Otter's Rock

I've been reading through all the posts about internal AO3/OTW workings in the last month or so, and how horrifyingly awful it can be--ranging from "overwhelming" to "intentionally abusive." (synonymous has a great roundup here.) And I keep hearing things that bring to mind Issendai's excellent essay "Sick Systems," and also experiences I've had in my two decades working in/with various nonprofits (mostly Christian, but some secular). And I have some thoughts that current OTW volunteers might want to consider.

First, the essay. Sick Systems: How to Keep Someone With You Forever is excellent, readable, and very evocative. It helps you see how the sick system works, and why people stay in situations and relationships and jobs that are--from the outside--absolutely bonkers and harmful. If it has a flaw, it's that it presumes intentionality on the part of the people (whether employer or lover) who create the sick system. I have seen enough such systems in various nonprofits to know that most of the time they're not intentionally sick and awful. You don't have to try to be abusive and manipulative to create a system that is abusive and manipulative.

All you really need is some combination of: incompetence, lack of imagination, high value on "the mission," low value on the well-being of the people involved (at least compared to "the mission"), a feeling of pressure and scarcity (not enough time, not enough people, not enough money, not enough whatever to accomplish the all-important Mission), and an emphasis on measurable results over all else.

"Incompetence" is self-explanatory.

Lack of imagination means a lot of things, but the one most likely to lead to a sick system is that when there is a problem, you put a jerry-rigged patch on it and continue on, instead of figuring out how to fix the root of the problem, because you can't imagine any other way of doing things than the way you've always done it.

High value on the mission sounds like it should be good! But not if it leads you to forget why you're doing it or if that belief leads you down the road of "the ends justify the means." When you value the mission more than you do the people who are working on the mission or the people you're (supposedly) serving, it's a recipe for exploitation. "You should volunteer an unsustainable number of hours per week because The Mission is so important! You believe in The Mission, don't you?" And any criticism can be deflected because it is insignificant next to the all-important Mission. Or, even better, turned into criticism of the mission. "Oh, you think we should stop abusing and exploiting our volunteers? We can't be abusing or exploiting people because we're Good People doing An Important Thing! You're complaining about nothing because you want to see The Mission fail!"

A feeling of scarcity (whether real or imagined) means that you're under pressure to do what you can without stopping and thinking about the best way to do it. You can't do it the best way, you don't have the time/people/money/whatever! So you have to cobble it together out of what you can, and exploit what you do have to make up the difference. So, for example, if you feel like you don't have enough money, or like the money you have can't legitimately be spent on certain aspects of your work, you might fill the gap with volunteers. And if you don't have enough volunteers to do it, either, you'll do it by pressuring the volunteers to work more than they should.

An emphasis on measurable results, well, you get best at what you measure. And things like "the well-being of our volunteers" and "the goodwill we have created in the community" are really, really hard to measure even when they're absolutely crucial to the core of your mission.

Basically, you put all of these things together in varying proportions and you get a system where people feel trapped, overwhelmed, and yet willing to twist themselves in knots and harm themselves and others to accomplish the mission, and override every reasonable objection or suggestion because The Mission comes first and they can't imagine any other way to do things and even if they did they don't have the time or resources to implement it. And hey, it can't be that bad because The Mission is getting done and we're all Good People here, right?

None of this requires anyone involved to have any bad intentions whatsoever. In fact, it's more effectively harmful if everyone involved genuinely has good intentions and is not personally an asshole. Because if an asshole wants you to do something, even if you believe in The Mission just as much as they do, it's easy to stand up to them and say no if they're being unreasonable. But if it's a good person, a person you like, who is really genuinely sorry about it, but you're the only one who can do it, that's a lot harder to say no to. And then you end up with the sort of Sick System Issendai talks about, despite the fact that everyone involved has genuinely good intentions. (You know, those things they pave the road to hell with ...)

Which brings me to something they taught us in my management courses in grad school, which I have seen work wonders in such situations: Don't be afraid to let things fail.

Let me repeat that: Don't be afraid to let things fail.

