to explain why you have posted personal, non-public information about another contributor on your personal blog. This blog post has direct ramifications on the project, and may put you in gross violation of the project’s norms and policies.

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Due to my revelation in this post that the Wikipedia user Cla68, who has been arguing that transgender people are too biased to edit the article on Chelsea Manning, is in fact a member of the US Military and thus has clear biases of his own, the Arbitration Committee of the English language Wikipedia has removed my administrator privileges and banned me indefinitely, forbidding any appeal of the ban for a year.

As discussed in the post, Cla68 has, prior to this, been open about his participation on Wikipedia, freely giving quotes to the media and engaging in discussion on Wikipedia about those quotes. It’s only now that he’s begin editing with an obvious conflict of interest that he has suddenly developed a desire to keep his identity a secret. My “revelation,” in other words, is nothing of the sort. Indeed, it’s difficult to see how this decision comports with Wikpiedia policy, which declares that “Posting another editor’s personal information is harassment, unless that person had voluntarily posted his or her own information, or links to such information, on Wikipedia.” Which, again, Cla68 has done.  Since my post, in fact, Cla68 has posted on Wikipediocracy, a Wikipedia criticism site on which he’s a forum moderator, confirming his employer. Furthermore, I’ve made no mention of his identity on Wikipedia, nor have I linked to that blog post from there. I revealed his identity in my capacity as a z-list blogger, not as a Wikipedia editor.

My reasoning for outing Cla68 was and is simple: it’s in the public interest. The sixth largest website in the world is sanctioning trans allies and Chelsea Manning supporters for being “too involved” to work on the Chelsea Manning article, but is giving a pass to members of the US Military, who apparently have no conflict of interest. This is straightforwardly something that deserves to be talked about.

This shockingly harsh sanction – the harshest the committee ever hands down – takes on an unnerving tone when one considers that the bulk of that blog post consisted of criticism of the Arbitration Committee’s decision to punish editors complaining about transphobic behavior on Wikipedia more harshly than they punish transphobic behavior itself. It is difficult, if not impossible, to see this move as anything other than petty retaliation.

Particularly entertaining is that I’ve been banned for attempting to disinfect with sunlight with regards to Chelsea Manning. Not only does this sanction look petty, it looks particularly ridiculous when applied on the topic of someone who is in jail for her commitment to transparency. I’m actually taken aback by the comedy of it. The Arbitration Committee censures its critics for leaking things in the public interest. Over the Chelsea Manning article.

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(Previous post on this topic)

10/23: Update with recent developments added to the end of the post.

11/6: I have been banned from Wikipedia for the contents of this post. More information here.

We’ll start with the good news. After a second move discussion, Wikipedia has decided to move the article on Chelsea Manning back to her actual name instead of misgendering and misnaming her. This brings us to the bad news, which is essentially everything else, and in particular everything surrounding the arbitration committee case.   This case has led to the declaration that calling out transphobia on Wikipedia is unacceptable, that trans activists are disqualified from working on articles involving trans subjects, and that it’s more acceptable for people employed by the US military to covertly edit the Chelsea Manning article than it is for trans advocates to do so openly.

To recap, immediately after Chelsea Manning publicly came out and and announced her new name, Wikipedia updated and retitled its article on her. This set off a wave of controversy, resulting in the article being moved back to where it misnamed Manning and being locked there for thirty days. Those thirty days have now passed, and a second discussion over the topic resulted in overwhelming consensus to move the article back to its correct title.

A consequence of this, however, was that a request was filed with the arbitration committee – an elected body allowed to pass broad sanctions to settle disputes on Wikipedia, including banning editors. That process has also now concluded, and has concluded disastrously.

