Thoughts on Benjanun Sriduangkaew/Requires Hate

[swan_tower]

As promised, a follow-up post on the public revelation that Requires Hate and Benjanun Sriduangkaew are the same person, and the material collated by Laura J. Mixon on that topic. This is entirely about my own feelings and opinions on the matter; they’re not statements of fact, though I’ve done my best to be clear what facts I’m basing my feelings and opinions on.

Because naming gets complicated in a discussion of someone with multiple names, my approach has been as follows: I use Winterfox or WF when referring to that specific persona, ditto Requires Hate or RH, ditto Benjanun Sriduangkaew or just Sriduangkaew. (I would like to abbreviate that name as well, but since the initials there are BS, it would have a very unfortunate effect.) When I’m talking about the individual behind all of those personas, I follow Mixon’s lead in calling her RHB, for lack of any better referent.

Some brief prefatory comments follow, before I get to the main points.

***

My feelings on Benjanun Sriduangkaew, prior to Mixon’s post:

I liked “Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon.” I was very meh on “The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly,” because it was way too baroque for my taste. If I read anything else, I can’t remember it. I would have been glad to look at any other stories of hers I came across, with the understanding that depending on where they landed in that spectrum, I might have very different reactions to them.

My feelings on Requires Hate, prior to Mixon’s post:

The name alone always registered on me as a warning sign. “Requires Only That You Hate” is not a phrase I can get behind: while anger has value, hate is corrosive. Her reviews, when I looked at them, seemed to prioritize invective over substance. I was not a fan.

My feelings on Winterfox, prior to Mixon’s post:

Do Not Engage. Everything I saw of her behavior told me this person was dangerously toxic.

***

RH has said in her apology that there are impostors whose words are being wrongly attributed to her; she specifically references acrackedmoon. This post says that “Winterfox” is another one of the aliases she is disavowing, which appears to be true if you put together the pieces from other sources (i.e. the origin of the “raped by dogs” comment).

I find myself dubious. I’ve heard for years that Winterfox and Requires Hate were the same person, in multiple places around the internet; this is the first time I’ve heard RH dispute the connection. It’s hard to believe she wasn’t aware of people linking the two names, given how frequently it happened, so if she has been saying for years that it isn’t true, I’d appreciate someone pointing me at that.

***

There are a few places where people have been talking about RHB saying that Benjanun Sriduangkaew is a “constructed persona.” This actually doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Because guess what? “Marie Brennan” is a constructed persona, too. (There are ways in which that would be true even if it were my legal name.) Who I am here on my blog, speaking as a professional, is not who I am when I’m home for Christmas, or who I am when I’m hanging out with friends. Identity is contextual and always shifting. I don’t need to know what name is on RHB’s birth certificate to “know” her. The notion that Sriduangkaew might be a pen name only bothers me if she’s intending to drop that identity and come back under a new one with the intent of deceiving the community.

***

With all of those prefaces out of the way, let me get to the actual discussion. All of this is my opinion on the matter, and it’s written on the assumption that Winterfox is indeed another alias of RHB, as the evidence I’ve seen supports. I’ll be clear where I can which behaviors are linked to which names, though, so that if you disagree with the probability of that connection, you can more easily slice away the WF-influenced parts of this section.

So:

I hope her apologies are sincere. I hope she genuinely repents of her previous actions and sees the damage they have caused; I hope she takes active steps to make amends, both with individuals and with her community, so that ten years from now it will be possible to talk about the good she’s done, to counteract the bad. I don’t expect that would mean everybody forgives her, nor do I think it should. The people she hurt may or may not ever “get over it.” That’s up to them, not me. But it would be nice to see good come of this going forward.

There are things that make me doubt the above will occur.

It started with Sriduangkaew’s apology. I kind of want to scar that word with quotation marks, because she spends way more time on her explanation than her apology, way more time talking about how she’s been victimized than how she victimized others. This post says that’s true in at least one instance; I’m willing to believe it. But the post where you’re apologizing to other people for the hurt you’ve caused is not the place to talk at length about how you’ve been hurt yourself. The RH post actually reads as an apology; the Sriduangkaew post does not.

