The Nebula nominations are closed now, so while they’re producing the list of finalists for review, I’ll talk about something else for a few days. First, a question seems to have arisen this week about whether racist Internet bullies and/or abusers should be forgiven even if it looks like they’ve reformed their ways, or whether they should be blacklisted in some way.
The pertinent issue right now is about Requires Hate, an Internet personality who spent years harassing and bullying writers under different screen names, especially young writers of color. Her different personas were eventually connected to her pen name for fiction, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, and Laura Mixon won a 2015 Hugo Award for an expose. Sriduangkaew, in her persona as a Thai lesbian writer, was by then a rising star published by a number of high-profile magazines and a nominee for the 2014 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. I’ve had commenters on my blog assume that being exposed as a racist, homophobic bully ended Sriduangkaew’s writing career. However, it didn’t. The high-profile magazines continued to promote her stories, while she apparently continued her harassment behaviors. This issue came up last week when Apex Magazine included Sriduangkaew on a roundtable event. After complaints, editor Jason Sizemore issued an apology.
Contrast this with the recent treatment of writer Sunil Patel. After various complaints from women about “manipulation, grooming behavior and objectification of women” (but not apparently direct sexual harassment), several publishers cut ties with Patel, dropping him out of scheduled publications. This happened even after he publicly apologized.
So, why the difference? Why does the community of editors (and presumably readers) ignore Sriduangkaew’s racist, homophobic transgressions and continued harassment of writers, while blacklisting Patel? Is there a double standard of some kind in work?
Lela E. Buis 
Feb 18, 2017 @ 23:21:36
Not just racist and homophobic transgressions by Requires Hate–she outright called for people to be killed or gang-raped for their views that she disagreed with. This goes beyond opinion or offense–these are crimes under the laws of most nations (communicating a threat, incitement to violence). Unindicted, unprosecuted, but self-confessed and arguably proven guilty. If she’s somehow rehabilitated, how can they not deny rehabilitation to other figures with far lesser offenses?
“The question of whether to support Sriduangkaew despite the discovery of her longstanding alternate personality has divided the sci-fi/fantasy blogosphere. It’s also thrown a harsh light on the complicated nature of progressive politics in a community that prides itself on supporting diverse writers. That community now has to figure out how to handle a writer with a toxic history of her own, one whose attacks have been connected to another author’s attempted suicide, as well as numerous rape threats, death threats, and sustained harassment campaigns.”
http://www.dailydot.com/parsec/benjanun-sriduangkaew-revealed-to-be-troll-requires-hate-winterfox/
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Feb 19, 2017 @ 00:09:29
I gather that Sriduangkaew’s harassment of other writers has continued, as I’ve linked above to an accusation written just this year. I agree that this is terrible behavior, and if she’d done it to me, I’d likely have reported her to law enforcement. But apparently editors have chosen to ignore it. Why is that?
Also, I see that Patel is in trouble for apparently just being a jerk, and has been dropped by several publishers as a result of complaints. Why is being a jerk now the kind of crime that causes blacklisting?
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Feb 19, 2017 @ 01:41:28
The establishment is very left-leaning. RH may be pariah, but she’s their pariah. Patel lives across the tracks. I think it’s a simple as that. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Tribalism beats out principle.
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Feb 19, 2017 @ 01:59:48
I’m late to the party, and didn’t read everything as it was going down, but I gather that Sizemore’s first apology wasn’t acceptable and he had to try the second time to get the tone right. Does that suggest he didn’t understand why anyone was objecting to Sriduangkaew? That he’s taking it as a given that the value of her talent trumps anything she’s done in her private life?
Why do you think Patel lives across the tracks?
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Feb 19, 2017 @ 11:10:31
Probably I should have said they decided Patel lives across the tracks, figuratively, because although he may have looked like a diversity asset, it turns out he doesn’t fit in. Note that I’m not intending to underplay his real offenses, but I do think the left is often eager to embrace surface diversity as virtue that washes away all sins–until it doesn’t.
Not that the right is free of this problem (or anyone who’s blinded by their own ideology–“If he looks like me he must be all right.”
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Feb 19, 2017 @ 01:44:43
Or maybe, the “big lie” or “big transgression” principle kicked in, wherein it’s easier to forgive behavior that seems so bizarre as to be, at some level unbelievable, and harder to forgive the one closer to you whose bad behavior was more subtle.
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Feb 19, 2017 @ 15:04:08
I think this is a good point too. Sriduangkaew’s behavior just seems incomprehensible–it’s hard to imagine a sane person getting any pleasure from the things she did. And taking away her platform as a writer wouldn’t fix anything.
We don’t really know what Patel did, but it’s easy to imagine a person with some authority trying to use it to coax people into bed with him/her. Taking away such a person’s roles as editor/reviewer for one or more professional magazines would fix such a problem entirely. (If that’s what the problem was.)
So it’s certainly possible that the double standard is entirely justified in this case. Two different treatments for two different problems.
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Feb 19, 2017 @ 11:02:13
I try hard to rate stories on their own merits and not let outside factors influence my ratings. I’ve reviewed eight Sriduangkaew stories in the past two years, and half of them were one-star stories, which means that the writing is so bad that I think it reflects poorly on the editor. However, I have actually recommended one of her stories, “Desert Lexicon,” published in Meeting Infinity. I can only guess that the anthology editor made her clean up her prose.
I note that it’s been a year since she had a story in Clarkesworld and almost six months since she had one in Apex, which is the last story she had published. It’s easy to believe that editors pay little attention to the authors when they select stories to publish, but that they do respond to negative feedback after those stories turn up in print. It will be interesting to see if she ever gets another story published in one of the top 11 magazines.
As for the difference between Patel and Sriduangkaew, we don’t really know what he did. He was on staff at several magazines, which gave him more opportunity to do things. To really make a case for a double standard, you’d need to find someone who refused to publish stories by Patel but was happy to publish stories by Sriduangkaew.
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Feb 20, 2017 @ 18:47:28
Greg, I had a quick look, at it appears Lightspeed has both published Sriduangkaew and fired Patel as a columnist.
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Feb 21, 2017 @ 00:19:33
I checked ISFDB and I don’t see anything by her published in Lightspeed since 2013.
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Feb 19, 2017 @ 13:06:52
Thanks for checking in Greg. I’ve been Googling around, and it looks like Shriduangkaew is moving into longer works, I see she’s had a sci-fantasy novella Winterglass accepted by Apex for publication later this year. LIkely the roundtable was part of promotion leading up to its release.
I’ve been reading up on Patel, too, with sort of interesting results. No one has quite uttered the word “racism,” but the double standard indicated here might be a classic case. I’ll post another blog on it soon.
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Feb 19, 2017 @ 14:58:34
I still think the biggest difference is that she’s mostly a writer while he was mostly an editor/reviewer. You can take a principled stand of saying “I’ll publish/review stories based on their own merits–not the personalities/politics of their authors” and I can applaud that. But someone who’s in a position to credibly promise/threaten attention to an author’s work has a lot more power, and it’s a lot easier to justify taking that power away.
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Feb 19, 2017 @ 16:15:03
As far as I know, the charges haven’t been clearly stated. It seems like using an editor position to get someone into bed would be standard sexual harassment. Instead, women have posted about him trying to scare them into following him on Twitter, “gaslighting,” manipulation, etc.
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Virtue Signaling: Weaponizing the System | Lela E. Buis
Dec 22, 2017 @ 23:01:42