Oh, I wasn’t talking about you, didn’t mean to hurt you.
June 26, 2020 9:22 AM   Subscribe

John Scalzi addresses his friendship with Myke Cole, Max Temkin, Sam Sykes and Warren Ellis concluding
Women have a right to be safe and secure, and to have full participation in the cultures and communities that they create and work in.

Scalzi briefly references his own fuck up, RaceFail '09, which he later walked back.

Title is from a comment made by Tempest Bradford on Scalzi's fuck up post. Her full quote: "You want to say “Oh, I wasn’t talking about you, didn’t mean to hurt you,” but that is what people always, always say whenever they make stupid blanket statements and act in otherwise stupid, hurtful ways."
posted by zenon (6 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: I know Scalzi's a MeFi local but I don't feel like this blog post or him personally makes a lot of sense as the thing to center further discussion about this on; he's got a comment section on that post which seems like a good place to engage with his writing specifically, and if there's a post to be made about some of the folks whose behavior he's discussing as fuckups beyond the existing Temkin and Ellis threads it should probably be framed more around those folks directly. -- cortex



 
One of the things that I've noticed about abusers and exploiters, especially those that have created personality cults around themselves, is that they don't just use their power to get away with abuse and exploitation. They also use it to cultivate friendships and professional relationships, not just for the usual reasons but in case their abuses and exploitations get made public and they need to call those markers in. Whenever someone called the late Harlan Ellison on his various offenses, for example, there was always somebody who stepped up to testify about some random small kindness that the Great Man did them. This is not by accident.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:42 AM on June 26, 2020 [3 favorites]


The choice of language in calling long standing abusive behaviour a fuck up is minimising in and of itself. A fuck up would be leaving the taps running and flooding the communal bathroom. This is more like continually pouring poison into the water tanks for years on end.
posted by dng at 9:47 AM on June 26, 2020 [1 favorite]


I really detest the way he frames their actions as "fuck ups." There's no such thing as an "intentional fuck up." Just call them rapists. Call them abusers. Call them racists.
posted by muddgirl at 9:49 AM on June 26, 2020 [3 favorites]


I get that it might be attractive to view any good acts by someone who behaved monstrously as cynical attempts to create a structure of support and cover for those acts, but I suspect it's more complex than that.

People are capable of being both wonderful and terrible in different contexts. That Ellison was a predatory creep doesn't mean he was providing aide or friendship in other contexts in bad faith.

At the same time, kindnesses given in one area cannot and do not excuse exploitative and predatory behavior in others.

That said, I have deep reservations that this FPP is going to produce a positive conversation here. Very quickly we'll see a split of "glad he said something" and "but this is bullshit and he didn't do enough," and neither side will be interested in the view of the other.
posted by uberchet at 9:50 AM on June 26, 2020 [6 favorites]


It's good that JScalzi wrote this and is being very clear about fucking up and making mistakes. But it does also stink of a kind of "I need to distance myself from these other problematic men. I've participated in problematic-lite but I'm not THAT kind of problematic."

It's fucked up all around. But I guess it's a start. I knew about some of these writers having toxic views/behavior but not all, adding a few more people on my "DONT NEED TO SUPPORT WITH DOLLARS" list.
posted by Fizz at 9:51 AM on June 26, 2020 [2 favorites]


I agreet that this is not a good poast for metafliter.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:51 AM on June 26, 2020


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