Not Ready To Make Nice – Shoshana Kessock

Your Game Is Not A Nordic Larp – And That’s Okay!

July 1, 2019 by Shoshana, posted in Criticism, Game Design, LARP Discussion and Theory, Not Ready To Make Nice

[Please note: This article was written in 2018 during the height of a debate about Nordic Larp and American Larp. I hesitated at the time to get involved in the debate due to health issues, but now think I’d like to contribute this follow up to the question. Please read with the understanding the information is a little dated, and updates may occur.]

Nordic Larp. What does that even mean?

I had the same question myself when I headed over to Europe for the first time six years ago for Knutpunkt, the large Nordic Larp conference held once a year in either Norway, Sweden, Denmark, or Finland. I had the opportunity to drop myself into the middle of a larp discourse already in progress there, at the crossroads of many countries all discussing the different aspects of the art form/hobby of live action games. While there I learned that the Nordic larp tradition was spreading in a big way, fostered by outreach from the Nordic countries to other larp traditions across the world.

Since that outreach began, Nordic larp and its design ethos and ideology has become a part of many local larp communities, its influence offering tools to designers outside of their normal design choices. This exchange is, at its very heart, a fantastic way to grow larp as a discourse and a design practice and art form, inspiring new creations across the pond. But things haven’t been entirely… smooth in this cultural and design exchange. Not by a longshot.

For the last few years, a growing rift has begun between the centralized (as it is) Nordic larp community and the American community, driven by the way in which certain conversations have been going between the two groups and certain ideological differences. At the core of that discussion is a single idea: Nordic Larp and the ideas it espouses are rooted in a specific tradition, and to take that name and brand your larp that way outside of the community can be a problem.

More plainly: hey, people on the outside, Nordic Larp is not necessarily yours, and taking the name for your own buzz and hype is maybe not okay.

And you know what? For a number of reasons, that’s a really good point.

Your game probably isn’t Nordic Larp – and that’s okay too! Here’s why.

I opened this article with a question: what does the term Nordic Larp even mean?

There’s a lot of answers to that question. And if you think that makes the arguments about the appropriation of the term difficult, you’re absolutely right. Ask Larpers in the movement there what Nordic larp means, and you will probably get a lot of answers that seem hand-wavy and unspecific. However, there are certain key ideas behind Nordic Larp you can point to as being “very Nordic.”

This definition (which is a little long) comes from the NordicLarp.org, a website which focuses on collecting articles, videos, and documentation all about the evolving Nordic Larp tradition and discourse.

Nordic-style larp, or Nordic larp, is a term used to describe a school of larp game design that emerged in the Nordic countries. Nordic-style larp is dramatically different from larp in other parts of the world – here are a few examples of aims and ideals that are typical for this unique gaming scene:

Immersion. Nordic larpers want to feel like they are “really there”. This includes creating a truly convincing illusion of physically being in a medieval village/on a space ship/WWII bunker, playing a character that is very close to your own physical appearance, as well as focusing on getting under the character’s skin to “feel their feelings”. Dreaming in character at night is seen by some nordic larpers as a sign of an appropriate level of immersion.

Collaboration. Nordic-style larp is about creating an exciting and emotionally affecting story together, not measuring your strength. There is no winning, and many players intentionally let their characters fail in their objectives to create more interesting stories.

Artistic vision. Many Nordic games are intended as more than entertainment – they make artistic or even political statements. The goal in these games is to affect the players long term, to perhaps change the way they see themselves or how they act in society.

We’ll come back to some of the elements in this description in a moment, but keep in mind as we go forward the following descriptions: Nordic Larp is focused on Immersion, Collaboration, and Artistic Vision.

Alternatively, Jaakko Stenros, a well-known researcher, academic, and speaker gave a lecture at the Nordic Larp Talks in 2013 about just what is Nordic Larp, a talk that’s been shared the world over. I’d encourage everyone to give it a look before going any further (it’s not that long).

Stenros points out that early on in the Nordic larp scene, those within the community would label a larp Nordic when they thought it was a Nordic Larp – using the “I know it when I see it” method to build a body of work that helped define the later discourse. (And if you think that’s round-about, you’re not wrong). Yet within a few short years, the definitions of what is Nordic larp, while still widely debated, were solidifying to provide a larger context for those outside the culture and within.

