Drowning Nor Waving

That's interesting, because my perspective is the opposite: I'm perfectly willing to believe that Jeremy Lassen is a good guy with a commitment to feminism, but his behavior during the debates has shown he doesn't get the concept of male privilege on a really basic level. Or maybe he gets it, but lost in this particular case. In either case, the aggrieved cookie demands just exasperate me more, as does his willingness to listen to a commenter with a male name, but not to listen to the same complaints made more angrily by women. It is pretty much a textbook demonstration of the parody post you put up a few weeks ago.

I understand that it's hard to confront privilege. I have a hard time with it myself. But I am also tired of the demands *from the people in power* that the people being discriminated against have to make all the behavioral concessions, regardless of whether or not this is fair or even commercially sensible (as the notion that a company can tell their customer base how to act is kind of, um, not commercially sensible).

In terms of language: I felt the poll was neutral, some of the commenters were snarky, and the first commenters to get outright abusive were Jeff Vandermeer and nightshadebooks. And that's one of the problems with tone on the Internet: nightshadebooks (who is not jlassen, I think?) and Jeff V. clearly interpreted the tone of commenters differently than I did. But, you know, tone and complaints about tone are a major warning sign: when a man starts complaining about a woman's tone or a white person complains about a POC's tone, they automatically lose credibility with me, because there's a whole history of power relations there they should be aware of, and if they're not even aware of stuff that's *that* basic, the whole conversation is just going to be a ton of work.