How We Help Breed Charming Sociopaths, Or: The Con-Bayashi Maru

A few weeks ago, I asked people who host kink parties how they’d deal with one guest claiming that another guest was under investigation by the police for sexual crimes.* And I’d say about 75% of the respondents said some variant on:
“Well, I’d talk to both sides and see who sounded more reasonable to me.”
Now, let’s set some opening criteria here by invoking the nerdiest possibly comparison: The Kobayashi Maru.
In Star Trek, there’s a training mission called the Kobayashi Maru, which puts Starfleet cadets into an unwinnable situation to see how they deal with defeat. (Kirk won, but only by reprogramming the computer to allow a victory.)
People do not like unwinnable scenarios. People like to think that their tactics have no down sides, and once they’ve decided on a course of action, they have this funny habit of shrugging aside the costs of doing business as somehow not being harmful.
My point in these writings on public spaces is that no matter what you choose, your choice carries the risk of harming someone innocent.
Ban people based entirely on hearsay accusation? Well, false reports do exist, and even if you act discreetly – because remember, you don’t have to tell someone why you’ve banned them from a private event – you still risk ostracizing an innocent who’s been targeted by a malicious person.
Ban people based entirely on whether the law has taken action? That’s got two problems: first, the sexual offender registry is notable for sweeping up teenagers who’ve accidentally had sex with someone a year too young, and second, have you noticed the humiliation that rape victims have to go through on the stand in order to get a 7% conviction rate? The court system is designed, as I’ve noted in the past, to make it very hard to convict – and for good reason! – but “not being convicted in court” does not mean that someone is harmless.
And you know what I feel the result of “We’ll just talk to them and see” is?
That you should stop fucking being surprised when yet another charming predator turns out to be a serial offender.
“I’ll determine who’s guilty based on who feels right to me” is as decent a method as any other, but you give up your right to go “HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?” when hey, the person who’s very convincing turns out to merely be a great liar.
Because what you do in situations like that is to send a clear message: If you want to get away with abuse, make sure you’re likable. And the top-tier predators are smart. They figure out really quickly that “doing favors for other people” is a great way of incurring likeability, and they learn how to spin stories to gaslight other people, and they’re smart enough not to victimize every person but to only target a precious few.
And that’s not even counting the charming folks who’ve gone all rock star and have come, quietly, to believe that they’re such studs in the community that every person desires them. These folks can do serious damage – not because they’re trying to be evil, but because they’re like “Hey, if I’ve got her tied up, the last five people liked it when I stuck my fingers inside of them without warning, so this is sure to please!”
When you ask them? They’ll be confident, poised, sure that this was just a misunderstanding. They’ll be Very Concerned, just enough to ensure that you get the impression they’re a good person –
– and then the flip side of the “Who feels right to me?” test comes in, because not only are you disproportionately rewarding people who are charming, but you’re disproportionately punishing people who are traumatized in ways you think are unseemly.
Because not everyone’s a convincing victim. There’s a scene in the movie Spotlight, where reporters find a guy who’s on a crusade against molesting priests – and this guy is stuttering, and alternately brutally nasty and then cringingly apologetic to the reporters. He’s literally got folders full of sketchy evidence that he hands out to anyone who asks.
He looks like a complete nut case. The problem is, he is a complete nut case – but that’s because the abuse made him unhinged. He didn’t react well to being betrayed by an authority figure he idolized, and as a result he’s not together enough to present himself as being convincing.
And like him, lots of legitimate victims are angry, and appear vindictive, because shit, if someone hurt you or someone you loved, wouldn’t you want them not to get away with it?
Being violated is like grief: there’s a script you’re supposed to follow when someone you love dies, complete with weeping at the coffin and clutching loved ones for support, but everyone reacts in different ways. Some people go for isolation. Some people get nasty. Some people run away to drugs or sex.
That doesn’t mean they’re not in pain. It just means they’re not following the script.
So what happens when you adopt the “Who feels right?” means that you reward socially adept people and punish those who don’t follow the “good victim” script. And as such, when another superstar turns out to have a rotting underbelly, you shouldn’t really be too shocked.
Our community, largely, rewards these behaviors.
Now, at this point I anticipate a lot of rage and people shouting, “Well, I’m not a trained investigator! Yet you’re telling me not to necessarily trust the court system, and you’re telling me not to automatically believe the victim, so what do you want me to do?”
I want you to acknowledge the path you’ve chosen has drawbacks.
I want you to be aware of the failure modes of your choice, and to be prepared to walk things back when something hits those failure states.
I want you to admit fallibility.
Look. When I say, “My preference is to believe the victim, in the absence of better evidence,” I do so knowing full well that some percentage of victims make false accusations. And were I running an event, I’d be prepared for the eventuality of uncovering a false accuser, and ready to potentially undo a ban based on new evidence.
If you talk to people to see whether they feel right to you, I’m asking you to recognize that you’re not trained at this, and that manipulators can abuse your system just as off-the-script victims can fuzz your senses, and to be ready to try as best you can to correct for that liability.
If you only ban court-convincted people, acknowledge that the court is not a perfect method of safety – it’s the best way we have to administer justice, but “justice” and “safety” are not always linked.
This is the Con-Bayashi Maru. There’s no perfect solution. And what you do in a time of imperfect solution is to acknowledge the failure modes and try your best to apply workarounds whenever you can.
That’s all.
* – The actual investigation was for possession of child pornography, and there was some discussion of whether having child porn was a bannable offense or whether even “being an active child molester” was reason to bar someone from a party, but most people seemed to take this specific instance as a more general “What do we do when someone comes to us with serious hearsay?” Some may have altered their answers if it had been a case of, say, rape, which is a failure state *I* heartily acknowledge.