During Stenros’ talk, he defines contributing elements to the definition of Nordic Larp. Some of them include:

Larps coming from the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland)
A social phenomenon and an ongoing discourse focused on playing styles and design ideals, rather than just geography, inspired and informed by other scenes originally such as Fastival, improv theater, and larps from other countries which helped build the basis of the Nordic tradition.
Other elements to consider in this social phenomenon is the migration of influences, social situations that created the creation ground for the tradition, key works which influenced the discourse, social network structures within the key communities, and the people involved.

His stricter definition (influenced by the work done by Markus Montola and Bjarke Pedersen) is (at minute 10:19 in the video):

“A larp that is influenced by the Nordic Larp Tradition and contributes to the Nordic Larp discourse.”

Yup. A definition which is defined by itself. As my mother would say: Oy. Vey.

Please note that Stenros’ entire first ten minutes of the talk or so is about how his definition is not “the answer, but an answer” which he’s sure will be disagreed with, dissected, and transformed within a short period of time. What does that tell us? That Nordic larp was and still remains a shifting creature which is an all-encompassing term for a larger community, often defined less by what it is and more by where it comes from, what basic artistic principles created the initial cornerstone, and then set against the context of what it actually is not.

It’s also important to note that this definition, though I’m using it as the basis of a good deal of my discussion here, is also five years old. And as Jaakko notes, the tradition is ever-evolving. So by looking at the definition listed above from NordicLarp.org and then looking at Jaakko’s definition, the terms have evolved and narrowed down to identify specific design factors as key to the Nordic larp experience. There are also plenty of different introduction videos as well by thinkers and designers like Petter Karlson and others within the scene trying to define and identify what has become a slippery monster of a catch-all design ethos.

“[Nordic Larp is] a great term to describe a wide-cast net,” says Johannes Axner, editor-in-chief of NordicLarp.org and Swedish larper, “it’s pretty useless to describe individual larps.”

It’s that ambiguity, that wide net, which stands at the heart of this controversy. Nordic larp itself is a shifting mirage, defined by all those involved in the process over and over, grinding down the ambiguity to try and distill the essence. That essence is then interpreted, delineated, and slapped on games which run the gamut from block-buster big-ticket events to black box, small-scale experiences. And perhaps that defining and attributing is for more than just design reasons.

“Five years ago, no one cared what the exact definition [of Nordic larp] would be,” says Stenros. “This has changed. The term has now brand value. It is worth something.” This worth is at the heart of much of the argument going on within the larp communities, a brand value which, when attached to a game, evokes a certain response in players looking for that ‘Nordic Experience’ (capital N, capital E) they’ve heard so much about. The brand value, when added to the advertisement for a larp, interests those who have heard about games like College of Wizardry and Just A Little Lovin’ in Europe, who’ve seen documentation about games on battleships and in castles and yearn for something bigger than perhaps what they’re used to.

Similarly, organizers have deployed the branding of “Nordic Larp” or “Nordic Inspired” to evoke the specific school of design Stenros has described in his talk – and perhaps rightly so. These games can be said to have been heavily influenced by the Nordic larp design elements learned by engaging in spaces like Knutpunkt or online groups, or even by those who have hopped the Atlantic to play the Nordic larps themselves.

“If you brand something Nordic Larp, you might get cool indie cred in the US, or you might get some players who wouldn’t have considered going to your game.” Is that really what we’re doing when using the term in the United States? Relying on the branding of Nordic larp to bring in players who might be looking for that indie cred, or else looking for a new hotness they’ve only heard of and not seen elsewhere? I think (in part) the answer is yes. Stenros may have been writing about this in 2013 but in the years that followed, we’ve seen an uptick in games in the US using the term, and those games have been very high profile and considered en vogue right now. And that attracts attendees.

And that isn’t bad. In fact, for larp designers bringing in players from across traditions, having the brand recognition of Nordic Larp can spread a new tradition of ideas to audiences which might never have had access to it before. This especially works for those American larpers who can’t hop the pond or spend the money to attend Knutpunkt, whose finances don’t allow European trips, or whose mental bandwidth doesn’t allow them to engage with ongoing (and often complex and heated) debates in online spaces. Nordic larps or “Nordic inspired” games coming to the US allows people to see just what the (rightly created) fuss is all about.

