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Hey, Z - I know a lot of this thread probably reads like personal attacks on you right now. This is important:
Whether you take these as personal attacks on you right now is a choice, and up to you.
(Well, most of it. Some of these are personal attacks. But, to many of us, your ficsuit, and especially your justification of it, reads like an attack on precisely what many of us have been trying to do lately.)
I'm going to be gauche and quote myself, here, from the Feminism 101 thread:
It's odd. If I hit someone inadvertently with the paper ball I was trying to get in the trash, I say I'm sorry. But if I inadvertently injure someone with my speech, I'm much more tempted to say that they've no right to be so angry as I didn't mean it that way.
Similarly - if someone says 'Psst. Your fly is unzipped', my first instinct - before I even look down - is to cringe. Because obviously that other person's in a much better position to notice. But when someone says 'Psst. You are inadvertently perpetuating the heteronormative patriarchy,' my first reaction is more along the lines of 'Nuh-uh!'. Despite the fact that the other person, observing only my speech and not the way what I said came from what I thought and what those words mean in my private language, is WAY better equipped to tell me what what I just said actually means in the world outside my head.
People are reacting to what they heard you say. This may be different from what you intended to say or how you wanted your words to be taken. I promise that if you are able to sincerely just post some kind of 'My bad, problems with translation from inside my head to on the screen,' people will understand and move on. It happens to all of us.
You fucked up. You wrote something that, whatever it may mean in the private language of you and your friends, means something very different on Barbelith. Where it goes from here is your call. You can own up to it and apologize, or you can mount the old 'joke!!!!!!!' defense, which has worked out so very well in the past. |
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