Not the entire mission of the organization, of course. But parts of it. Projects. Events. Even parts of the organizational structure. If they can't be sustainably and healthily done by the organization as it exists now, stop doing them. Let them fail. Kill them if you have to. Yes, even if they're important. Yes, even if--especially if!--it feels like the world is going to end and the sky is going to fall and the entire organization/mission will die with them.

Because when you let harmful/unsustainable things fail, a world of possibilities open up. Here are some of them:

• People panic and redouble their efforts to re-create the thing that failed, except with even more pressure (this is by far the worst possible outcome, but it's also the only one that ends up as bad as where you started).
• You find out that when the pressure of "we have to keep this going no matter what!" is removed, people have more freedom to think and imagine and you figure out ways to improve and transform things before it actually fails. If you don't have to keep things going no matter what, you have freedom to try something that may not work. And maybe it'll make things worse, but maybe it'll make things better, and if it makes things worse then it's not the end of the world because the thing was failing anyway, you didn't kill it.
• You find out that the thing you thought was so vital to The Mission ... actually isn't. You might have needed it at one point, but you don't any longer. Now you're free to stop wasting energy on useless stuff.
• You find out that the thing you let fail actually is as important as you thought it was, and it really sucks that it's gone (for now). But now that you're not hustling to Make A Failing Structure Work, you have the space and time to stop and think and figure out a better and more sustainable way of doing it. Yes, some things got dropped through the cracks when you let the previous system fail, but let's be real. Things were falling through the cracks anyway or being done badly enough it might have been better if they had fallen through the cracks (the system was unsustainable and awful!) and once you get the sustainable system in place more things are being handled (and handled to a much higher standard) than ever before.
• You find out that the thing that failed did so because it was designed for very different circumstances than you're actually in. Maybe the people who designed it didn't realize what was actually going to happen, but maybe things have changed in ways you didn't notice while you were trying to prop up the sick system and wondering why it's not working. Now you can design your new system for the way things actually are now, rather than the way someone else thought they were going to be a decade ago.
• You find out that your organization actually has the resources you assumed they didn't. Maybe it takes a rethinking of priorities. Maybe it takes a concerted fund drive or reaching out to specific high-ticket donors. Maybe it takes a different way of recruiting and training and organizing your volunteers. Maybe a lot of things. But the limitations you thought were iron-clad were actually pretty flexible.
• You find out that there are other people in/adjacent to the organization who believe in The Mission, too, and have things to contribute in ways that weren't compatible with the thing that failed, but which you can use now that you're not wedded to The Way We Used To Do It.
• You find out that your organization doesn't have to do that particular thing by yourself. Maybe there are other organizations you can partner with. Maybe there are other resources in the community who are doing the same/similar work.

You think the sky will fall if things fail. You think The Mission will be irrevocably harmed if you stop grinding away at yourselves and others to make the Sick System work. You think everything will be over forever.

And yet, if you genuinely let something fail--not the whole organization, but a part of it!--you will actually be in a better position to figure out what needs to be done and how to do it in a sustainable and non-abusive way.

Quite often, when something gets dysfunctional, the easiest and quickest way to fix it is to let it fail (whether in whole or in part), take a breath, figure out a better way of doing it, and then rebuild something better in its place.

I'm not advocating for people to let the whole OTW collapse. The OTW has done a lot of great things over the years, I am grateful they exist, and for all the time and effort put into it by all the people who have volunteered. I hope the OTW and AO3 continue on for years and decades to come (albeit in a better/healthier way). But specific projects or committees might benefit from being allowed to collapse and then seeing what new thing can and should be done to replace them.

At the very least, the freedom to take a deep breath and say "if this particular part of the mission fails--whether temporarily or permanently--the sky will not fall and the world will not end" makes all the difference in the world.

ao3_news_feed posted: Yahoo Groups Closure - What You Can Do - Part 2

Archive Team

The Archive Team is working on taking backups of public groups, with the intent to submit the data to the Internet Archive. You can submit a request for them to backup a group using their nomination form. The nomination form also has an email where moderators can give permission for their Groups to be archived. They’ve also developed a Chrome extension to simplify and coordinate signing up to at-risk groups and have moved many fandom groups to the top of their queue (note: the extension also helps them download non-fandom groups).