However, in deploying that brand name, not only are organizers evoking an entire larp culture’s identity, but sometimes imposing their own outsider’s opinion on what exactly makes that culture tick.

It’s coming into someone’s home and asking for a recipe, then going home to make the thing and say their food is the same as the authentic cultural cuisine. That’s been happening for generations, as Americans recreate food (which is a cultural medium by the way) and define what it is and how it should be prepared based on their own internal design/creative choices. Or else they create food fusions, taking traditions and smashing them together to make new and interesting takes on traditional recipes.

And that’s what’s happening here. “Nordic-inspired” games are the fusion food of the larp world, considered pretty trendy, attention-grabbing and fun. Fusion is sexy, it’s mysterious: what can this combination create, bringing together the best of both worlds for something we’ve never seen before. And you know what? Fusion is AWESOME. Fusion dishes are exciting and innovative and create new and fabulous tastes based on cultural exchange. Fusion is a valid and impressive form of food evolution.

Where it can become a problem is where people misidentify or else co-opt food origins altogether for their own ends without giving credence to where it came from, or considering just how they may be erasing traditions from BOTH cultures to create this newly created dish… game…

This analogy has gotten away from me here. But I digress. Let’s look at some of the factors involved in this erasure.

We’ve looked a lot at the Nordic larp tradition across the pond and how it developed, but looking at the other side of this potential appropriation debate, we must also look at the development of larp cultures across the United States. Plenty of research has gone into the myriad traditions and groups which have deep cultural roots across the US, work done by academic powerhouses like Jonaya Kemper and journalists like Lizzie Stark. The United States has decades-long histories going back to the days of the evolution of simulationist gaming into live action spaces, and non-nerd community organizations like Model UN or murder mystery weekends.

These traditions are vast and wide-spread and often developed in tandem with one another over the years. Due to geographic isolation, lack of communication between groups, and schisms splitting communities over the years, different larp traditions have evolved to create design tools that can be both similar to those from other communities and also flavored with their own experiences and innovations. And due to how massive the United States are, that decades-long artistic growth from untold separate communities has created a tapestry of American larp culture which reflects the diversity which makes America what it is today: a complicated, culturally diverse, and often fraught hotbed of inter-community cooperation and friction.

It’s because of that complexity that United States larp doesn’t have a centralized definition, even though many from the outside have struggled and often erroneously attributed one to the scene (if there can be said to be a single scene). “American Larp” is often defined as “a form of roleplaying game where participants physically portray their characters” (Wikipedia) while engaging in competitive play, sometimes involving heavily controlled plotlines, live combat with contact safe (boffer) weapons, and “crunchy”, number-based systems which rely heavily on chance and competition rather than negotiation. American larp is also sometimes split in definition in an attempt to encompass those many traditions by putting them into several sub-categories: live combat (boffer) games, theater style games with no physical contact (like the far-reaching Camarilla Club or Mind’s Eye Society for White Wolf games), and the emerging and ever-growing freeform scene, with smaller and more personal games and less scenography or 360-degree immersion involved.

As you can imagine, these definitions are almost just as broad as the term Nordic Larp, even in their broken down form, and contribute to a generalization of what “American Larp” really is that does no one any favors. One could then instead go in and deconstruct just what design practices are employed by these American traditions, and you do come down (in my opinion) to some important cultural touch points which are pervasive in many designs, specifically:

a reliance on chance rather than negotiation,
a competitive spirit between players and therefore their characters,
a focus on secrets kept by characters rather than open sharing of plots beforehand or during play, and
stories heavily driven by centralized storyteller authority rather than created cooperatively and predominantly by players.

Yet even with these pinpointed overlaps in communities, these elements barely touch the complexities developed in US larps over the years. And many of the games being created defy these elements, operating outside of the definition traditionally ascribed to much of the American larp scene. These games instead incorporate perhaps some of these element – or none at all – and instead employ design choices we might more closely attribute to Nordic Larp games. This includes design ideological choices like cooperative narrative development, culturally important thematics, emotional roleplay focus over story and simulation, and strip-down of mechanics to more freeform design.

In that way, these games have more in common perhaps with Nordic design than with their American counterparts. But that does not make them any less a product of the American larp system. And to say these tools haven’t been employed by American larpers for years now is to erase literally generations of work by talented designers and powerful communities in favor of claiming techniques to a single community. Everyone in larp has been reinventing the wheel for years, but in the end a lot of our wheels ended up looking very much the same, and all doing the same job: rolling the hell along.