Okay, so maybe those posts were meant to serve different purposes. It bothers me, though, that neither post links to or even mentions the other. In fact, the Sriduangkaew post says outright that she’s apologized elsewhere . . . but it doesn’t say where. Followers of RH can walk away from her blog having no idea that she’s Sriduangkaew. Readers of Sriduangkaew can walk away from her blog without the faintest clue that she’s the rage-blogger Requires Hate — in fact, without much clue what she’s apologizing for in the first place.

She says she’s apologized more directly to those she hurt. I hope that’s true; I haven’t yet seen anyone on her target list come out and say that yes, they’ve been in communication with RHB. If there are any instances of this, again, I would like to see them, because it would go a long way toward giving RHB’s claim of atonement more weight. As of me writing this post, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz appears to still be waiting for an apology, and the problems between them are quite recent — though, to be clear, those problems revolve mostly around Sriduangkaew accusing Loenen-Ruiz of outing her, and aren’t of the type Mixon mostly documents.

She also speaks of this as if it’s well in her past, something she’s been trying to leave behind her for years. But this happened as late as spring of last year, and while it doesn’t rise to the magnitude of some of her other actions, that doesn’t make it good.

RH’s apology says her behavior stemmed from the fact that she (mistakenly) thought of herself as “doing good and punching up” in her anger about injustice. If she’s WF, though, her toxic behavior well predates any adoption of the language or goals of social justice. And it’s hard to understand how she can think of herself as punching up when her targets — as documented by Mixon — were disproportionately women, people of color, or (frequently) women of color. Newcomers, rather than established names. Basically, not the people who are truly in positions of power. I can kind of wrap my brain around it, if I try; maybe she thought the people who should be her allies but failed to live up to her standards were a worse enemy than those with privilege. It’s twisted logic, but I guess it’s there.

What I can’t see at all is how that ostensible goal squares with her long-standing habit of deleting her most egregious posts and comments. If you think of yourself as fighting the good fight, why would you hide half of what you’ve done? On Jim Hines’ blog, people have suggested charitable interpretations: maybe she regretted stepping over the line, but couldn’t bring herself to admit it. Maybe she deleted those comments and said nothing at the request of her target. But I haven’t seen any evidence (other than wishful thinking) to support those interpretations. If she regretted her excesses, why did she keep committing them? If her targets wanted those things gone and the entire thing swept under the rug, why are so many of them upset about the deletions? Based on the evidence I’ve got, it looks much more like RHB was covering her tracks — which is something you do only when you’re trying to get away with something that isn’t admirable. It had the effect of gaslighting her victims, who felt the full pain of what she’d done, but often couldn’t prove it to anybody else because the evidence had vanished. (If you find yourself thinking “what she did to Person X doesn’t seem so bad,” it inevitably has to come with a grain of salt, because who knows whether you’re seeing the whole story? Not everybody screencapped things before they were done.)

Gaslighting isn’t something a crusader does. It’s something an abuser does.

Elizabeth Bear has more experience with and knowledge of abusive behavior than I do, and she doesn’t buy the apologies in the slightest. Neither does the rape survivor who had trouble with her recently. There are a lot of people who aren’t convinced.

Like I said: I hope RHB is sincere. I hope she genuinely does see how she’s hurt people, and makes real efforts to atone for that. It’s better than the alternative, which is that she got caught out, and now is trying to run damage control without having changed her thinking in the slightest.

For now, I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.

It isn’t the same thing as trust.

***

So what happens now?

Benjanun Sriduangkaew will not be “blacklisted.” (We aren’t organized enough for that.) Will this hurt her career? Quite possibly. There are people who will no longer read her stories going forward. They’re perfectly within their rights to do that, just as QUILTBAG supporters are within their rights to not read Orson Scott Card, and Vox Day’s supporters are within their rights not to read John Scalzi. If you don’t like somebody’s politics or behavior, you don’t have to read them. Editors don’t have to buy their work. We can all judge those people for their personal boycotts as we see fit.

I probably won’t read her stories for a while, because I won’t be able to do so without this dominating my thoughts. Whether I do so in the future will depend on her public actions between now and then.