Helping these teams

If you’re a moderator who’d like to potentially import your group to the AO3, contact Open Doors and we’ll talk to you about options. For more updates on what’s happening, see announcements or check back on this page.

If you’d like to directly help rescue teams and you want to save only fandom groups, you can use this form to nominate fandom groups OR you can go directly to the public spreadsheet to find nominated groups that still need downloading. (General downloading instructions are here.) If you want to help save fandom groups and many other non-fandom groups, see Archive Team's chrome extension. Both are worthy efforts and both face a hard deadline of Dec 14.

If you want to help save fan history from the Yahoo closure, AO3 has some ways you can help!

From melannen 's DW post:

In all that reminiscing about platforms of old that I did on the survey, I realized the only one I really missed (as opposed to missing the people who were there) was del.icio.us, and specifically del.icio.us 's "recently popular pages with this tag" pages. I had the "popular pages tagged 'slash'" page on del.icio.us bookmarked and basically read everything that appeared on it (unless it was one of my DNW pairings.) It was the zeitgeist of fandom-as-a-whole (or, at least, the parts of lj slash fandom that had adopted del.icio.us) and always full of good fic to read.

There doesn't really seem to be anything that will do that anymore. pinboard.in/popular/fandom tries, but there's really not enough people bookmarking fic there for it to work. And I'm kinda between fandoms right now (or, well, not super-plugged-in to any fandom that is large enough to get me all the fic I want, anyway) so I miss it a lot.

It occurred to me though that AO3 would probably let me filter for recent, popular fic if I massaged its Advanced Search page. And it will! Sort of. You can't filter by *when* a kudos was given, and there doesn't seem to be away to search for works posted in a particular time range - only for works posted *or* updated in that time range, which doesn't give as good of results because it's swamped by long-going WIPs that just finished.

But I kind of got there by searching completed works in English with more than 500 kudos sorted in order of posting, which seems to give a pretty good overview of recently popular fics in recently popular fandoms.

I've always been bummed about that, since the death of del.icio.us, and ESPECIALLY since Pinboard's "popular in fandom" page turned into mostly politics and twitter stuff after the 2016 election.  So I'm really happy to have this, thank you melannen !

tumblr version is here.

I've been in fandom for almost twenty years, and here are some things that are true of pretty much every fandom I've seen: There is a lot more sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism, anti-semitism, etc., in fandom than most of us would like to admit, and the vast majority of it is unconscious. People (mostly white, etc.) THINK they're being perfectly unbiased and fair, and they really, really aren't. Their unconscious prejudices are shining through. And it sucks. We, collectively, suck.

But here's something I think most people miss: when we talk about this stuff, the point is not to make people feel bad. It's not about who's a "good," non-racist person, and who is a "bad" racist. It's not about proving who's "pure" and who's not. (Or at least, if that's why you're doing it, you're a really screwed-up self-righteous asshole.) IT'S ABOUT CHANGE. Because the thing is, we are all swimming in a sea of racist, sexist, queerphobic crap all the time. We can't change the larger culture (at least not by ourselves), but we CAN change fandom. I know, because fandom has gotten better about this stuff over the last twenty years. There is still a LOT of room for improvement, but it's better than it was. And it can get better than it is. But not if we ignore the problem or sweep it under the rug or get defensive. The first step in sucking less is to realize that you suck in the first place. The second step is figuring out how to suck less.

This post is about that second step. This post is about how to take the knowledge that, yes, we have some problems, and work to make those problems smaller. This post is about how to work through that, grow as a person, learn to suck less, and still have fun in fandom while you're doing it.

There are a lot of posts out there about how to be a good ally. There are also lots of posts out there about avoiding racist/sexist/ableist/whateverist tropes in fic. And there are a lot of good posts out there pointing out that fandom gets WAAAAAY more interested in able-bodied neurotypical cisgender white men than about any other character. We all know what the problems are, or at least, we should. But I think there's a need for "okay, I want to be more inclusive/suck less, how do I do it" on a broad level before we get to the nitty-gritty of "these are tropes I should avoid or be careful about." Namely, how does one get oneself to be fannish about characters that all one's cultural conditioning is screaming at you to ignore?