But then we come back to branding. And though a game might be incorporating elements which are recognized now during international discourse as “so Nordic,” the use of the term serves to attract players while largely undermining the complexity of the larp development in the United States and the world over. It appropriates the ever-evolving and often ephemeral Nordic Larp label for the sake of defining a game against the ‘American larp scene’ while still employing some of the techniques shared by both communities. And usually for the sake of creating distinction between what has come before, and the new hotness now.

In fact, many of the games being created are not Nordic Larps. They’re games which share design elements with Nordic Larps, elements which have been in use in the United States larp scene forever. And so the distinction belittles American larp while taking the brand of another community for our own. Essentially, it’s causing erasure on BOTH sides and causing further friction between American and Nordic larp communities.

Nordic Larpers express frustration about their culture being taken for profit here.

American Larpers feel under-appreciated, their traditions slighted and ignored in favor of the European import.

And so the fight has simmered, and recently exploded, and here we are.

But we’re missing a fundamental answer to this discussion altogether: games in the United States don’t need to be Nordic Larps to have the same elements. We’ve had those elements all along! We just didn’t have a brand, a label, and certainly not one with as much recognition as the hip Nordic Larp brand. (And I’m sorry for those who bristle under the use of such a capitalistic terminology for an art movement, but it is a brand today, used to sell experiences. And that class/political/economic issue is an internal debate for the Nordic community which has complicated the problem of tensions even further.)

American larpers don’t need to label their games as Nordic for them to be cool, and immersive, and emotionally intense, and freeform. We’ve had those for the longest time. In communities, for example, like Intercon and the Double Exposure communities, larps like these have been evolving for years now. Across the country, we’ve had people discovering these changes on their own. But because we’re not united in a single art scene, we needed a lable. And I believe for that reason, and for branding power, Nordic Larp was borrowed, the tradition imported, the ideology embraced.

Unless these games are run by Nordic teams in the US, even working with American larp designers (such as the teams running Just A Little Lovin’ in the US in 2017 or the newly merged Turtle House, made up of US company Imagine Nation and Dziobak Studios from Denmark), these games remain strongly American.

And I repeat. That’s okay. We can have our own hotness too.

In fact, I believe it is VITAL to the health of American larp and our pride as a larp culture that we embrace having our own hotness. That we work together in the spirit of growing national community connections to create discussions of commonality, and even perhaps create a term for our own adaptations of what traditions people are calling Nordic. “Nordic Inspired” doesn’t really hack it anymore and evokes that erasure again.

We’ve got our own thing going here. Why not find a name that serves to both give credit to the American developing scene and also detach ourselves from the appropriation of Nordic Larp? We don’t need to borrow anything when we’ve got our own sexy fusion going on, ready to evolve our larp communities to a bigger and better tomorrow.

On the opposite side of this argument is perhaps a valid point brought up by Jaakko Stenros within his above video, a point which sits strong in my mind when I feel a sense of irritation at the idea that Nordic Larp has been appropriated. As Stenros says:

“No one owns Nordic larp,” says Stenros in the introduction to his definition. “Not the designers, not the larpwrites, not the organizers. Not the journalists, not the experts, not the academics not the researchers, not the event organizers, or popularizers. Not the web service providers or the editors in chief, not the people who are working to import larp or export larp, not even the players.

“For we all own Nordic larp. There simply is no central bureau of Nordic Larp. And if there was, I can promise you that splinter groups would surface faster than you can say “Fucking fascists trying to limit my imagination to copyright my reality hacking tools, to steal my status and funding, and to take away my fun and misery.”

Nordic Larp in itself not only evolved, as mentioned above, by its creators and trend setters attending other larp traditions and creative communities to borrow techniques, but the community is defined by an ideology which does not belong to any individual group. It in and of itself is built around dozens of smaller communities, each networked together to define their games based on a shifting rubric. So then how can the Nordic Larp community claim ownership of this brand – simply because it’s Nordic? If the idea was to share ideas and continue to evolve Nordic Larp as a tradition, as it has continued to do over the years, then why invite outside input from (for example) Americans only to become upset when that input is given and swapped back to the US. Sharing ideas doesn’t necessarily happen the way one wants, nor produce some sanitized results. Cultural exchange is messy, and getting your peanut butter in your hummus can make some weird results that change the context of both ingredients for mixed results.

