We Have Been Forged

[vulcanfeminist]

Turns out I'm not done

And like, I'm also Jewish, I'm also Irish, I'm the descendant of three different cultures who were actively uprooted from their homelands where the colonizers, settlers, or just local dominant culture a-holes were violently forcing them out (usually Christian though regardless of nation or ethnicity - fun fact, Christianity is a colonizer diaspora religion and that really deserves to be talked about more just in general) and I feel what's happening right now in the US deep in the marrow of my bones. My mitochondrial DNA is absolutely screaming at me from so many different ancestors to run, hide, now, don't wait, don't think you'll be safe, you won't be, safety is a lie when they have power, run

And omg I wanna run so bad, and also omg I wanna hold onto hope so badly too, like this time it can be different, this time we can do something about it, this time we can stop it before it gets that bad...

I am so desperately yearning for that hope that i can taste it, and it tastes a lot better than fear and flee...

And I look around me, and I see what's happening, and I compare it to what has already happened, and all I see is the rhyme...

every rhyme gets completed... otherwise they wouldn't be rhymes...

[vulcanfeminist]

History Rhyming Again

Today the president of the united states made an official executive order calling "trans ideology" child abuse, calling for an end to these abuses and threatening punishment for people who perpetuate these abuses.

Both of my children are trans, both of my children are openly trans, both of my children have paper trails through public agencies that declare their transness and our stance as parents being supportive of that transness.

So I'm scared, I'm scared enough that we're looking at creating an exit plan. And the thing I keep coming back to in my mind is what my great grandmother went through. The name I knew her by was Jesse though I don't know her True name, she didn't know it anymore by the time I knew her. She was a Potawatomi Native, great lakes region, sort of like, the are that is now michigan and wisconsin, sort of, it's complicated.

Her parents were marched to a reservation in what is now oklahoma on the Trail of Death from their ancestral lands. She was born on that reservation and she was forced into a residential school where she lived for nearly all of her childhood. At 18 she fled. As soon as she was out of that residential school she created a non-Native identity for herself. She lied to EVERYONE and said that she was Italian to explain her dark skin, hair, and eyes. She made up a new name and a new identity and she married a white man on purpose.

Her one and only goal was to protect her children from all the horrific atrocities she personally experienced and witnessed on the reservation and in the residential school. She knew that Native identity was inherently unsafe in the colonizer state and she knew that whiteness provided an umbrella of safety. She sought that umbrella for her children on purpose and ALL of her children, grandchildren, and great grand children benefited from the choice she made. By deliberately erasing her Native identity and cleaving so strongly to whiteness she created a kind of safety for her descendants that literally could NOT have been achieved any other way. Thanks to her choice to bury that part of herself and hide it from everyone for so many decades my own grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all got to grow up in safety free from any fear that the government might steal them from their families and abuse them and call it "good." When I was born, the very first great grandchild of hers, she finally felt safe sharing the truth. As the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter going back at least 5 generations I was the beacon of safety she had longed for her whole life and she passed on what little she remembered to me. There was this sort of... idk, I felt it as a sacred responsibility. I was the one she shared this stuff with because she felt like my existence signaled a true end to the fear she'd known all her life. She shared some stories and songs of her people, she shared the truth of her identity and why she'd done it, she shared a few recipes, that was all she had and she gave it like it was the MOST precious thing (which it was, even as a young child I knew that).

She and I shared a very special closeness that nobody else in the family really understsood. I was 24 when she died and the time I got to spend with her is something I treasure more than most other things in my life.

And now here I sit with the very real possibility that the government might come for my family bc the fact of the matter is that whiteness is not enough to guarantee safety in this country, it never really was, and we see that all around us. And I am now faced with the question of what to do about it, what decisions to make now that we're here. Are there re-education centers in our future? Is it possible my sweet baby child could be taken from me and sent to a camp or a residential school like Jesse was? My great-grandmother truly, literally in the literal sense, gave up EVERYTHING in her life, in herself, to keep that from happening to her babies and her baby's babies. What will I have to give up to protect my babies? Is there even anything I can do to protect them at all? Is that even an option? I really truly don't know and idk yall... right now all I have is abject terror and the knowledge of what she did when faced with a similar choice