Why You Don't Have To Wait To See How Captain America Turns Out Before Judging It

Do I have to give a spoiler alert for something that was broadcast across headlines yesterday?  Well, in case you were sleeping, Marvel made a big change to Captain America yesterday, and in case you don’t know I’m giving you until the end of this sentence to get out.
 
 
All right.  So the latest issue of Captain America: Steve Rogers #1 retcons events so that Steve Rogers has been a Hydra agent all along.  That’s right: Captain America is, and has always been, Hydra’s greatest asset.
I told my wife Gini about that and she said, flatly, “No.”  And left the room.
Which was pretty much the Internet’s reaction.  Never before have I seen so much hatred heaped on a comic book’s decision.  But the #1 response to the hatred from turning, you know, one of Marvel’s greatest sources of moral certainty into a secret supervillain was this:
“Hey, we don’t know where this is going, wait for the whole story to come out before criticizing.”
Except there’s two reasons why that reasoning of “Why you should wait” is blatantly wrong.
First off, we probably do know where it’s going.  Long-time comics fans have seen a lot of stunning changes to major characters – The Spidey we love is a clone! Superman’s two zappy twins! Batman’s been crippled, and Azrael’s taken over!  Charles Xavier’s turned evil, Magneto’s turned good! – and we know ultimately there’s one of three options here:
Option #1: This becomes the new status quo, now and forever, which means we’re absolutely right to hate it as much as our initial gut reaction tells us to, or:
Option #2: As is more likely, this will be the new status quo for about three to five years, as long as editorial stubbornness holds out against the fans’ desires, and eventually we’ll see an awkward year-long storyline where this is all undone and this becomes That Awkward Storyline That Most People Would Like To Forget About Except That Hipster Writers Keep Reverting To This When They’re Out Of Ideas.
Option #3: As is even more likely, the plan is that this is all a dream!  Cap has had hidden memories implanted by Hydra!  It’s an alternate-universe introduction to the Evil Captain America that the real Cap will ultimately fight to show him what he could have become if he wasn’t so awesome!  It’s the Cosmic Cube warping history!  But whatever happens, it’s not real, it’s a bubble universe that passes at some point and hey, okay, sure, thanks for playing.
(And if it is #3, then fuck the Marvel Editorial Team for getting out there in TIME Magazine and USA Today and convincing the fans by saying, “Oh, no, this is really how it is.”  Lying to mislead us didn’t work out for JJ Abrams in Star Trek II, and it would be similarly icky here.)
So it’s possible that the team has some new trick up their sleeve, one we’ve never seen before in eighty years of comics stunts, but it’s highly unlikely.  Chances are very good that what we’re reacting to is entirely valid.  Because turning Marvel’s paragon of moral certainty into a compromised spy is either a really ham-handed insult to Kirby and Simon and Schuster’s legacy (remember,  two Jews literally created Captain America because they wanted to have the strength to punch out twenty-five Nazis), or it’s the exact sort of shoddy linkbait PR technique that was done largely for shock effect.  (We’ll get to “What if I’m wrong?” in a moment.)
But let’s be honest: Anti-heroes are lazy fucking writing.
Anyone can write a character who is morally compromised.  The storylines come quick and easy when you have a hero who does the wrong thing periodically – when they get backed into a moral corner, fuck it, they murder somebody and mourn!  Oh, it’s easy!  They get to do whatever they want!
The reason Captain America and Superman are hard to write is because creating adventures for a hero who must a) retain the high moral ground, b) be challenged, and c) win is, as Tailsteak once said, like writing a haiku.  Yes, it’s hard to do that and make it interesting.  That’s the point.  That’s why Captain America is iconic when thousands of other similar heroes have failed – he’s one of the most heroic heroes ever.
Compromising his moral identity makes it a lot easier to tell stories about him, in the same sense that playing football gets a lot easier when a player carries a submachine gun onto the field.  Maybe there’s still some strategy, but it’s not football any more.   Writing a Captain America story involves finding the real tensions that tempt even a paragon to shave a few moral corners, putting enough pressure on that you can’t possibly see how he’ll get out of it, and then watching him do it.
The reason Marvel did this is because they know this isn’t how Captain America isn’t supposed to be, and yet either they see “Taking the thing away that made Captain America interesting” as a positive achievement – which is bad – or they’re willing to burn fans’ good will towards Captain America to generate cheap publicity over an event they know they’ll have to erase, which is even worse.