If you can’t own Nordic Larp, then is it fair to say you own or control the overall discourse? Especially when that discourse invited in the very voices now being criticized for appropriation? Is it appropriation or a cultural sharing, a blending? Or is it a one-way theft of ideas? That is at its heart the essence of a lot of discussions of what is appropriation in the first place in all media and art forms, and is now being reflected in the larp world, underpinned by a current of fear about American cultural colonization which has existed the world over since America rose to super-power and international media influencer status.

But is that what this is? Is this appropriation or exchange? The debate goes on.

While we fight about the issue, however, are there any solutions to positively influence this contentious debate?

I believe there are three major solutions.

We as American larpers have a vested interest in discovering a new definition for what is coming out of the new evolution of larp right now, influenced as it is heavily by these ideas which appear parallel to Nordic Larp design. Nordic-inspired doesn’t cut it and does little for either us American Larpers or the Nordic community. Whatever we come up with, I’m sure we’ll fight about constantly. But having a brand new hotness all our own to reflect the hard work and in-house evolution we’ve done here in America would let us define ourselves a little more based on American ethos and make us look a little less like we’re blatantly ripping off another culture (which in fact we are not).
American and Nordic larp communities must have conversations, both internally and between one another, about the manner by which people are sharing information, and whether or not it feels appropriative or acting as an exchange. A two-way street is an important start to making the cultural discourse feel mutual rather than either appropriative or elitist, depending on the interpretation of the side of the argument. Americans aren’t coming over to steal ideas and just be prescriptive about their ideas, and Nordic larpers aren’t demeaning all American larp as lesser and imposing their European ways on American larp communities. And if it feels that way, we should talk about why and try to mend those fences, for the sake of larp development and community relations.
Last but not least (and perhaps harder still) is a revisiting of the way conversations about these issues are happening. Individuals are not only becoming burnt out, but there is very little benefit of the doubt happening. Instead, battle lines are becoming highly contentious, leading to many great designers and thinkers checking out of the conversation and perhaps even communities. We are imploding in on ourselves in an effort to preserve what we feel is vital to our identities, and a lot of that is based on the tensions rising and no assumption of positive intent. I believe that positive intent exists, and where it does not, it needs to be fostered to explore our commonalities and embrace our growing future as an international community. The alternative is cultural schism once more, something which has plagued larp communities everywhere forever.

I believe we are on the cusp of a very important turning point in international larp discourse, where the decisions we make now will cement either a continually evolving design exchange which could improve everyone’s games and communities. Or else we’re going to continue fracturing under the weight of our factionalism and concerns about appropriation and political/ideological entrenchment. And if that happens, what we will lose is the chance at a brilliant future of creation together that could be wonderful, if allowed to flourish and survive.

The decision on how to proceed is largely in our hands. We just have to communicate and do the (often) hard work to get us all there together.

Gaming Communities And The Bystander Effect

July 1, 2019 by Shoshana, posted in Criticism, Geek Culture, LARP Discussion and Theory, Not Ready To Make Nice, Personal, Speaking Out

[Note: This is a post written back in 2018. At the time I was too nervous to put up this post due to the intensity of my feelings. I think now it’s as important as ever to talk about and so I’m posting it.]

I owed someone an apology, and it wasn’t my fault.

There’s nothing worse than being involved in a situation where due to someone else’s actions, your very presence caused a problem or harmed someone else. You might only be tangential to a situation, but through the confluence of events, you’re suddenly aware that for your sake, someone else was hurt. For you, someone else was put on the spot.

I had this happen to me recently. I was put in a situation where due to my needs, someone else was put out. Not only put out but hurt, where they should have been cared for and their needs met. I felt the need to apologize, even though the situation wasn’t my fault. And it gave me a great deal of insight into a problem I’ve seen going on for some time but didn’t have a chance to articulate until now.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up and start again.

We have a problem with safety in the gaming community. And that problem is complicity.

We live in an era of pretty awful social breaches within our communities, social breaches which run the gamut from rude and inappropriate behavior to all-out situations of sexual harassment, assault, and violence. From politics to Hollywood, from bigger cultural institutions to our own gaming backyards, online movements like #MeToo and other online threads have brought out stories of harassment, degradation, misogyny, mistreatment, and more, leading me to wonder sometimes if there’s any place safe from the predations of bad actors (the answer, my pragmatic side replies to my oh-so-innocent inner naivete, is no).