In order to understand the arbitration commitee’s decision, it is important to understand the culture of Wikipedia. In its determination to avoid creating any top-down editorial structure, Wikipedia has instead repeatedly embraced a system of rules designed to eliminate thought from the decision making process as much as possible. Hence the policy that all information must be sourced to reliable secondary sources, with little concern for the biases that this demand introduces (what sources get published is, after all, heavily impacted by degree to which publication can prove profitable, a wholly distinct concept from what is accurate or important) or to the number of fields like the humanities in which secondary sources are not dispassionate attempts to synthesize materials but attempts to advance partisan and novel takes on existing material.

The fantasy has always been that with the right set of rules the encyclopedia would write itself, with optimal versions of articles just coming to exist naturally as a consequence of the self-evident rules about citation and secondary sources. The reality has always been that instead of actually thinking critically about content decisions people just think critically about how to manipulate and play with the rules.

Since this is, most days of the week, a geek blog, I assume the analogy to tabletop role-playing games and the type of player known as a rules lawyer will make sense. If not, allow a brief digression. A rules lawyer is a type of player whose pleasure comes not from any accomplishment within the game, but instead from the manipulation and contortion of the rules.…

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It’s funny where the line ends up being drawn and where we decide that things are truly outrageous. Let’s face it, most of the people who howled with fury at the willingness of Brazil to slash social services and jack up public transportation fees are the sort of lefty intellectuals who are unlikely to watch the World Cup in the first place. Or are the sort of leftists who rage fearsomely on Facebook and then bugger off and watch the football anyway.

And this is how these things work. World Cups. Olympics. They’re all the same basic principle – shift the infrastructure costs aggressively onto the public sector, and then private concerns take all the profits. Why, one might reasonably ask, would anybody sign up for such a rotten deal?

The clue comes in FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s plea in the wake of this summer’s protests against the World Cup’s precursor tournament, the Confederations Cup. “I can understand that people are not happy,” he said, “but they should not use football to make their demands heard.” The obvious response to this is, of course, “why not?” And this gets into the sick heart of these sorts of celebrations.

It’s an interesting fact that FIFA rules declare that football must be entirely above politics. Any sort of political meddling in the administration of national football teams results, in theory, in the expulsion of the national team from all competitions. It’s not entirely clear how that works in the case of a country like North Korea, where it is outright inconceivable that there’s no political interference with football or, for that matter, with anything else. (I mean, this is the country that asserted that its Supreme Leader was relaying advice to the manager via a hidden phone link.)

And anyway, the idea that politics and football aren’t intertwined is ridiculous on the face of it. When public money is a key part of how your business is conducted, you can’t be separate from politics. No, what’s key is that football is invulnerable to politics; that the political concerns of any given country cannot be allowed to affect football at all. Football is holy and all encompassing. Its official policy is that it’s more important than anything else. Hence the breathtaking arrogance of suggesting that people shouldn’t bring it into their protests. After all, don’t they realize football is far more important than silly little things like whether they can afford to eat?

So why would anyone sign up to it? Because there are benefits to the invulnerable absolutism of sports. You get to, as the UK did for the 2012 Olympics (essentially indistinguishable from the World Cup), normalize the imposition of martial law in your largest city and put missile batteries on top of residential buildings. Or Brazil’s use of the World Cup to drive tanks around its slums to aggressively clean them up. Not all the slums, of course – just the ones tourists might see.

The rhetoric here is exactly what you’d expect.…

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I went back and forth over whether to post this, having drawn it up for my reference. But ultimately, I decided that, as we get closer to the Moffat era (which in many ways starts with Blink, the story with which it became obvious who the next showrunner would be) that I wanted one definitive, centralized post on the subject. (Edit: It’s rather closing the barn door after the cows have gone, but since this got way wider linkage than I expected… I don’t mean “definitive” in the sense of “the last word ever on the subject.” Rather, I mean it as “here is this Doctor Who blog’s one-stop definitive comment on feminism in the Moffat era so that, when I get to it in a few months, there’s an overall statement in place that provides context for my comments on any given story.” So, definitive for the context of TARDIS Eruditorum. Not for, like, the entirety of the cosmos.)