But!  My own personal objections aside, let’s say that the team has found some way to thread the needle, and this new Captain America will become utterly amazing down the line.  It’s happened.  I was violently against bringing Barry Allen back in the Flash, back when Barry Allen had died to make a noble sacrifice for the world and Wally West had taken over for eight years – but damn if Mark Waid didn’t turn that into one of the greatest Flash storylines ever.
So let’s say it’s going to get good.  Really good.
Should people judge the story by this first issue?
Fuck yes we should.
Look, part of art is knowing where the reader’s going to pause, and manipulating that expectation to be satisfying.  One of the reasons the world is glued to Game of Thrones is because yes, it’s good for binge-watching – but the creators know that for many, the experience of GoT is tuning in once a week and waiting in anticipation for what happens next.
They set up their cliffhangers very carefully, because they know that most of their viewers’ expectations are shaped by when this chapter ends.
Narrative is governed by tempo.  If a dear friend came up to you and told you, “I have a cancer problem,” and then disappeared for a week, leaving you to stew and wonder what had gone wrong, you’d be furious when they came back and said, “I was born in July!  I hate my astrological sign! Ha ha!”  But that joke, cheap and stupid as it is, might work if you gave them a second’s pause before dropping the punchline.
Writing is about rhythm.  It’s about satisfying all the audiences that might watch this – LOST and X-Files were very satisfying to people who watched it chapter by chapter, but in the end they couldn’t pull together a coherent storyline, and that’s the opposite failure, and it’s just as bad.
So it’s not wrong to judge a story by how it’s satisfying in the short term.  This is how it’s initially told.  Marvel knows that at some point, this first issue of Captain America would stop and then people would have reactions to it that determined whether they bought the next issue.  That’s how the biz works.
And they chose to go for shock value.
Which is, I should mention, fine.  I don’t agree with this artistic decision, but they have the right to go for shlocky shock, just as DC had the right to turn Batman vs Superman into a grit-fest.  But they set the tone for a storyline that people appear to be roundly rejecting, and you know what?
If I write a shitty first chapter to my next novel (coming out in September, I remind you!), it is not wrong for you to conclude, “Wow, I won’t like the rest of this book.”
Your conclusion might be wrong.  Plenty of stories start out slow and build to brilliant endings.  (I infamously had to make five running starts at Dune before I got hooked.)
But if you fail to read the rest of the book with the shitty opening chapter, that’s not a failure on the reader’s part.  That’s a failure on the author’s part in drawing you in.  Or it’s a marketing failure on the publisher’s part by giving you a cover promising shiny space unicorns and giving you an opening chapter with gritty military violence.  Or it’s just a generic failure that’s really nobody’s fault because hey, the greatest epic poetry ever written won’t appeal to someone who hates poems.
But it’s not a failure on your part, because reading should not be an experience in “Who can chew this tin foil the longest.”
If you don’t like it, leave when you’ve had your fill.
Maybe this storyline is going somewhere unexpected and wondrous.  But by presenting that first issue as they did, Marvel and crew set up an expectation that either a) this is pretty damn disrespectful to Kirby’s legacy, or b) this is the kind of tawdry stunt-PR crap that’s destroying comics.
Would I know how to fix this error in the first comic?  No.  That would depend on knowing where they are going with this.  And even then, it’d be hella-tricky.  But as I said, it’s not the reader’s job to make it easy on the writer.
And Marvel knew this would cause a shitstorm.  It’s why they had stories ready to go in major media outlets.  I don’t feel all that sorry for the hatred they’re enduring, because they had to know this was part of the cost of doing business.  They’re not surprised, they’re braced, and they’re hoping this generates new sales.  I can’t feel all that bad for someone who purposely triggered a barrage of social media.  (Especially when the writer of this storyline seems to be sniggering at the rage trollishly on Twitter, but Twitter’s a remarkably hard place to read strangers’ state of mind.)
And in my heart of hearts, I hope that I’m as wrong as I was when Mark Waid brought back the Flash. I stopped reading after that first “Barry Allen is back!” issue, and later picked up the back issues when someone told me that wow, this was way better than he’d thought, and even if it was ultimately option #3 on the Menu Of Grand Comics History Changes, it was perhaps the best Option #3 that anyone ever did.
So I’ll hope this is a good story, in time.
But I’ll also argue that when they’ve only given you this issue to ponder for the next month, it’s not wrong to base your decision to dislike it upon literally everything they’ve presented to you.
Oh, and one last thing about the guy who wrote this storyline:

While we’re discussing what Captain America would or would not do, pretty sure he wouldn’t be saying “Let’s send death threats to artists!”

— Ferrett Steinmetz (@ferretthimself) May 26, 2016

Good People Often Stay Closeted. Good People Sometimes Stay Silent.

Here’s the thing nobody denies: speaking out helps other people. Every time a gay person comes out, they help normalize “being gay” for other people. Every time a depressed person speaks openly about their struggle, they help to reduce the stigma of a crippling condition they didn’t ask to have. Every time someone smacks down racist or sexist talk in public, they help send the message that that kind of talk is not cool.
What few people mention is that those discussions help other people but may harm you.
We’ve all heard about the kid who came out as gay and his family disowned him. Someone openly admitting their mental health struggles can be passed over for promotions at work because, well, they’re crazy. Yelling at your friends for racist or sexist language can cost you friends – and it’s all well to go “Well, those aren’t the kinds of friends you should have!”, but that’s scant consolation when you’re lonely.
Speaking out hurts.
And yet there’s often this liberal narrative that good people burst out of the closet, muscles rippling, while these sad poisoned Gollum-like people stay within. If your game store is full of homophobic assholes, a good person would charge in there like a bull, call them on all their shit, face them down mano a mano until they bent underneath your herculean will!
What kind of weak asshole would just choose not to play at that store?
But here’s the truth: Speaking out helps other people, but protecting yourself is also a priority.
This does not make you a bad person.
Look: I’m openly polyamorous… now. But my wife and I were poly for several years before we acknowledged it on the Internets, and I’m not ashamed to say that we kept that shiz under wraps because we had two teenaged daughters who lived with their biological father. Maybe he’d be cool with our open marriage, or maybe he’d decide this was time to go to court to get the kids out of the hands of those perverts.
We had to weigh our desire to speak out against the very real cost of maybe not getting summer visits with our kids.
I don’t regret that choice one fucking bit. I regret not speaking out, of course. But in the end, it’s nice to do good by giving poly workshops and helping other poly couples feel represented and sharing my experiences… but I wouldn’t be able to do any of that anyway if I wasn’t able to talk to my kids, as I’d be too miserable to function.
Likewise, not everyone has the energy to fight grand battles at their schools or family meals or game stores – or even if they do, they don’t have the energy to fight every battle that comes along, because shit, you can grind yourself to dust grappling with every microaggression, and is it really worth the progress you’ll make if you destroy yourself along the way?
It’s not wrong to pick your battles. It’s not wrong to prioritize your own survival over forging paths for other people’s future benefits. You should fight wherever you can, of course, and don’t make the closeted gay Republican mistake of trashing your own people to fit in, but…
In the end, any good movement is about finding compassion. And we should celebrate the people who fight the good battles, because they make headway. But those stories all too often end like Christ Himself did, with some poor schmuck dying horribly and a weeping family and a legacy that only kicks into play years after the pain and the survivors have faded.
And your movement should be understanding enough to not view you as a soldier to be shot up in the front lines, but as a human with needs who deserves as much love and support as anyone else.