Yet in the face of all this ongoing horrific disclosure from men and women who’ve suffered some truly horrible nightmares, we’ve seen communities responding in positive ways. Safety policies are being developed and organizers and leaders are finding ways to safeguard their populations by recognizing bad actors and weeding them out for the safety of everyone. The arrest of people like Harvey Weinstein in Hollywood and the indictment of actor Bill Cosby have given people hope that justice, albeit slow and often full of compromise, is possible. Slowly but surely, we’re hopefully climbing towards a better tomorrow.

The fact is, however, there is still a huge stumbling block in the face of truly transforming the spaces we inhabit. Though our communities are (usually) full of well-meaning and positive individuals, whose aim is to be in a social space with others of like minds and interests for the purpose of finding unity of purpose and commonality, there are those who are around because they want the community to fulfill their own destructive, selfish needs. They bring damage in their wake, sometimes unconsciously and sometimes consciously and sometimes based simply on a view of reality so different from everyone else it boggles the mind. These people are the abusers, the manipulators, the tragically thoughtless, the hopelessly deluded. And they are within every community, acting in various degrees of inappropriateness, from the simply hurtful to the downright criminal.

We all have them, in every community, in every space.

And we still put up with them.

Sure, the most egregious bad actors are easier to recognize and target for removal. Those who act for example in an overtly aggressive manner or are violent or caught in a flagrant bad act are easier to target for exclusion from the community. Yet for every bad actor extracted from the community for safety, there are a thousand other little infractions, cuts of various sizes inflicted, which go unaddressed and unattended. These are not simply the sort of slights one does to a single individual, but rather a pattern of systematic abusive or selfish actions which harm others over and over. Often, these individuals are recognized, their behaviors identified as problems, and they garner a label as a ‘problematic’ person. And yet-

And yet these people don’t receive any adjustment in behavior. And yet the bad behaviors continue unchecked. That is until things become so bad they can no longer be ignored, often coming to a head in an action which causes intense harm to one or more people.

How does this happen? How do these ongoing bad actors and their harmful actions continue on and on until things get out of control and implode into traumatic and hurtful events?

The answer, in my mind, is complicity. And we’re all a part of the problem, each and every one of us, one and all.

I had to explain to my father about the internet the other day. Or specifically, the realities of being a woman on the internet.

I was busy trying to listen to the announcements about video games announced at E3 and at the same time trying to explain to my father what some of the terms I mentioned about video games meant. When I expressed my dismay that a particular game was going to have an online multiplayer mode, my father didn’t understand what that meant. I told him about online play, about teaming up with others and getting a chance to play together remotely. He said that sounded like a fun thing to do, playing with others instead of alone.

So then I had to explain to my father about the internet and how it treated women. I had to explain online harassment, the term incels, and Gamergate. It branched off into a discussion about SWATing, about the harassment of women like Anita Sarkesian and Zoe Quinn, of death threats and unsolicited sexual advances, and of rampant misogyny. I had to tell him the story about coming back from speaking at PAX back in 2013 and finding my inbox full of death and rape threats and pictures of decapitated animals and people because I’d been on a panel about feminism in gaming and nerd culture.

It wasn’t the first time I tried to explain things like this to my father, who sometimes just seems boggled by the issues of modern communities. This time, he was horrified and furious. He didn’t understand how this stuff happens today. As he’s often said when I tell him about awful things going on, he’ll blurt out, “But it’s 2018! How does this happen?”

And every time, I keep coming back to the same answer, over and over.

“Because we let it happen.”

With that answer, I in no way mean to blame victims for what happens to them. Far from it. The ‘we’ I mean when I give that response is the collective we of communities at large, who see issues going on and remain in said community without causing disruption to protest bad actors or horrific events. Faced with reports of bad behavior, plenty of communities choose to turn a blind eye or refuse to engage with individual problematic events, or even escalating patterns of bad action, for the sake of maintaining the status quo. Instead, we fall back on the idea of “it’s not my business” or “there’s two sides to every story” or my favorite, “I don’t want to get involved.”

