The Tale of Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Part I: A Brief Introduction
Anna asked me to write something about this, because a lot of people who may be concerned with online harassment, with intersectional feminism, and/or with abuse and harassment directed with the goal of silencing and isolating (at a minimum) a marginalized, vulnerable person may not be familiar with the story at all, or may only have heard about it from unreliable, distinctly biased sources. This is the TL;DR version - watch this space for longer, future installments, which will go into great detail.
In August of 2014, short story writer Benjanun Sriduangkaew’s novella Scale-Bright - her first fiction sale outside of short story markets like Clarkesworld and Beneath Ceaseless Skies - was coming out as hardcover from a small press, and as a self-published e-book, so there was some buzz around that, including talk of a potential Hugo should her skills stand up with the longer form. She’d been nominated for the Campbell award for best new writer that year as well - things were looking pretty awesome for her. At the same time, a whisper campaign was reportedly already in full swing, alleging that Bee (Benjanun’s nickname) was the same person as “Requires Hate,” the blogger behind review blog Requires Only That You Hate. Much of it was predicated upon both Bee and RH both being queer Chinese Thai women (i.e. Thai citizenship, Chinese ethnicity)… and that’s about it.
This review blog, active from 2011 to 2013, was known for scathing, vitriolic, hyperbolic language, born out of rage at imperialism, colonialism, cultural appropriation, misogyny, racism, and homophobia, to name a few. She held nothing back - when reviewing Paolo Bacigulpi’s The Windup Girl, a novel that won numerous awards and high praise, but set in a future, biopunk version of her native country, she called it “exotifying, yellow-fever, offensive claptrap,” and engaged in hyperbolic language about violence in retaliation for perpetuating Western stereotypes about Thailand in a high-profile, highly-praised, widely-read novel. On her Twitter account, she’d sometimes joke with friends about similarly violent fantasies.
In retrospect, it reminds me of, when the topic of Kevin J. Anderson came up in one fan forum with respect to his Star Wars profic, one of the first responses was that he should be tarred and feathered at the next con he appeared at. This sort of performative rage also was and is very much a thing in social justice circles: here’s some sample reading if you want to spend some time on it.
In any event, this blog earned her a lot of enemies - while it’s not universal, a number of people in the genresphere, both readers and writers, consider it a severe breach of etiquette to be anything other than profoundly respectful to genre writers when criticizing them, especially if it’s a work that, like The Windup Girl, gets lots of awards and buckets of critical acclaim, or if it’s a writer with a lot of social cachet and general respect, such as Neil Gaiman.
Now, here’s the part where we admit that she’s not an angelic victim (if that wasn’t already clear). She spent years in Internet fandom as a truly bad actor, when she posted under several (linked) handles. Her most notorious handle was Winterfox on LiveJournal, where she engaged in rather reprehensible behavior; she routinely insulted people, calling them illiterate and/or idiots if they enjoyed something she didn’t like (or vice versa). She spent several years as a poster to a particularly foul, toxic, chan-ish RPG forum, where she engaged in roughly the same level of toxicity as pretty much everyone else there. She said some truly vile shit. Let’s be perfectly clear on this.
And then she moved away from it. Got tired of it. Like a lot of people did.
This may remind you of another problematic victim, if you’re familiar with a particular hate group in video gaming and their targets.
So, when the rumors started circling, so did the sharks.
In early October of 2014, one of Benjanun’s editors and friends, Nick Mamatas, attempted to get in front of the burgeoning whisper campaign and outed her as RH, in a (perhaps misguided) attempt at damage control and taking control of the narrative. Over the course of the next month, writers and bloggers fell over themselves to talk about what an awful person she was, with the word “troll” constantly coming up.
A troll.
Someone whose main purpose is disruptive, evoking emotional reactions. Which is true, as far as it goes. But a troll does that for its own sake; think what you may of her methods, her goal was to increase awareness of the many issues endemic to genre fiction, issues of racism, misogyny, QUILTBAG representation and stereotypes, and scads of other issues. And that doesn’t even get into representation among creators.
All of her criticism, as insightful and incisive as it was, reduced to “trolling.”
I’m not exaggerating. I’ll be getting into this in detail, but suffice it to say that calling out writers for homophobia and racism was treated as “abuse” by the community.
As most of the people posting in namespace about it were white women and men, some people of color expressed discomfort with how it was shaking down, including doubts about one of the major sources of allegations. This culminated in a blog post by one Laura Mixon (you can grab a PDF of it here, with comments, because apparently it broke her blogging platform; if you should read it, see if you can count the weasel words, just as a start, though I’ll be dissecting it in detail later on), which provoked further criticism along those lines, much of it from people not necessarily sympathetic to Bee or impressed by her behavior in the past or during the shitstorm.
That last link?
Solace Ames has been attacked for insufficiently condemning Bee because of what she wrote there.
Anything less than wholesale, unambiguous condemnation of Benjanun Sriduangkaew as the second or third worst blight upon all of genre fiction, ever*, and implicit or explicit support of an end to her publishing career, is treated as “defending abuse.”
Again, I am not exaggerating.
She has had every element of her identity questioned - her nationality, ethnicity, gender, age, and sexual orientation. All of it.
There has been speculation - in public, by people with not-insignificant platforms - that she is not actually the author of her fiction, but that some other person wrote it for her.
And it has not stopped.
It slowed down for a time, but after the publication of one of her short stories in January, and then Scale-Bright receiving a BSFA nomination, a new round of it has emerged, which includes new (yes, new) attempts to direct our “favorite” VG-centered terrorist mob to attack her.
Stay tuned. It’s gonna get messy in here.