Nobody should harass her, or doxx her, or in any way adopt her own tactics against her. Wrong doesn’t become right when you do it against somebody else who did wrong.

What do I think should happen? I don’t really know, but I kind of feel like the response to the community matters more than the response to the individual. What happens with RHB herself depends mostly on what she does, at least for a while. We need to support the people she hurt, and we need to change things so that this doesn’t happen again. We need to not support abusive behavior just because it’s wearing the cloak of a good cause. We need to advance that good cause in honest and substantive ways, so that people don’t feel like they need a hateful rage-blogger to express their anger for them. We need to agree that “the tone argument” is a weapon often used against people who refuse to accept injustice politely, but that this fact doesn’t mean all rhetoric is equally acceptable. We need to try harder. We need to do better.

That may not be satisfying to people who want to see justice done. Thing is, I don’t know what “justice” would be in this situation. Some of the things RHB has done may be legally prosecutable (I’ve heard this may be the case in at least one instance involving the UK). Most of it, though, isn’t a crime in the literal sense, and so there are no clear-cut statutes telling us what should happen now. Retribution doesn’t seem like it will accomplish anything. Restitution, maybe — but we can’t force that on her. The best thing I can see for us to do is to grow stronger, so that this doesn’t happen again.

***

For the record, I’m going to be AFK for most of today, which means I’ll be slow at responding to comments. Possibly I should hold off on posting this at all until later, but I’ve already waited several days because of World Fantasy, and don’t want to delay more than I already have.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Winterfox and Requires Hate openly stated that they were the same person for years. I and hundreds of others saw them repeatedly link posts in one name from the other name, saying stuff like "Here's my review of this shitty book." The same review was frequently duplicated on both their blogs, and posted under both names.

Since those "check out my review elsewhere" posts appeared from both Winterfox and Requires Hate, linking back to the other, it is impossible for Winterfox to have been an imposter unless RH is also claiming that her own identity as RH was hacked for a period of years without her ever noticing. Claiming that Winterfox is RH's imposter is like Marie Brennan claiming that Swan Tower is an imposter.

And yeah, this is the first I've ever seen any claims that Winterfox was an imposter.

She says she’s apologized more directly to those she hurt.

She stalked me for three years, and I have yet to get an apology. I made a public request, which I am certain she knows about given how assiduously she reads my blog, for her to publicly promise to leave me alone from now on. I outlined the exact phrasing and where I wanted her to put her promise (on both her blogs). She has yet to do so.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Anything posted by WF claiming to be RH technically doesn't hold much weight as evidence goes, since anybody could scrape reviews etc and repost them, taking credit for the work. Ditto linking. But if RH had pointers going toward WF, as it sounds like was the case . . . then yeah, no, that disavowal doesn't hold much water. (Especially since it rather strains credulity that RH either did not know about her impostor, or allowed it to pass unremarked, for all that time.)

Since RH never came out and said directly "I'm not Winterfox" -- her actual words were "I didn’t tell anyone to get raped by dogs" -- then it's possible that what she's actually claiming is that someone impersonated Winterfox on at least one occasion. Which is possible, I suppose: looking at Mixon's report, that comment was on a semi-private forum and has been deleted, so there's a chance that the WF there was not the real one. (Either that, or the pairing with the comment about the impostor obfuscates the fact that what she's actually saying is that this particular incident never took place.) Even if one of those interpretations is true, that still leaves us with a rather large body of inexcusable actions taken by RHB in the WF persona. Being innocent of one particular offense doesn't really change the balance of her behavior.

She stalked me for three years, and I have yet to get an apology. I made a public request, which I am certain she knows about given how assiduously she reads my blog, for her to publicly promise to leave me alone from now on. I outlined the exact phrasing and where I wanted her to put her promise (on both her blogs). She has yet to do so.

In situations like this, I try very hard to look for angles from which things might look better, as a corrective against the impulse to just take everything in the worst light possible. The best I can do here is to think that RHB went after so many people, she has either lost track of them all and therefore hasn't apologized everywhere she should, or is still working her way through the list.

. . . neither of those seems terribly likely, mind you. But they're the best I can do.