First, some basic principles.
1) This is fandom. It is supposed to be fun. This should not be like that terrible assignment from your least favorite teacher in school, fandom should be fun.

2) We've all been marinating in a stew of racism/homophobia/sexism/ableism/antisemitism/islamophobia all our lives. Even if, on a conscious level, you disagree with any given ism, your gut has been conditioned to prioritize white able-bodied cissexual neurotypical men over everything else.

3) Racism and sexism suck, and sucking is bad, and it makes fandom NOT fun for those on the receiving end of it. We should all be trying to suck less, both as a goal in its own right and because we want fandom to be fun for EVERYONE.

4) It is possible to work at sucking less while still enjoying fandom.

5) The higher we are in the kyriarchy, the more damage your sucking causes, and the more we are protected from that damage. So, like, a white person is part of the power structure that causes and benefits from racism; we're less likely to see it, more likely to cause damage to others because of it. BUT we also have a lot more power to change things for the better. It's not up to black people or Latin@s or Asians or Roma or LGBTQ people or people with disabilities or Jews or any other oppressed group to fix things--they're not the problem. The ultimate responsibility is up to Whites to suck less. (This doesn't mean that, say, a Black person can't suck--just that they are WAY less likely to damage others through their suckitude.)

So the question is, how do we as White people have fun in fandom while sucking less? Fear not! It's actually pretty simple, you just have to make that a consistent priority.

Let's define Principle 1. How is fandom fun? Well, for me, fandom is fun because there are shows and movies and books that I love, and I love reading and writing fanfic and meta about them, and squeeing about them with my friends. I find all of those activities fun. I hope you all do, too. I want you to keep on finding those things fun.

BUT there is a problem. We are conditioned by our society to value men more than women, Whites more than any other race, able-bodied neurotypical people more than disabled and/or neurodiverse people, etc., etc., you can all fill in the hierarchies that our society has tried to instill in us (and has probably succeeded in instilling more than you realize). The preference for white men in fandom isn't any worse than in other places in our society. It's true, and I think it's important to remember.

The problem comes in when we leave it at that. "Well, it's not my fault, and anyway even if I AM conditioned to pay more attention to whitedude more than anything else, this is fandom so I should be able to just ignore that and go on like always." Aaaaand then you continue to have fun, but you keep sucking, and hurting people in the process.

We have all been conditioned to favor whitedude above everything else. By which I mean, our society privileges stories about able-bodied neurotypical white men above stories about other people. A white man who has super incredible abilities and can do all the things is Batman, a white woman with all the same qualities is a Mary Sue, and is usually depowered to make room for the male hero, to boot. And characters of different ethnicities, or religions, or with disabilities, don't even have it that good. We think stories about white men are interesting because ... those are the stories we've read, watched, listened to the most. We're used to them. We've been taught all our lives that these are the good stories, the stories that matter. And so most of us have learned to prioritize those stories on an unconscious level. And we show that in our choices, which shows we watch, which actors/actresses we think are hot, which characters we write about.

The good news is, that's conditioning. It's not some inborn genetic thing, it's how we've been trained. And we can train ourselves differently!

It starts by being mindful. What we consume shapes us, right? So keep that in mind when you choose what you consume, what movies, what books, what TV shows, what fanfic. I'm not saying "don't watch your favorite show if it's got too many white men." But let's be real: some TV we watch/read because OMG ITS TEH BEST EVAR!!1! and some we watch/read because it's fun and some we watch/read because our friends are and some we watch/read because it's better than other things we could be doing.

When you're making a choice between two shows/movies/books that will probably be about the same level of entertaining, go for the one that's less ALL WHITE MALE. This is the age of the internet, where our choices are much greater than they've ever been before. When you're browsing Netflix on a Tuesday night looking for a fun movie to watch, give higher preference to diverse shows. Not in an "OMG, I can't ever watch anything with white men again, no matter how awesome it is!" way, but rather in a "I've seen so many movies about White Men(tm) in my life--is this one going to just be more of the same? Are there other options I might enjoy?" way. When you've got a variety of options and they would all be enjoyable, go for the ones least likely to reinforce the WHITE STRAIGHT ABLEBODIED NEUROTYPICAL CIS MALE IS THE DEFAULT AND BEST inside your head.

