Herd Watching

Recently Seal Press has learned a lesson the the Democratic Party is learning as well. The lesson is simple… When you advance yourself by encouraging people to use their imagined victimization as a weapon, you know they will turn those weapons on you someday.

Seal press sells a whole bunch of books that primarily feed into the victim mentality of it’s readership. In exchange for the cover price those readers get to be righteous about how the man (or someone, anyone really) is keeping them down. I find it interesting that they were surprised once these victimization junkies got done blaming men for the problems and turned on the next target - Seal press itself.

According to the attackers the world is like this*:

• White men oppress everyone
• “Men of Color” oppress women
• White women oppress “Women of Color”

One of the problems is that Seal Press isn’t going out of their way to beg WOC authors to submit proposals to them. Hell, I don’t agree with much of their views on the world, but given how much hate was being tossed their way I thought Krista and Brooke (from Seal Press) were incredibly reasonable when they said the following (note: somehow something in that quotation is supposedly “racist”*** - I sure as hell don’t see it)

“I appreciate the dialogue, ladies. First off, the blog feels very informal, and my language is in response to the language here:

1. You hate us.
2. We have nothing on WOC.

I get that you all engage best through negative discourse, but I find that too bad. It’s not servitude when we pay our authors advances. And book publishing is not an industry of outreach as much as it is editors being presented with an idea and engaging would-be authors in creative co-creation. I just find it curious more than anything that you all are wasting your time hating (yes, purposeful reuse of the word) rather than actively engaging in changing something you find problematic. I totally respect the creative space.” - Krista and Brooke over at the hate fest

The problem is that Krista and Brooke are white and they own a business. It should not come as a shock that this makes them the targets of anger and scorn in the radfem community. A community which is mostly anti-capitalism and expects white women to apologize for their coloring every second paragraph. Personally? I think that the quote “you all engage best through negative discourse” is the most insightful thing anyone has written about the radfem / victimization community (other than me of course) for a long time.

Now some of that nightmare resulted from a whole bunch of hand wringing and upset centering on someone named “Brownfemipower” who claimed that Amanda Marcotte plagiarized an article she wrote from a speech Bfp gave at a conference that frankly no one in the real world had ever heard of. Now honestly we all know Amanda is not wrapped very tight and has no ethics to speak of but these folks probably have it mostly wrong this time.

Anyway, things went predictably. Boycotts. Outraged posts. Impassioned defenses and the inevitable self deletion of a blog**. Of course, the fact that this Bfp person has used the time honored tactic of flouncing before isn’t stopping people from losing their minds.

“Bfp has nuked her blog a number of times since she started blogging over some blowup” - Julia states the obvious

Heck, to hear some people say it the Internet as a whole will be lucky to survive and frankly feminism is already dead.

“That group included one of the most important feminist bloggers in the history of the web — who has now taken her blog down. As I’m writing, that link goes nowhere. Perhaps permanently — I don’t know if she will return, though like many others I dearly hope she will.” - Holly explains why we are doomed

It’s all pretty confusing. I am sure there are a few real points made under there someplace but frankly I am a bit tired of the white guilt thing at the moment. If Bfp wants to get published I suggest she hit’s up Lulu and set up an account. Hell, I’ll even buy a copy of the first thing she puts up just so I can be safe when the revolution hits.

Go follow the links. These folks always put on a great circus and remember… no one tears down women like radfems with a good hate on.

* note: Depending on which event of the victim Olympics you are watching you may also see the rick oppress the poor, the pretty oppress the ugly, skinny oppress fat and heterosexuals oppress homosexuals. The list is literally endless.

** note: If you are an author and wonder why people don’t take you seriously, I might suggest you not repeatedly acting like a child.

*** note: the “racist” accusation was made on a blog who’s author (in the comments below, where she links to her blog) has asked me to take down the link. I am going to do it this time because this situation is already contentious enough and frankly the same silly accusation is rampant in much of the discussion of this topic so it wasn’t a unique data point. On the whole, I am not sure if I will always remove links on request so don’t take this as a precedent.

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