The more I look at her words and actions, the less I trust her seeming contrition. Picking through the WF bit above, for example, makes her wording look seriously weaselly, calibrated to give a certain impression while never coming out and saying the thing directly -- i.e. leaving her room to backpedal. I do keep hoping I'm wrong, because the world would be a better place if she actually did feel sorry. My hope, however, is not very strong.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry. I don't in any way wish to tell Rachel that she is wrong to feel offended and hurt, and Rachel, if it read that way to you, my sincere apologies.

This is me trying to examine my own knee-jerk assumptions, so that I don't automatically leap to the worst possible interpretation of her actions -- which is pretty much my first impulse here. As I said in my post, I'm trying to approach this from the direction of hoping that RHB's apology is sincere, because I want this to be the first step in something good after so much bad. (The alternative is that there's just more bad, and I don't want to hope for that.) This isn't the same thing as actually assuming she's sincere -- like I said, I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt for now, but not trusting -- but it does mean I'm looking for possible evidence of sincerity, and then weighing that against the likelihood of its validity. What I was trying to get at is that when I attempt to do that here, with Rachel saying "here's how you can make restitution with me" and RHB failing to do so . . . it basically doesn't work. I am indeed tying myself in knots to impute good -- but then stepping back and saying, uhhhh, that's an awfully convoluted knot there, Occam's razor says this is probably bogus. I don't think the latter part came through very well at all. (That's what "the best I can do" was meant to convey, and didn't really do. I probably should not have tried to write that comment right before going to bed.)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I didn't read it that way, for what it's worth. I just think that there is, to date, zero evidence of contrition or even initial good motives (RHB was attacking people in video game comms, using transphobic insults and racialized rape threats, for years before she ever cloaked herself in social justice) and a mountain of evidence that she is only sorry she was caught.

I have not heard of anyone getting an apology since the less-than-convincing ones she posted on her blogs. I sure haven't. (And, as she well knows, I don't want an apology. I want a public promise that she will never stalk, harass, contact, link to, or even mention me again.)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The more closely I look at her words, yeah, the less I buy the notion that she is actually contrite. The RH post (which I read before I even read Mixon's roundup) actually operates pretty well as an apology, but there's places where it's less straightforward than it looked at first glance. And then I'm seeing people talking about Sriduangkaew presenting herself as a sweet and naive newcomer to the genre . . . starting back in 2012, at the same time that RH was still very much active. It really looks two-faced -- if you're going to apologize and reinvent yourself, you need to do it in that order, not the reverse -- and the warning signs keep piling up.

Right now, frankly, the thing I keep wondering is whether "Benjanun Sriduangkaew" will fade away and stop publishing, and then in a year or two some other fresh-faced new writer will step forward, and it'll be RHB under a new mask. That's the one thing that makes me wish we knew her "real" name, because then we'd have a better chance of catching her if she tries to duck out on this. As it stands, I don't want new WoC writers getting the side-eye on the off chance that they're RHB in new guise.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

That deleted comment was me. I apologize, Marie. RH/WF/BS scares the f*** out of me for reasons that are not your fault; I shouldn't have taken it out on you.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

No need to apologize. You made me realize that my comment didn't really convey what I intended it to; while you were deleting it, I was posting a reply that I hope will make my actual point clearer.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

No, your explanation makes a lot of sense. I'm hair-triggered on the topic and should not be engaging about it; that's not you, that's me. Thank you for taking the time to respond.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

You're not the only one who may be hair-triggered (given the sensitivity of this topic), so I'm glad that you prompted me to clarify.

[lokifan]

Interesting post. I would like to note here that you can take away the rage blogging and still have a virulent abuser. I understand why people are focussing on the reviews but I wish they wouldn't; it's edging into tone-policing, and even if it weren't, mean reviews are not really the point when RH was also talking rape and death threats and smear campaigns.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Right -- part of the point here is that WF behaved the same way, long before she started doing reviews as RH. And RH's behavior went well beyond negative reviews.

[calico-reaction.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to thank you for posting this. I've had a few run-ins with her myself, both as WF and RH, so I've been paying VERY close attention to the fall-out of the revelation.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I just wish I had anything resembling a "solution."