What this can look like in practice: I like Marvel, but I am not a big enough fan to watch all of their shows. I pick and choose and leave myself time for other shows as well. On Netflix there are two Marvel shows I could be watching that are roughly comparable: Daredevil and Luke Cage. Both are about urban superheroes, but Daredevil is white and Luke Cage is black. (Also, Daredevil has some really terrible Yellow Peril stuff.) So I watch Luke Cage. I enjoy it. I'd probably enjoy Daredevil, too, but I don't have time for everything, and so I prioritize. And I don't treat it like I'm taking my medicine and forcing myself to watch something because it's more socially just and not because I like it. I go in expecting to have fun. And you know what? Usually I do.

Another example: back in 2011, I needed something new to be fannish about. I had enough time to be fannish about one television show in addition to the stuff I was already fannish about. There were two shows premiering that fall that looked interesting to me, both rather similar: Grimm, and Once Upon A Time. Both were urban fantasy. One starred a white man, one starred a white woman. I chose the one starring the woman and went in to it prepared to love the show. Not grudgingly, but "ooh, this could be fun." And I loved it. If I hadn't, I would have stopped watching it after a couple of episodes and switched to Grimm. That was always an option; I wasn't watching OUaT to be masochistic about "doing the right thing." I was choosing which of two interesting options to give brain and heart space to, and I was going in to it with a brain and heart open to being pleased. If, despite that, it didn't please me? I'd move on to the next thing. Plenty of other fish in the sea. But I started with the less-whitedude option.

What this does is it gives brainspace to new possibilities. It erodes the assumption your hindbrain makes that white men matter more than other people do. It erodes the assumption your hindbrain makes that white men are more interesting. The more attention you pay to people outside the cultural norm, the more interesting you find their stories. When you do this, you are actively re-training your cultural conditioning about who matters and who is interesting. And you are having fun while you are doing it.

This has two ways that it will erode your suckage in fandom-related ways. First, it increases the number of people likely to be in non-whitedude fandoms, which is a slight counterweight to the overwhelming whitedude nature of fandom in general. One more person reading the fic and (hopefully) commenting. One more person posting about it, whether you do meta/art/fic/gifs/fanmixes/videos/whatever. Second, if you do this consistently over a long period of time, you will find that your instinct to always focus on white male characters will erode. Your background assumption of who is interesting and who isn't will start to shift.

Do this with the fannish content you produce, as well. You have a tumblr? Give preference to reblogging women and people of color. If you see something about white guys that is AWESOME AND SQUEEWORTHY, go ahead and reblog it and enjoy it while you do. But, you know, a lot of times we reblog stuff that's interesting but not full-on capslock squee, right? Stuff where it takes a second to decide if you should reblog or not. Where you could go either way. And in those cases, make a conscious decision in favor of diversity. Stuff about white men? If it's in that "should I reblog this?" category, don't reblog it. Stuff about anyone else? Do reblog it. When figuring out new content to post, do the same thing. AWESOME SQUEEFUL STUFF? Post away! Interesting but not incredible? Give more weight to stuff about women and people of color and queer people and disabled people and neurodiverse people and Jews and Muslims and all the rest. It's not about harshing the squee, or putting your fannish tastes through some kind of quota system. It's about balance. Trust me. The world and fandom both have PLENTY of whitedude stuff, they'll get along just fine without more. But there's a shortage of everything else, so that's where the focus should be.

And you can do the same with fanfic! Again, I'm not saying "never read your favorites!" I'm saying, be mindful. Are you a big Captain America fan? Check out the Sam Wilson and Natasha Romanov and Maria Hill fic in that fandom, and keep your eye out for more. When you do so, consider filtering out Steve/Bucky stuff occasionally. (http://erindizmo.tumblr.com/post/65292624924/7-step-tutorial-on-how-to-filter-out-characters) After all, presumably you already read a lot of S/B. Your goal isn't to find fics where Sam is in two scenes to get the Whitedude together or help them work out their shit, but fics where Sam gets to really shine. As himself, not just the sidekick to the whitedude. And don't do it grudgingly; do it with open heart and mind, ready to embrace Sam in his awesomeness. This isn't to say you should never read whitedude fic, if that's your thing, but rather that there should be a health(ier) balance. This isn't about forcing you to choke down your bitter fannish medicine; it's about expanding the things you love. It's about creating more opportunities for joy and squee.