Your activism can be part-time, when you have the strength to do it. Not every combatant can be a warrior on the front lines; there should be room for guerrilla tactics, and spies, and even noncombatants who occasionally lend hugs to the people who need them.
You have to protect yourself so you can fight whenever you can, in whatever way you can. You might not be up for every battle. You might, in fact, be totally unable to fight some battles because you know that losing your kids or your parents or your social group is not something you can afford to do right now.
That’s okay. Protecting yourself does not make you a bad person.  Find the places where you can afford to make change, but don’t beat yourself up for not being able to be as “bold” as other people, because part of this journey is in finding your own strengths and learning how you can contribute even with the very real compromises that everyone has to make.
Just don’t give up.

How To Entice A Weasel To Sign Books At Your Town

So I’m looking to do another book tour in the fall to promote the final book in the ‘Mancer series, Fix. Last year, I hit Cleveland, New York, Boston, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, and Portland: this year, I’m hoping to add a couple more stops, because apparently I dislike this whole “rest” thing.
That said, I had people saying, “Come sign at my town!” – and while I love showin’ up places, remember that this book tour is on my dime. It’s not really a book tour, where publishers pay for my hotel and plane fare – it’s more like a book vacation, where hey, I have a few weeks to go new places and visit friends, so why not anchor a big swingy trip with bookstore appearances?
So if you’d like me to show up in your town this September/October, it involves some mild legwork:
1) Find me a contact at a bookstore who wants me to come there.
Simply saying, “Oh, $BOOKSTORE exists!” is not enough, sadly. When I planned my first book tour, about half the stores I called rejected me. And even now that I have people at Angry Robot to do the legwork for me (thanks, Mike Underwood, whose Kickstarter is running even as we speak!), I’d prefer not to ask them to do all the gruntwork of cold-calling a bookstore to have them go, “Who? Oh, fuck, no.”
So if you’d like me to come, give me a name of someone who’s happy to have an author there.
2) Unless that bookstore is willing to pay for me to go out there, said bookstore should be within a night’s driving distance of Cleveland, Ohio.
Hey. If you want to pay me to come to Australia? I will go, man. For any reason. “Ferrett, come to Europe and don’t sell books, just do that funny little dance you do.” I’ll be putting on my tap shoes before you finish that sentence.
That said, as noted, this is a vacation, and while I’d love to fly to Austin or Las Vegas, I’ve got a limited budget. I’ll literally go anywhere if you’re willing to pay my travel expenses, but otherwise I can reasonably drive six to eight hours before I collapse.
(This also applies for convention appearances. People ask if I’ll give polyamory talks at their convention. I absolutely will! But I need to not lose money getting out there and back, so if you can fly me somewhere, email me at theferrett@theferrett.com and we’ll talk details.)
3) Uh, Actually, That’s It.
So if you can do those things, lemme know, we’ll talk it over. Otherwise, maybe some day I’ll hit your town – I’d love to! I like doing signings and visiting new cities and meeting people and buying too many books at indie shops! This shiz is fun for me!
And, you know, I hope you enjoy the book, too. Which I am putting the final edits on this week. Wish me luck!