Let’s start with a brief overview of the history of feminism in Doctor Who. It’s never been the case that Doctor Who has been a tremendously misogynistic show. It’s also never been the case that it’s been a terribly feminist one. Instead it has always been somewhere in the middle, but unmistakably behind its times.

It started well enough, with Barbara serving as a terribly strong and iconic female character of the sort the series would go over forty years without seeing again – a middle aged woman who was not there primarily as sex appeal, but who was sensible, practical, and able to carry her own plot on her own terms. But she was paired with Susan, who, by the end of the first season, was such an obedient little peril monkey that she’d successfully avoid breaking out of prison cells because there were rats and would go willingly to the guillotine because she was feeling a bit queasy.

The history of subsequent female companions can hardly be called any better. No matter how lofty their intentions, they all ended up the same way. Let’s take a brief tour of the post-Susan female companions, or, more accurately, their fates. Married off hastily, as a last-minute replacement for a plot where she’d have died; died; died; mind-raped and dumped in London; hastily written out after only appearing in two episodes of her last story, last seen being told to look after the male companion who was also departing; given six episodes of 1960s torture porn before she sobbingly asks to leave because she can’t take it anymore; mind-raped into forgetting all her adventures with the Doctor.

One can only hope the refrigerator is bigger on the inside too. Sure, there are cases where male companions had similar fates, but that’s not the point; the point is that all of the female characters suffered ignoble and humiliating fates that cut them down to size. Every single one.

This brings us to the granddaddy of them all, Terrance Dicks. Who writes out a smart and capable female character with no explanation to replace her with a dumb blonde, declaring openly that he considers the companion’s only role to be getting captured and rescued.…

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There is something that you never, ever do to a transgender person: use their birth name. The reason here is simple – to call a transgender person by their birth name is to deny them the basic right to their identity. It is to claim for yourself the right to dictate who they are, over their own express wishes. It is to tell them that their transition is invalid – that they deserve instead to suffer from the genuine and real pain of gender dysphoria, and that this is preferable to ever allowing them to think that they might have the right to define for themselves the basic aspects of who they are. It is hate speech, plain and simple, as straightforwardly as using the worst racial or sexual slur you can think of.

This is not a matter of when hormone therapy has begun or surgery has taken place. Those are just procedures to reduce the material impact of gender dysphoria and make social transition less awkward and, frankly, less dangerous. The point where it becomes hate speech is the instant that a person has told you their preferred name and gender presentation.

On August 22nd, Chelsea Manning issued a public statement confirming the longstanding reports that she was transgender and asking that instead of using the name “Bradley Manning,” as media sources had been doing up to that point, people refer to her by the name of “Chelsea.” Almost immediately after this announcement the Wikipedia page for Manning was changed from being called “Bradley Manning” to “Chelsea Manning.” In the early hours of August 31st, following a week of discussion, the page was moved back.

This is the story of how the fifth largest website in the world came to actively embrace transphobia and hate speech.

Some disclosure. I am not an impartial observer. Nevertheless, this is a factual account based on the public record of Wikipedia talk pages and logs. Still, in the interests of disclosure, I involved myself in this debate in a minor role, advocating for the position you’d expect. This was my first substantial contribution to Wikipedia in several years, but I do have administrator rights on the project dating back to 2004, when I was a highly active editor. I am friendly with several of the persons involved, although have not met any except on the Internet. One person involved, Morwen, was a significant donor to my Kickstarter. I am not writing this piece on behalf of any of them, and in fact more than one person I am friendly with has expressed reservations over the piece, though not about its factual accuracy.

Morwen has a highly visible role in what happened, but not, ultimately, an important one; she was the editor who retitled (or, in Wikipedia parlance, moved) the page following Manning’s announcement on the Today show. To begin, at least, events consisted of jargon-heavy technical decisions based heavily on Wikipedia policy. These events may be somewhat opaque to outsiders, but it is nevertheless worth summarizing the exact events that led to the larger conflict.…

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