And when you read those fics, comment on them! Spread the love! Authors who write about women or people of color tend to get fewer comments on those fics than on stories focused about white male characters, which is discouraging. Share the love; kudos and comment. A comment saying "Good fic" is great, it doesn't have to be long and involved. This holds true for all your fic, by the way, not just the fic where you're consciously diversifying your reading habits. Reading a Steve/Bucky fic and the author wrote Sam well, or Natasha, or Maria, or Rhodey, or Dr. Cho? Tell the author! Point that out specifically. Doesn't have to be elaborate; "I liked Sam" is fine. The point is to reward people for being more inclusive.

When you find a particularly good fic based on a certain woman or character of color, check out the author's page. Chances are, they've got more like it. If they do, and you like their work? Subscribe to them so when they write something, you see it. Again, the goal is to still have fun with awesome fic, but shifting what you consume to be more diverse. Because that will shift your internal default away from the Straight White Neurotypical Ablebodied Man that our society tries to push as the default. And that will affect how you see the world both in fandom and out of it.

Part of the fun of fandom, for many of us, isn't just about consuming content, it's also about creating it. I love writing fanfic. And here's where a lot of peoples' asses start to show, and where they start whining about how they just write what they write and they only get plotbunnies for whitedude. And that may be true, but again, this is something you can actually change. If your brain doesn't come up with plotbunnies for characters of color, or for women, or for lesbians, or for a mixed-race canon couple, or for disabled or neurodivergent people? You can work on coming up with plotbunnies on your own and train your brain in the process!

For example! Say you are a fan of The Flash. For every episode you watch, come up with one plot bunny for a non-white male character. You don't have to write it; that's another step down the road. It doesn't have to be something huge. The first step is getting your brain used to generating plot bunnies for characters you normally wouldn't. If Iris had a big part in that episode, think up a story idea for her. What was she doing while Barry was fighting the villain of the week? How's things going at work for her? If Joe had a big part, think up an idea for him. If there was an Iris/Barry moment, think up a story idea for that pairing. Wally, Cisco, Caitlynn, Lisa Snart, you get the idea. If you're a Supergirl fan, come up with a story idea for Hank or James or Renee Montoya or M'Gann each episode. You don't have to write it, the goal for this part is to get you used to thinking of these characters as people with stories. People you are interested in. I mean, if you get a great idea and want to write it, awesome, but step one is to get your gut and your hindbrain primed to think about these people and care about their stories. You've already been primed to care about and think about white male characters by everything you've seen and read and heard since you were a baby, but there's been precious little priming you for everybody else, so a little extra effort is probably going to be needed.

The next step is similar to the choosing-fandoms step, only for choosing plotbunnies. You will probably have some ideas that just yank you over and demand to be written, so write them. But if you are anything like me, there are also times that you want to write and have a lot of different ideas you could write, you just have to decide which. And in that case, you can probably guess by now, give more weight to the non-whitedude options. If you have four plot bunnies you could write, and two of them are about white male characters and one of them is about a white woman and one is about a character of color? Give more weight to the woman and (especially) the character of color. I'm not saying "you can never write white men again!" I'm saying that in your decision-making process, recognize that the rest of the world is weighted WAY THE FUCK IN FAVOR OF WHITE ABLE-BODIED NEUROTYPICAL CIS MEN, so to provide balance, we should be weighting in favor of everyone else, and giving the most weight to the people that society gives the least weight to.

The things I've outlined in this post don't magically get rid of all that social conditioning overnight, and they don't magically fix everything. What they do is they give you a place to start, and aim you in a direction so that, if you work on it over time, you will suck less while still having fun in fandom and making it more inclusive. And the more people who do stuff like this, the less fandom will suck over time.