And I know that sometimes the answer is to hide everything at all costs. I know that sometimes that's the only way to achieve any sort of safety and that at the end of the day continued existence matters more than literally anything else.... Thank you Jesse for all you did and all you gave to me, to us... I hope that I can manage to do what my babies need and that when the time comes I'll know what that means... (and please do not come for me, I do not believe that Native oppression and trans oppression are identical to each other and if you're here to drag me over some pretend equivalence you've made you can move along, I'll ignore it if it's there. The point is not sameness, the point is the rhyme)

[vulcanfeminist]

Today I had a person in training who I've had before. The last time I had her she was hostile as fuck, very argumentative, pacing and not really paying attention, clearly thought it was a waste of time.

But this time she was engaged, thoughtful, not disruptive, helpful, encouraging, supportive, it was a complete 180. And then at the end she brought up something last time that really stuck with her, she wrote it down even, and she's been sharing it with people and using it and it's really helped a lot.

So maybe I had something to do with her attitude change and maybe I'm making some kind of a difference

[vulcanfeminist]

I am so tired...

I recently had an argument on r/changemyview that keeps living in my head rent free (which I'm into). The OP was basically saying that the left is hurting their cause by hating on the right, and like, I somewhat agree with that so I wasn't there to change OPs view. One of the top rated comments was about about how we have to have a shared reality in order to communicate with each other and by and large the left and the right don't have a shared reality and therefore they can't effectively communicate. And I called bullshit on that. I pointed out that as someone who works with people who are actively experiencing psychosis we can definitely communicate without shared reality, we can disagree with each other about reality and still communicate if our goal is to listen to understand. It's entirely possible to be collaborative and work towards shared goals even when you 100% disagree about actual reality, I do it every single time I work with a client. And a bunch of people got shitty with me about it, enough that I didn't even go back to the thread, seeing the previews in my notes made it clear nobody was interested in actually hearing any damned thing and I don't need to waste my energy explaining things to people who are dedicated to misunderstanding me. But it's still living in my head rent free... That really is the crux of it and I'm pretty sure it's THE problem with our society/culture more broadly. Everyone thinks the other is not worth hearing, not worth listening to, not worth connecting with or understanding. If all we ever has is conflict we can't resolve anything.

It's difficult to collaborate with someone who disagrees with you about reality in a respectful and supportive way. It's worth the effort every single time - connect then correct. If you start off with you're wrong, stupid, annoying, ignorant, foolish, worthless, any other judgement out there, it's not possible to connect and why on earth would anyone bother listening to someone who doesn't think they're worth hearing? When we get past judgement to curiosity and listen to understand we are able to connect and making that connection can lead to shared work on shared problems. And it just makes me real damned sad to be surrounded by so many people who genuinely think half of the people in their communities aren't worth the effort of trying. But I think it's also a thing where people genuinely have no clue how to disagree in respectful, caring, supportive ways, and that sucks. These people can only imagine "brutal" honesty (meaning disrespectful honesty, cruel honesty), an honesty that focuses on judgement and conflict, winning, I'm right you're wrong period the end. And it's cool to win or whatever, it feels good to be right and righteous, but it's also not functional, productive, safe, or healthy to make community about beating the others. These people telling me how wrong I am are imagining that if I'm being respectful and supportive I must also be lying and "going along with" someone's delusions. Nobody has to go along with anything, when we disagree with reality we simply just do that, we disagree and that's it, then we move on, nobody has to win or lose and nobody has to be right or wrong. We can still have shared goals even while disagreeing on reality bc, fun fact, all humans are equally human and we mostly share the same goals we just disagree on how to achieve them. So you start with a foundation of what you agree on, even if that foundation is that we are going to agree to disagree, and you build on that towards shared goals. A delusional person can probably agree that we all want to feel safe and that living with constant stress and anxiety sucks, we can build on that. So while I recognize that there will always be people we just can't work with bc they're dedicated to dehumanizing the Other and there's nothing to be done about that, I also recognize that I don't gain anything by choosing to dehumanize others in turn. And the people who can be reached won't be reached without connection. We can punch nazis and offer basic dignity to people we disagree with at the same time. Violence isn't the answer it's the question, and sometimes the answer is yes, but a lot of the time the answer is no that will just make it worse. We need answers for all those other times and we gotta at least acknowledge that they exist in the first place.