[calico-reaction.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I think time itself is the solution, to see what a person does once their mistakes are in the open. Do they truly change, or do they revert back to their old tricks?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Which is more or less where I'm at. But that doesn't undo the harm, nor prevent it from happening again with other people.

[calico-reaction.livejournal.com]

Absolutely not.

A Jewish friend of mine and I were talking about the situation and she explained this to me (I'm always asking how things work, which is why she REALLY has to explain things to me):

In Judaism, there are only two unforgivable sins. One is murder. The other is slander/harassing talk.

I need to stop and explain something about how forgiveness works in Jewish thought, which is frequently misunderstood. In Judaism, the only person who can forgive you for a sin is the person you committed it against, and only if they can somehow be made whole again. On Yom Kippur, God forgives the Jewish people for sins they have committed against him (this is frequently misconstrued as "Jews believe god absolves them for sinning against others"--which is completely inaccurate. Even God can only forgive a person for sins committed against him but because God is ultimately good and loves people, he will do so if you ask--according to Jewish thought.)

This is why murder is the unforgivable sin. The only person who is capable of forgiving a murderer is no more, therefore murder is unforgivable.

The other unforgivable sin is slander, the malicious things you say about other people. There is a common rabbinic parable that explains why this is that I like:

"A certain person in the community hated another and spread salacious gossip and harsh words about him, which damaged his standing in the community and caused him grief and harm. Over time, the gossiper came to regret his actions, and went to the rabbi. Rabbi, he said, how do I proceed with gaining forgiveness for having slandered my fellow? The Rabbi said: Before you can be forgiven, you must first stand on the roof of the tallest building in town on a windy day and slice open a feather pillow, then come back to see me again. So the gossiper did so, and the feathers quickly blew about and were lost. The gossiper went back to the rabbi and said, I have done what you asked. The Rabbi said, to begin being forgiven for your gossip, you must collect every feather from the pillow. The Gossiper cried out that this was impossible. The rabbi said, every lie and slander you spread is like a feather from that pillow. Your victim cannot be whole until the pillow can be."

I thought the parable apt, considering.....

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

That is indeed quite apt.

[(Anonymous)]

Two things:

I've read over the comments, and I'm not sure that they're sufficiently clear that RH and WF were never coy about originating the other handles listed. What she's saying about the impostors is that there is one or more people who have, at times, created accounts under one of those handles in various places, and some of the actions currently attributed to her were actually done by one of these others. Given that she has at least one long-standing stalker (the one who posted from his Twitter account to the threads in James Nicholls' LJ), and that said stalker is also openly a GamerGater (he was talking about her outing in a forum thread that was mostly about GamerGate, and taking great joy in watching others dogpile her, not to mention goading some of said dogpiling).

Also, I'd like to see some consistency here; there are people who have done, and continue to do, the same things to RHB that they condemn her for, but are facing very little backlash. And what little backlash they do face is from people who are broadly condemned as "defending abuse." Which is ... problematic, to say the least.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

What she's saying about the impostors is that there is one or more people who have, at times, created accounts under one of those handles in various places, and some of the actions currently attributed to her were actually done by one of these others.

Ah, I see. If that was what she intended to communicate, she could have been a great deal clearer about it.

That interpretation still doesn't make me sanguine about things, since there is enough bad stuff attributed to both names that it would have to be 90% impostor work (which I doubt) for me to change my opinion on her behavior. But that would at least remove the charge of complete duplicity regarding the personas themselves.

Also, I'd like to see some consistency here; there are people who have done, and continue to do, the same things to RHB that they condemn her for, but are facing very little backlash.

If you give me links, then I will be critical of them, too. But all of the commentary I've read thus far has not been anything like "the same things" RHB has done -- in fact, it's been remarkably civil, all things considered. So until I know who is behaving otherwise, I am being entirely consistent.

I understand this is like super-late but it's not her real name

[sergei s. (from livejournal.com)]

Just spreading the word that real name of Benjanun Sriduangkaew is Venesa Burranupakorn.

Since filter usually discoursages links, I will post link wihtout http part

winterfraud.wordpress.com/2015/07/05/requires-hate-revealed/