You've probably already read it, but franzeska has some EXCELLENT meta on AO3 about fandom, racism, sexism, shipping, slash/gen/het, fandom history, hypocrisy, and counterproductive activism.  It's long but OH SO GOOD.  With a lot of really important points that get completely missed in most discussions of these issues.  I have a few quibbles and one major problem with the piece, but overall I agree with most of it.

Your Vagina is a Bigot; My Vagina is a Saint

Hey, tielan, I read this article and thought about you. The Tyranny of "Do it yourself!" Nothing you haven't said many times, but it's true and nice to know that other people experience the same things.

As discussions about representation in media continue to grow and gain traction around the Internets and through different corners of fandom, we start seeing a lot of repetition: the same unhelpful arguments being made again and again. One of the responses I see a lot, and that I find among the most tiresome, boils down to this: "Stop complaining that other people aren't making the media you want, and just do it yourself!"

I first encountered this response in media fandom, as a pushback against people who wanted to see more content for an unusual pairing, and/or more diversity in romantic pairings (more femslash, more pairings involving people of color, etc.). It was frustrating there, but it's even more pervasive in the wider SF/F fandom, and follows many of the same patterns. And although I don't want to say that this is the very worst response to calls for diversity -- there are a lot of contenders for that title -- it's certainly up there.

I think there are a few reasons that this response is so unhelpful:

And then I saw an article about how Even Mothra, Queen of the Kaiju, has to lean in sometimes, and it is frustrating but not surprising to learn that sexism/misogyny doesn't just affect human-shaped females, it affects even female-coded monsters. Ugh.

If your plan to escape patriarchy involved eating a lot of radiation or surgically grafting frightening animal parts to yourself, just remember: even female-coded flying monsters are expected to sacrifice themselves so men can grow and become more fully realized and achieve self-actualization.

Over on tumblr, things are shaking up--tumblr is changing how people track tags and search for tags, and also they've taken away (mostly) the ability to reply to a post. madamehardy hits the nail on the head as to why:

"When you consider the latest highly annoying changes to Tumblr, never forget that they aren’t meant for you. Yahoo, Tumblr’s owner, is under a lot of pressure to make some money. That means that Tumblr has to either pull its weight or be shut down. In the Web-ancient adage, “If you aren’t the customer, you’re the product.” That is, if you aren’t directly paying for any Website, then the Website is selling you, in the form of advertising. Tumblr desperately needs to monetize you. To monetize you, they need to know your personal demographics, so that they can sell groups of similar users to advertisers."

“If you aren’t the customer, you’re the product.”

Let me repeat that again: “If you aren’t the customer, you’re the product.”

This is why I really, really don’t like websites where advertising is part of the revenue stream.  I would rather pay up front–in donations or user fees–and be the CUSTOMER who is catered to instead of the PRODUCT that the website is SELLING to its advertisers.

What Tumblr is doing now?  That’s what LJ used to do, back when LJ was the fandom hub.  The great advantage of DW over LJ is that DW’s users are its CUSTOMER base, because DW organized their finances from the very beginning so that they didn’t need ads.  User revenues–paid accounts, merchandise from the store, extra icons, etc–pay the bills.  DW is never going to be a huge goliath of money-making, but it doesn’t have to be because it is financially self-sustaining and makes a decent income for the owners.  (And they manage it on a freemium basis, where basic accounts are free, and you get more features if you pay but you don’t have to to use the site.)  DW has other issues, but we are not the commodity we are the customers.

AO3 is similar.  The whole POINT of AO3 was that a big enough segment of fans got fed up with being the commodity and not the customers, and wanted to own the servers that fannish work was on.  AO3 has problems–huge problems–but at that they are quite successful.  We own the servers.  Our donations fund a service designed by, for, and about US.

Pinboard is also user-supported.  That fee you pay?  That means that we are the customer, not the commodity.  Which means that while Pinboard may eventually close down, it won’t do like Delicious did and make itself unusable for us while making itself more attractive to its advertisers.

I know tumblr has a lot of great features.  But maybe that shouldn’t be the number one thing we as fandom look for in a website.  Because what do the features matter if they get yanked out from under us every time they’re not profitable enough?

quinfirefrorefiddle is running a multifandom Virgin-By-Choice Fic Challenge in her journal.