Why I Didn't Write A Blog Entry Today

There’s a lot of blog entries I call “load-bearing entries.”  Those are the ones where, if I write one wrong paragraph, I’ll risk the wrath of the Internet falling upon me for something I didn’t mean to say.  I write maybe two of those a month, even though I get ideas for them pretty much daily.  But those sorts of essays require a lot of forethought and the willingness to deal with asshole responses for the rest of the week, so I don’t write ’em all.
There’s a lot of blog entries inspired by questionable things that other people I know are doing, and writing about that now would have those people feeling personally attacked.  And even if I didn’t mind hurting people’s feelings, the problem with personal attacks is that it transforms the experience of the essay from “This is bad behavior that has these negative consequences” to “YOU JUST DON’T LIKE THIS PERSON,” and the message is lost.  So I make a mental note, wait a few months, file off the serial numbers, and write an essay on the exact same behavior when everyone’s forgotten who it is.  Sometimes those people who inspired it by being buttheads thank me for writing such an insightful essay.  It’s weird.
There’s a lot of blog entries on topics that are really dear to my heart, and I want to get the emotions on them right, but I’m just not finding the right entry point.  And rather than knocking out a quick essay on this really emotionally-critical topic that misses the mark, I stash it and hope one day I’ll find the way to write it as well as this not-often-discussed topic deserves.
There’s a lot of blog entries where someone else said it, and I think I have something new to add, but whoops, I don’t.  Deleted.
There’s a lot of blog entries where something important is happening, and while I have Very Severe Feelings, I don’t feel like pretending that reading two essays and a Wikipedia article makes me an expert on the topic.  Deleted.
There’s a lot of blog entries where I can say what I need to on Twitter, and while in the old days maybe I would have coalesced a couple of other thoughts around that single idea to make a blog post, Twitter is now where I get my little thoughts out of the way.
There’s a lot of blog entries where I’ve been talking about the same topic for days in a row, and because I’m responding to people’s responses, the general interpretation is that “Man, Ferrett is really mad about the way people are reacting to him.”  But I’m not.  Ferocious debate interests me, particularly when people are wrong.  But after three days of response essays I find that, much like the “personal attack” essay, the lesson people start taking away is “Wow, is he thin-skinned,” so I stop responding after a bit because my points become increasingly lost.
There’s a lot of blog entries where it’s inspired by a relationship question I’m pondering, but if time has taught me one thing, it’s that opening your relationship to Internet debate hardly ever settles the question even if you’re telling people that you’re probably on the wrong side of this debate.  So I’ll wait a few months on that one, too.   Until it’s no longer a question, but an answer.
There’s a lot of blog entries where I’ve said that before.  So I don’t again.
There’s a lot of blog entries I forget, particular when I’ve laid ’em fallow for a few months.
There’s a lot of blog entries.  But man.  If you could see all the topics I consider, you’d realize how easy blogging is for me, and how hard.