[sweetoothgirl]

Single Girls Wholesome Molten Chocolate Lava Cake

[sweetoothgirl]

Cinnamon Crunch Braided Brioche Bread

[d0rbee]

Reblog if you’re autistic and you talk to yourself I’m curious.

[13faeinapenguinsuit]

Oh gosh, yes!

[vulcanfeminist]

constantly, and sometimes to make it more fun i do voices 

[riverselkie-deactivated20190510]

i feel like there’s this huge unfulfilled niche in the Dark Academia thing (kill your darlings, the secret history, dead poets society etc) for stories about women???? like can we have rakish girls quoting sappho and anxious genius poet girls, bespectacled, frantically tapping away at typewriters? wild girls trying to start literary movements and being dragged down by their own hubris? innocent girls discovering love and sex and angela carter? cute girls in 60s looking school uniforms investigating ~mysterious happenings~? going to class the next day hungover and exchanging knowing glances? can we just have. the thing

[bemusedlybespectacled]

I always find it kind of weird that matriarchal cultures in fiction are always “women fight and hunt, men stay home and care for the babies” because world-building-wise, it makes no sense

think about it. like, assuming that gender even works the same in this fantasy culture as it does in ours, with gender conflated with sex (because let’s be real, all of these stories assume that), men wouldn’t be the ones to make the babies, so why would they be the ones to care for the babies? why is fighting and hunting necessary for leadership?

writing a matriarchy this way is just lazy, because you’re just taking the patriarchy and just swapping the people in it, rather than actually swapping the culture. especially when there are so many other cool things you could explore. like, what if it’s not a swap of roles but of what society deems important?

maybe a matriarchy would have hunting and fighting be part of the man’s job, but undervalued. like taking the trash out or cleaning toilets: necessary, but gross, and not noble or interesting. maybe farming is now the most important thing, and is given a lot of spiritual and cultural weight.

how would law work? what crimes would exist, and what things would be considered too trivial to make illegal? who gets what property? why?

how would religion work? how would you mark time or the passage into adulthood? what would marriage look like? if bloodlines are through the mother, bastardy wouldn’t even be a concept - how does that work?

what qualities would be most important in a person? how would you define strength or leadership? what knowledge would be the most coveted and protected? what acts or roles are considered useless or degrading?

like, you can’t just take our current society and say you’re turning it on its head when you’re just regurgitating it wholesale. you have to really think about why things are the way they are and change that. 

[apprenticebard]

THIS IS SUCH A GOOD POST THOUGH.

I think what really bothers me about the whole “men take care of the children and tend house because they’re not in charge” thing is that it reinforces the idea that traditionally feminine work SHOULD be undervalued. That there’s no way anyone could see raising children and think, “wow, what a valuable contribution to society”. Even though families are what societies are MADE of, and if you ignore the welfare of your children the society falls apart in a generation or two.

Imagine if women were seen as the ideal political leaders BECAUSE they’re the ones best suited for raising young children. What if it was assumed that government positions were sort of scaled-up households, and that only a leader who saw their subjects as their children could be fair and compassionate enough to rule effectively? What is a village, or a country, but an extended family?

On the one hand, the ability to use physical force effectively is super important for a low-tech society, and there’s always the threat of hostile military takeover, either from outsiders or via internal revolt. On the other hand, a society where all the men want to rebel is probably not a society that’s being run at all effectively, and there are other ways of maintaining control (ie religion, cultural traditions, propaganda, etc). Women could be the more educated group–in some ways that’s even intuitive, since a non-magical preindustrial society is one with a high infant mortality rate, which means it has to have a high birth rate to compensate, which means women will be pregnant a lot. If they have trouble consistently working physically demanding trades, why not assign them to jobs that require more mental exertion? Why not a society where all the lawyers are female, all the doctors are female, all the historians and most respected poets are female? If you keep that up for long enough, eventually that gets seen as an inherent sex difference, and men don’t exert physical force because holy shit they’d have no idea what they were doing once they gained power.