Why did I want to start this challenge? Because modern media has turned the word "virgin" into an insult, almost a bad word. It is time to take that word back. Being a virgin isn't a bad thing in itself, and there are a number of reasons why an adult might be a virgin by their own choice.

I hate that being a virgin is something that mass media tells me I'm supposed to be embarrassed about. (For this particular topic, fandom is quite definitely part of mass media.) Something I'm supposed to be ashamed of- especially at my age. I hate that mass media, when portraying someone who remains a virgin for this long, consistently makes them an extremely conservative religious type of some sort- and you ever notice they tend to be sweet girls with long hair who wear long flowy flowery skirts and don't wear makeup? No guys, no women who dress otherwise. Virgins are prudes, virgins are afraid of sex, virgins are incomplete, virgins don't take risks, virgins are most likely to end up as homemakers- and oh yes, virgins are always always always women- or fourteen year old pimply boys. And often enough, virgins don't have a choice in the matter- they are oppressed by the system they are in, by their parents. They never have any power over their own life- because hey, if they did, they'd be having sex, right?

I want to see biker virgins. I want to see kickass military virgins. I want to see religious virgins who are in control of their own damn lives and make their own decisions, thank you! (And if some of them happened to be clergy, well, hey, that'd be cool as well.) I want to see thirty year old male virgins- who do not live in their parents' basement. I want to see historical character virgins who seriously can't wait for their wedding night. I want to see extreme sports virgins. I want to see people who are virgins for strictly practical reasons- fear of STDs and pregnancy. I want to see people who are virgins because being that physically vulnerable with someone freaks them the hell out. I want to see virgins who just haven't met the right one yet, and will be damned if they settle for less than who they want. I'm looking for people who don't have giant dramatic/traumatic pasts that act as "excuses" for their virginity.

I think it's kind of ridiculous how much the word itself freaks us out. You ever notice how people tend to drop their voice a bit when they say it out loud? I kind of want to go around working "virgin" into as many conversations as possible for a few days- except I really can't have my coworkers wondering why. But maybe if we use it a lot some of the stigma will go away. Virgin. Virgin virgin virgin. Virgin virgin.

Go check it out, and maybe write some fic!

... okay, hradzka, I never noticed that until you pointed it out, and now it won't get out of my head.  Darn you!

At any rate, I now have an account at An Archive Of Our Own, (also known as AOOO or AO3)and am slowly but surely loading my fic onto it.

But that's a lot of work, so why do it, you may ask?

First, because fandom owns the servers.  That means if people send nasty letters to try and get things removed (either for copyright or because they can't tell the difference between fanfic and someone going up to kids in parks and asking if they want candy), we don't have to depend on the goodwill of non-fans.  Now, because of my general style and subject choice I probably wouldn't have to worry about the latter scenario, but all fen who write should be at least a little wary of the first, which makes AO3 A Good Idea.

Second, because I believe that all fan authors should have a website or multifandom archive where they place all of their stuff, everything easily findable, preferably something that's not dependent on their staying active in fandom or their fandom staying active.  I hate, hate, hate it when I fall in love with a story and want to read more of that author's works (or rec them) and have to chase them over all creation.  (Some people have reasons not to want their stuff easily findable, but for most authors it's more a matter of chance and fandom migration patterns.)  FF.net has always been the biggie; I don't read fic on the Pit of Voles unless it's been recced to me, but I upload all my fics there because it's large, it's persistent, it's easily findable.  Unlike other archives, it's not going to disappear into the wind any time soon.  I'll still upload new fics there, because backups are good, but now it's a secondary backup, not the main thing.

Third, AO3 has some cool features.  Like being able to add character tags if the character you want isn't a character already.  Like having a wide-ranging and flexible tag system where you add the tags you want to your fic, and if there's a tag out there that means the same thing the people behind the scenes will match the two up so that someone who reads your fic, decides they want to read more fics like it, can click the tag and the results for both will come up.  And the ability to "orphan" your work if you want to dissociate yourself from a story but don't want to delete it.