wiscon, i am disappoint

[jazzfish]

At Wiscon last year (2013), Elise Matthesen filed a harassment report against Jim Frenkel, a senior editor at Tor Books.

This official report seems to have triggered a whole slew of additional (mostly unofficial) reports, enough that the end result was for Frenkel and Tor Books to part ways.

Frenkel returned to WisCon this year (2014), and much hubbub was raised. In the process of the hubbub, it came out that the Wiscon concom had 1) "lost" a report of harassment by another individual, and 2) spread false information about Elise's harassment report.

To their credit, Wiscon, having exhausted all other options, started doing what looked like it might be the right thing: they formed a committee to look into l'affaire Frenkel.

The committee released its report today. (Linking to James Nicoll rather than directly to the report as there's some good discussion and interesting backstory in his comments. Summary: Frenkel is definitely banned from Wiscon 2015, and *maybe* for up to three years after.)

This... would seem to be insufficient, and a privileging of the rights of the accused over those of the harassed. It's like, to paraphrase someone (vschanoes?) in James's comments earlier, they saw the Readercon debacle, and rather than saying "oh, we should do something to make sure that doesn't happen here!" said "thank god we're awesome enough that that will never happen here!"

A number of people have already declared their intention to not return to Wiscon next year. Elise, I believe, is going to Balticon instead.

Well. Balticon is certainly more convenient if I'm already in the DC area in May. And it has the likely advantage of sorcyress, as well as members of my former writing group. And next year is a long way off.

I don't know what I'm doing. But... I didn't expect to say that. I didn't expect to ever say "I don't know if I'll make Wiscon this year."

Grr.

Comments

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

I'm curious as o your thoughts re xiphias's posts re Wiscon

[selki.livejournal.com]

I'm not Jazzfish, but I did attend Wiscon in 2013, have/had some friends on ConCom, and have read con/panel write-ups for years. I get xiphias' point in his most recent Wiscon post, although
1) I think his patriarchy-language does muddy his point (I get what he's saying about the 70's history there, but still: muddy)
2) I don't actually agree that more hierarchy (to substitute the word I'd prefer which preserves what I believe to be his point) is necessarily what's needed. Better communication and structure (including documented processes including decision-making criteria), yes, but structure doesn't need to be the old obvious hierarchy structure.

I also get his casino card-counters-ejected model in his prior post, though that also is a little problematic.

So I'd quibble on some of his specifics, but am in a fair bit of agreement (especially emotional reactions), too.

[jazzfish]

His 'casino' post is very much on point. I find the metaphor less problematic than some of the commenters but I recognise that I'm in a social position where I can afford to.

The other post... I disagree pretty strongly with both his diagnosis and prescription, and his terminology. Other people have rightly argued about the terminology in comments.

I think that what's needed is more coordination and (especially) more transparency / communication. I *don't* think that handing off authority will help: in the current situation it's just made things worse. The Frenkel subcommittee did their job poorly (focused primarily/solely on Officially Reported incidents despite the con's known history of losing/misfiling reports and a very large sample of unOfficially Reported incidents to draw from, for starters) but they had the authority to do so.