It doesn’t have to be these specific differences, of course. But I think that’s the thought process that most of the best worldbuilding comes from–why are things this way? How have they stayed this way? Just saying “what if women could tell MEN what to do!” is so boring compared to asking why we value the things we value. Besides, fictional societies that are created without asking why things are the way they are are not going to stand up under close scrutiny, whether they play into or subvert our expectations.

[bemusedlybespectacled]

This is such an excellent addition to my post, @apprenticebard, I am rubbing my hands together with glee.

[space-australians]

(Not aliens, but goes along with some discussions on how cultures might differ.)

[beatrice-otter]

The thing about a gender hierarchy is that most gender-based “x gender is better at y task” is bullshit, and so is “all x gender have (or are supposed to have) z trait.”  You will find all kinds of people of all kinds of gender presentations with all kinds of skills and traits.  I mean, there is an after-the-fact correlation where girls are taught one set of things and boys are taught another, but it has zip zero zilch nada nothing to do with aptitudes and interest.

So if aptitudes and interest and the raw stuff of skills and traits is gender-neutral, how come we think some things belong to one gender or another?  The answer is quite simple.  Because any trait or skill that society values gets assigned to the highest gender in the hierarchy.

Let me repeat that for the folks in the back.   Any trait or skill that society values gets assigned to the highest gender in the hierarchy.  And you can see this because as values change, tasks and traits get passed between genders.

The best example of this that I know of is sexual appetite.  See, one thing that really boggles peoples minds when they read medieval literature is that their assumptions about sex are, to us, backwards.  Ask anybody today who has the greatest sexual appetite, and they’ll say it’s men!  Who has the least sexual appetite?  Women!  A great deal of research has shown that this is bullshit, that there is a wide range in both men and women and gender tells you exactly bupkiss about sex drive, but even people who know this are guided by unconscious assumptions that men are ravening sex fiends and women are only in it for the emotions.

Except in the middle ages, they thought the exact opposite.  Men were pure, in it for emotions and cerebral affection.  Women were the ravening sex monsters who couldn’t control their lusts.  Why?  Because celibacy and sexual innocence was the highest sexual virtue.  Therefore, men had it and women didn’t.

This changed in the Renaissence, when potency and virility (and hence, lots of sex) became the highest sexual virtue.  Therefore, men have high sex drives and women don’t.

When you look at occupations today, and which ones we value and which ones we don’t, especially as you track changes over time, you will also notice that when men enter a field in large numbers, its prestige and pay rises.  When women enter a field in large numbers, its prestige and pay fall.  It is not that some jobs are high-status and men gravitate to those jobs, and women gravitate to “lesser” jobs.  Instead, JOBS THAT MEN DO ARE VALUED, AND JOBS THAT WOMEN DO ARE NOT.

So for example, in the USSR there were a heck of a lot more female doctors than there were in the west at the time.  Since “doctor” was a high-status occupation in the West, the West assumed that women were more equal in that they had access to high-status jobs.  Not so; women were just as oppressed in the Soviet regime as they were in the West.  The difference was that in the USSR, being a doctor was a low-status job.  Therefore, it was open to women.

So if you are going to build a matriarchal society from scratch, your first question should not be “which genders do which jobs” but rather “which jobs are going to be high status in this society, and which are going to be low-status?” and then assign the high status jobs to the women.

[feynites]

This! ^^^

This post was insightful and interesting, but also rubbing me kinda the wrong way, and I couldn’t figure out entirely why until I saw @beatrice-otter’s addition.

The first thing you need to decide, when building any fictional society, is how it sustains itself. What does it run on? How does it gain power, gain security, manage labour, acquire resources? This doesn’t mean that you have to be an expert in economies or politics (although research helps). What it means is that you have to have some kind of an idea of what sort of civilization you’re looking at.

The concept of a ruler-as-parent is not inherently matriarchal (paternalism in violently bigoted societies is often a major thing, in fact, and lots of patriarchal civilzations have equated kings with fathers). The concept of a conquest-driven warrior society is not inherently patriarchal, either, we just associate parenting with women and violence with men because of our own socially-conditioned presumptions. And any civilization which heavily preferences one group of people over another is probably going to be exploitative, because that’s the main motivation for encouraging social inequity - it lets the people in power hold on to their power, and accumulate even more by increasing the disparity between their authority and other people’s. (Which isn’t to say that some of the above ideas aren’t still good ways to look at things, just that it’s kind of an incomplete perspective).