When trying to explain this to my father, I was reminded of a situation from my childhood. There was a family I knew growing up who had serious problems. The father was a violent person who abused both his wife and daughter on a regular basis, while the mother had mental illness issues to contend with while trying to raise her child. The husband’s malicious actions were widely known among both the adults around me and, as I discovered later, the community at large. But no one did anything. In the end, the wife was so badly damaged by the events she was forced to be institutionalized, while her daughter finally ended up in foster care for her own safety. The trauma went on for years with so many people aware of the problems going on. Yet no one acted, because to act would involve them in another bad situation outside their own lives. Members of the community were complicit, and the damage was done.

And back in the gaming community, the damage is being done. And we are all complicit too.

The gaming community has seen an escalation of toxic masculine behavior, fueled by the anonymity of the internet and the lack of repercussions against those who harm others. From verbal and written harassment to stalking, death threats, and harm against property and data, behaviors which many consider harmless have led to real and lasting damage to marginalized populations and women, in particular, to name one group.

Yet with every outcry, there is a larger policy of deaf ears to overcome, a general epidemic of see no evil, hear no evil to contend with. When presented with the stories of harassment and harm, repeated over and over until a larger pattern of toxic encouraged behavior becomes apparent, the population at large seems unable or unwilling to stand up and in one voice say they simply will not abide this behavior. Everyone has heard the same stories, seen the same social media posts, and yet the behavior continues unabated. And those fighting to make it stop happening, who work to mitigate the damage or present new options to change the community for the better, are fighting a downhill-flowing tide of tireless work and horrific situations intending to bury them whole.

They’d have a better chance, however, making a difference if they weren’t surrounded by people unwilling to interrupt their regularly scheduled programming to help make a change.

There’s a very famous story out of New York about a young bar manager named Kitty Genovese. Back in March of 1964, the 28-year-old woman was on her way back from work when she was stabbed repeatedly in the courtyard of her apartment building in Kew Gardens, Queens by Winston Moseley. Kitty Genovese lay dying in the chilly night air outside her building, crying for help, and receiving none. The New York Times later reported that 38 people were witnesses to the event, either hearing Ms. Genovese crying out for help or seeing her lying on the pavement, but each chose to do nothing. The incident became the origin of the term bystander effect, a sociological phenomenon in which people are unwilling to offer help when others are present for fear of taking responsibility or ‘becoming involved’ in the trouble.

Years later, researchers have discovered many holes in the Genovese story casting doubt on the validity of many of the details of that night. But the concept of the bystander effect has remained a replicatable sociological phenomenon. When presented with a situation that is difficult or requires direct action, people will often decline to act because they either believe others will take care of the problem instead or else they don’t want to get involved out of fear of reprisal or simply due to indifference or lack of willingness to become involved. People don’t want to complicate their already complicated lives by involving themselves in the problems of others, in disrupting their status quo to introduce an unstable element that might end up causing them trouble.

Looking at the gaming community, we have a hell of a lot of bystander effect going on. Because we, like many other communities, are either full of folks who are simply deeming themselves too busy to get involved in standing up against problems, or believe someone else is going to fix the situation for them, or feel powerless in the face of such overwhelming negativity, or are the victims of it themselves. And many are simply too frightened to stand up and make a change, afraid of being targeted themselves or perhaps even having their own actions picked apart and targeted.

So we all sit back and wait, wait for someone else with the power to make the decisions, or for someone else to seize that power to change things up. We hear the cries of the women harassed by Gamergate, or harmed in our tabletop RPG communities, or in the Sci-Fi and Fantasy fiction world like those bombarded during the Sad Puppies debacle. And rather than speaking up in one voice, we do not seek action. We remain complicit. We continue to enjoy our social activities and communities without taking an active role in solving the problems at hand.

We may not agree on solutions, or even if the problems are necessarily what they seem to be. Communities can disagree over problems, but as long as they engage with them in a direct manner, they are breaking the chain of disinterest which allows problems to fester. By bringing them to the forefront they allow the problems to go from being problematic to being recognized problems with the possibility for solutions. By burying problems instead and avoiding conflict, we leave the work to a few individuals to make the change for us. And when it doesn’t happen, we bemoan the difficulties in our world. But in the end, we did little to nothing to change things for the better.

This makes us complicit. And therefore, in our own way, part of the problem.

