A Clarification of Events Regarding Kari Sperring on the 29th of April, 2015
Rose Lemberg tweets about it here (archive link). Unfortunately, her impression is incorrect in several crucial ways.
Deirdre Saoirse Moen’s blog post covers much of it.
What happened from my perspective:
I see this comment from Deirdre:
Where things begin to bug me is the amount of toxicity currently being directed at Bee, such as the awkwardly uncomfortable part of the Sad Puppies panel at Eastercon, where it was suggested that someone write Vox Day/Requires Hate slash.
Now, this struck me as a more than a little odd, because “slash” without further qualification means, to me, explicitly sexual M/M fanfic. Here, we have a pairing that’s het, but one of them is explicitly a white supremacist cis man, and the other is a queer woman of color whose politics are as far from white supremacy as it’s possible to get without advocating for actual subjugation of white people. (And if you think Bee believes or advocates for such, and are inclined to argue about it, kindly fuck off. It’s as batshit as when I saw someone alleging she was pro-GG, which is the exact opposite of the truth.)
But mostly it skeeved me the fuck out, because I’d already become aware that some posters at FFA had started writing real-people fic about Bee, her friends, and their “heroes” in the continued campaign to silence and isolate Bee. (I read one snippet, and then considered bleaching my eyes, because it was awful as fiction as well as having the creepy obsessiveness RPF tends to have.) So some creepy asshole coming up with the idea of a fic wherein Bee and VD have sex sounded entirely too plausible.
I mentioned it, and linked to the comment, in private conversation, and Bee’s reaction, in addition to the disgust I felt, was to point out that having VD have sex with her would require it to be rape, because there is no universe where she would ever consent to sex with him. She tweeted about it first here. And I agreed with her assessment.
Note: we did not know who had made the comment Deirdre referred to above at this juncture, and in addition to I and a few others condemning the idea of “RH”/VD “slash” (i.e. fic about them having sex) as inherently, necessarily rape fic, we wanted to know who would suggest such a thing so that we could block them and not have to risk engaging with them. We were under the impression that it was a suggestion, that no such fic had been written yet, just that the suggestion had been floated and we assumed (hoped?) that it was meant as a “joke.”
Shaun Duke was also horrified, and contacted the EasterCon chair to express his concerns. Again, we did not have a name yet. I think we all assumed that it was a white man who said it - Deirdre hadn’t even mentioned the gender of the speaker, as I recall, prior to disclosing identity. Mostly because of the sort of privilege that would allow sufficient disconnect to talk about such a thing strongly suggested a white male. The only thing Bee wanted was to know who to block, and I supported her, because I wanted to block anyone who’d suggest what we’d believed had been suggested. We did not believe anyone who would suggest such a thing at a con panel was someone who’d feel shamed by bringing it up on Twitter.
Again, all of this happened during the day on April 29th (going by my time zone - I’m in North Carolina in the US), and we had not gotten a name from Deirdre yet, because she wanted to be sure before doing so.
A full ten hours after Bee’s first tweet, Deirdre confirmed that it was Kari Sperring who’d made the comment. Note that both Shaun and I were shocked; I’ve never gotten the impression that Dr. Sperring (archive link) would make such a “joke,” and she says as much here (archive link).
As it happened, Sperring was referring to a short fic someone on FFA had posted about VD and “RH” having some sort of conversation (archive link), not suggesting porn involving VD and “RH.” Sperring did describe it as “slash,” but stated that she’d not intended it to be about sex (archive link) and that her understanding of the word was that it meant “focuses on particular characters.” (archive link) Which … no disrespect to Sperring, but that’s the first time I’ve ever heard “slash” used to describe fanfic devoid of either sexual or romantic content, and I’ve been around in various online fandoms since 1995. And even Elizabeth Bear jumps in to echo that “slash” == “sex,” (archive link) presumably not having read Sperring’s preceding tweets (because, as I read it, she was working off the assumption that Sperring hadn’t used the word “slash” to refer to the fic in question). As I pointed out in subsequent tweets (to which Bear never responded), Sperring did, in fact, describe it as slash fic, which is the source of this whole mess.
(Also, that tweet shows one of several instances of what I believe to be (unintentional?) gaslighting of Shaun, similar to responses I’ve gotten when I’ve stated that, no, Bee is not a master manipulator - to which I say, fuck you, you do not know my history or background with manipulative people and how I learned to recognize them, nor am I required to make public my reasons for concluding that Bee’s ability to manipulate people has been vastly overstated by her enemies.)
At no point did any of us - especially Bee or Deirdre - intentionally target Sperring. The vast bulk of our tweets happened before we had any idea who it was, and if I’d had that name from the beginning, I wouldn’t have said anything because I’d prefer to honor Bee’s promise not to engage with her unless there was unambiguous evidence of active malice, and in Sperring’s case that would take a lot, because I’ve never seen any evidence of Sperring being a malicious person in any significant way.
Again, I apologize for implicating Sperring as far as I did, and will take these events under consideration in the future before I react in public.