The ‘elite’ set the tone for what is valued or devalued, as it suits the climate of their society. When computers were a new and niche thing, and no one was quite sure how far they would take off, programming was considered a branch of secretary work - it was women’s work (and WoC’s work).  As computers became more influential, and men in the field became more frustrated with having their work ‘devalued’ by its association with women, a concerted effort was made to drive women away from computing and associate it with them, instead. And now the typical image of a computer expert is, of course, a dude with glasses. Image campaigns were launched, more men were recruited to the field and fast-tracked to promotions, women were discouraged and pushed out via harassment and reduced career mobility, and historical retcons were put forward to make it seem as if they’d never been there to begin with. The social equivalent of headbutting your partner out of the classroom window on Science Fair Day and telling the teacher you did all the work yourself.

Of course, there is a question of how one gender initially gains this kind of advantage over another, and then builds off of it in order to reach the level of privilege where this sort of shit can fly. We don’t honestly know for certain, but women are, of course, strongly associated with the ‘gives birth’ end of the reproductive equation. Pregnancy, labour, breastfeeding, these things can all disadvantage someone when it comes to doing other stuff - especially if you’re doing them routinely because infant mortality rates are high and birth control is less-than-reliable. Free time and mobility are significant factors in who can explore their interests or focus on learning new skills, travel to other places, or investigate untested concepts. 

So, provided the genders of this hypothetical matriarchy are still composed along our own lines of thinking*, that should probably be taken into account when considering what runs this civilization**. Either the people going through pregnancies need to have an easier time of it for some reason (i.e. magic makes it easier on them, society is comprised of immortals who can waste time on loads of stuff anyway, etc) or the people not having babies need to have a harder time of it for some reason (i.e. magic makes it rougher on them, pregnancy provides some kind of immune boost that makes people more resistant to some kind of plague, etc).

Because the unpaid/unacknowledged part of the equation is the most important. A matriarchy which is run by rule of violence still might not be all that interesting to read/write about in the end (at face value, it can look less like a meaningful social critique, and more just like ‘look how horrible the world would be if women were in charge! This is what feminists want!!!’ which is.. tiresome). But in order to switch that around, step one is figuring out where the power is, and how this one group of people got a hold of it. That will give you the best indicator for how they should go about keeping it, which will, in turn, tell you what social roles are probably going to be the most lauded and compensated.

*More works which change this up would be pretty cool, I think. And shine some light on the arbitrary nature of a lot of presumptions about gender. 

**Of course, that’s if you don’t just want to shrug and go ‘I dunno, something happened in the early days of the major society we’re focusing on, and the advantage tipped far enough the other way that women have been able to build up on it since’ - that’s also totally fair.

[ruinedchildhood]

[nemhaine42]

i’m starting to hate the frequency of pinterest as a google result more than i hate pinterest itself. listen, google, googly-mate, pinterest isn’t a fuckign source. I want the sites those pictures came from because those are the ones with information such as dates, which is the entire point of the thing I am googling.   

[camwyn]

Damn right. How the hell am I supposed to find tutorials on how to do wire work or bead weaving when the first howevermany pages of Google results are some idiot’s cluster of Pinterest collections of those tutorials?

[ceruleancynic]

SOMEONE ELSE HATES PINTEREST AS MUCH AS I DO

not only does it fuck with sourcing images, but you can’t even SEE the images unless you have a ~pinterest account~ which I have zero interest in acquiring; it does this so completely adorable coy little thing where it shows you half the page and then when you scroll down it goes *complicated tiresome flower emoji face* JOIN PINTEREST 2 SEE MORE! *complicated tiresome flower emoji face* and my systolic reading spikes. 

[jumpingjacktrash]

and google lists individual pinterest pages as separate results, so if a picture is popular, there can be HUNDREDS of pinterest listings before you find anything you could possibly trace back to a source.

listen, all my art bros who are mad about people not sourcing art, i dig that, i agree that sourcing is important, but maybe stop saying reverse image search is easy or ‘30 seconds’ or whatever. sometimes it’s just straight up impossible because fucking pinterest ruins everything.

[gostaks]

SUPER EASY WAY TO AVOID PINTEREST: type your query and then -pinterest

7 of the first 12 results are from pinterest

zero items from pinterest not a single one I’m free

[lakritzwolf]

Reblog to save a set of nerves.

[huffpost]

Stunning photos debunk the myth that queerness is “un-African.”

Mikael Chukwuma Owunna created “a queer African home for myself and others where we can be LGBTQ, African and whole.”

[raisinchallah]

@lesbianahsoka ok so the condensed version is that jeri ryan had an affair with a producer on star trek while she was in voyager and that led to her ex husband trying to reconcile their marriage by going to weird sex clubs in europe but they ultimately divorced her ex husband is jack ryan a politician in illinois who decided to run for senate in 2004 he won the republican primary but newspapers got a hold of the divorce papers from their divorce which were bad enough to hurt his campaign and he dropped out of the race leaving the republicans to not have a well supported candidate so the race was easily won by the democrat barack obama and thats how voyager got obama elected to the senate which later led to him being able to run for president 

[derringdont]

erudition

[vulcanfeminist]

this is why we can't have nice things

everyday my memories on fb are just nonstop social and political misery, every year it's just same shit different day, virulent racism and sexism and classism and ableism literally killing people and nothing ever actually gets any better and it's got me feeling incredibly down... honestly if I'm really paying attention to the last decade then the election results were zero percent surprising and that's just.... fuck... this is not the world any of us should be living in, the fact that this is the world so many people want to live in that they're willing to fight and kill for it is.... fuck...........

[slayerbuffy]

[mother-ducks]

@glitterwarpaint

[grimlykid]

oh MOOD

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

Her face like “IS SHE FLIRTING WITH ME”

YES

YES SHE IS :D

[grimlykid]

she’s just thinking ‘oh, another lesbian to add to the collection’

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

She is catnip to lesbians :D

[storybookplotholes]

Leznip…

Nope that just sounds like lesbian nipples.

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

Heheheheheheehehehehe

Good point…

[storybookplotholes]

Leznips! Available wherever lesbian goods are sold!

Nope… I think I exacerbated it.

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

“OH NO I MADE IT SOUND EVEN DIRTIER”

[black-to-the-bones-deactivated2]

We are the part of the American history that they want to erase. No wonder they will never let any monuments symbolizing the power of black people to appear.

[rsasai]

Do NOT trust Anne Rice

Hello, Vampire Chronicles fans.

Sit down. We need to have a chat.

You see, while some people are very much excited for a new show about our pompous king of the assholes (and I say this as a term of endearment, having loved Lestat since I was a depressed teenager living in New York, shuffling through my mom’s fiction section) we need to pause and remember this:

Anne Rice does not support fan fiction or anything that is not glowing praise.

Read it again, slowly.

Anne Rice does not support fan fiction or anything that is not glowing praise.

This is difficult for younger fans to understand, but let’s take a walk down memory lane.

She has threatened to sue writers in the past. She is one of the most prolific writers of our generation, and she does not support people using her characters for their own work.

In fact, in 2000 she went on a binge-attack against her fans. She threatened legal action against fans who wrote or drew her characters, but especially those who wrote with them. She sent them weeks of harassing letters and doxxed them on the internet.

Let me repeat that.

She doxxed people who wrote fan fiction.

She harassed them online and threatened to contact employers.

She used her fans to outright attack other fans.

This isn’t even something she can just shake off now, with the comment of “It was so long ago” because she did this to a writer who wrote commentary on her story in 2013.

In 2013.

While it was not that she wrote fan fiction, she still shows that she has no respect for people who are in fandom.

Remember those disclaimers used in fan fics, at the beginning? “I do not own …. ”? Yeah, a lot of that has to do with the fact that Anne Rice and others like her would attack fandoms and threaten them, and was in hopes that they would just leave us alone. She didn’t.

In short: Do not trust Anne Rice. I love her writing, I have read every book she has even written, but I do not trust her.

You shouldn’t, either.

[northstarfan]

Anne Rice was and still is a bully. Don’t support her work.

[calleo]

She’s been like this since Geocities was the big place to have spec (that’s what fics used to be called, specs, as in speculative fiction) pages back in the mid 90s.

She use to threaten to sue anyone she found posting specs anywhere, and there was a whole underground network of people to share specs and fan art (which she also would threaten to sue over).

Anne Rice has always been kind of a twat about fan works based on her mediocre writing.

[barlowstreet]

She’s harassed people quite recently. @jennytrout Wanna gossip?

[jennytrout]

What was that? “Raise your hand if you were ever personally victimized by Anne Rice?” 

DISCLAIMER: this is not about fanfic, but it is about what she can do to you.

So, I totally idolized Anne Rice. Fully and adoringly so. One day, she shared one of my HuffPo articles with her “people of the page” and it was probably the greatest day of my entire career. 

But she has this thing where she’s OBSESSED with bad reviews. At one point, she complained about a bad review she got for Interview from the New York Times or some such thing like forty years ago. She used it as an example of how reviews can hurt authors. I was like, seriously, lady, you have how many millions of copies of your books sold? How many movies have been made from them? *People try to find your house to take pictures of themselves in front of it.* But okay, everybody has their quirks. I just kind of rolled my eyes over it.

Not long after that, she made a post about this website that was made by a writer who apparently wasn’t getting the sales numbers or accolades they so richly deserved. The problem wasn’t like, the nature of the business or anything, nay, my friends, nay, but the fact that people–BULLIES!–left mean reviews on Amazon. So these people whom Rice so admired would make posts where they would reveal Amazon/GoodReads reviewers names and home addresses and such. One post even mentioned something like, “Between this time and that time every weekday, they go for a walk by the sea wall.” Scary, scary shit. And Rice LOVED these people.

I don’t know why I took it upon myself to argue with her. I really don’t. Maybe because I respected her so much and her support of the site was so disappointing? This was the result.

So, I’m a bully. Big whoop, right? And my feelings were a little hurt, but hey, never meet (or follow on social media) your idols, right? Lesson learned, and it wasn’t like this could destroy my fond memories of how much I loved her books, right?

So, fast forward, I think it was the next year, or at least a few months later, when I wrote a post about a dumb $0.99 Kindle book about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings in a BDSM relationship. A pathetic little troll with too much hair gel and not enough parenting ran to his goddess Anne Rice to tell her how mean, mean, mean I was being. She posted a link to a blog post made about me on the reviews-are-bullies site and said something to the effect of someone needing to teach me a lesson or someone needed to show me how it feels or something like that. To THREE. MILLION. PEOPLE.

As a fan of Anne Rice, I am confident in stating that many of her fans are not okay people. And they heeded the command of their “queen.” Yes, they referred to her as such, flooding me with emails, tweets, FB messages, anywhere they could reach me. They posted my address, screenshots of google earth images of my house, they threatened to kill me, they made graphic threats against my children, one charming gentleman on parole from his assault sentence offered to make a necklace of my teeth to present to “my queen.”

When confronted about the fact that she had unleashed all of this on me, her response was basically:  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

She insisted she hadn’t done anything wrong, she couldn’t control what people were doing, and oh yes, it’s terrible that people are saying this, but she NEVER. ASKED. THEM. TO. STOP. In fact, she joined her “people of the page” in mocking my appearance, mourning the horrible lives my children must have, and continuing to insist that my “prison tats” indicated that I was a member of a gang (I have “TIME LADY” tattooed across my knuckles in the 11th Doctor era Doctor Who font). Egging them on with this coy, “Well, we shouldn’t say things like that, we’re better than that, BUT” bullshit.

Her “people of the page” also contacted one of my publishers and caused a multi-author anthology that was like, a year in the making to fold.

This all went on for weeks. Some of these people still occasionally pop up to threaten/antagonize. So, yeah. Steer clear. She holds a grudge, she can and will mobilize her fanbase against you, if she dislikes you she will ruin you, and she doesn’t care if her readers literally kill you.

[fozmeadows]

WOW THAT IS SOME GROSS FUCKERY RIGHT THERE

[karnythia]

I’m on her shitlist (things didn’t get as bad for me as for Jenny) for a review I wrote of that super racist Save The Pearls book. The book described Black people as Coals mind you, but I was a bully because I read it, reviewed it & didn’t pretend it was anything but racist. In my case it was a lot of yelling at an editor I work with who is in non fiction & thus didn’t have to pretend to care. Still waiting to see if she lashes out when I get long fiction published.