And yes, I’m saying we. Because I am certainly, in my own way, part of the problem.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m someone who knows how to speak up for myself. When I need to, I’m capable of making a lot of noise to raise awareness of an issue, be it personal or otherwise. And yet faced with the situation I mentioned at the article’s opening, I didn’t do a damn thing to mitigate the damage done in my name. In fact, I sat there quietly and profited from the experience. I was complicit.

During an event I attended, I needed assistance from a member of staff. To provide me with assistance, that staff member callously brushed aside the needs of another person who was in crisis and needed, at the bare minimum, to be left alone. But instead, my needs were put ahead of this person’s and they were hurt. Now, I could go on about how that situation needed to be addressed, and what the staff member should have or could have done to not harm another person in question to help me out. Yet the part I keep coming back to since the event isn’t what this other person could have done in the situation – but what I could have done better.

Instead of speaking up at the time, I remained silent in the face of someone else getting hurt. I saw someone’s feelings get ignored by a person in power, someone whose job it is to look out for others at an event. I don’t know that it was done maliciously – in fact, I believe it was a thoughtless action brought on by short-sightedness. Yet that is no excuse for the harm caused, and I’ll do you one more: there’s no excuse for me not speaking up. By keeping my mouth shut, I made myself complicit in the actions taken. By not speaking up, I was implicitly aligning myself with the bad behavior.

To twist the NYPD slogan: I saw something, and didn’t say something. And I profited from the situation at another person’s expense.

And so we’re back around from my experience to the larger bodies involved. Take my experience and expand it to how many other incidents, how many other safety questions and harmful situations ignored. How many issues exist, some as tiny as mine and some massive problems that cause life-threatening incidents in communities, which go unresolved, festering and growing, until they boil over?

“But Shoshana,” you may ask, “how can we make change? We’re just little tiny parts of a larger system? A larger body that drowns out little old me?”

Well sure, it can drown you out. If you’re only one voice, it might. But if we changed the culture of complicity, if we really took up the idea of “If you see something, say something” and stood up for our fellows, we would disrupt the power structures enough to see real change on a faster timetable. We might be able to disrupt things enough in fact so things can change on a more permanent basis and quicker so as to make sure fewer people are hurt as we press towards a safer and more progressive tomorrow.

How do we do that? There’s some simple ways to disrupt rather than be complicit:

Speak up about larger issues: If you are aware that your community has a problem that is systematic and widespread, take a stand publicly against it. You don’t have to be on a soapbox and yelling constantly about it, but in the face of harmful behavior, if you stand up and say something it might encourage others to do the same.
Vote with your dollars and presence: If an event, a product, a community or a team does not address toxic situations, removing yourself or protesting will hit their bottom line if you remove yourself and therefore your contributions. That includes not buying products whose communities or companies don’t address bad actors or situations.
Intervene on a personal level: Bad behavior on a wider scale is perpetuated onward when small incidents are allowed to fester and remain unaddressed. Bad actors can be identified and either situations resolved or individuals removed but ONLY if people curb their conflict avoidance and instead engage the problem directly. Speak up and handle the situation or else seek help to mediate out the issue. If your problem is harmful and even dangerous, seek community leaders for backup. But don’t let your unwillingness to confront difficult situations help make you complicit in the harm they’ve caused.
Recommend solutions: Identifying problems is only one step in the process. But making sure once you stand up you contribute resources to solving the problem? That makes it all the better. It might take some energy to get involved (and you should not feel obligated to put out more energy into a situation than you can handle) but with what energy you CAN spare, help present possible solutions to the problem to your community leaders. This is an active step not only beyond complicity all the way to becoming a community reformer.

And above all: do what you can. Not everyone’s ability is going to be the same. Not everyone has the same physical ability, emotional bandwidth, psychological make-up, time, responsibilities, or wear-with-all to take on problems. We’re all different and have different restrictions to keep in mind and respect. We can’t judge how much someone else is doing necessarily in terms of hours put in and content. But every person can do SOMETHING at a minimum to confront problems in their community, each within their own capability. Together we can take on issues, each in their own way, supporting one another and aligned towards a goal of a better tomorrow.

I hope I’ll get the chance to someday to make up for being complicit in that uncomfortable situation I mentioned. I’ve already made my apology, but I’m not sure that’s enough. Instead, I’m using the situation as a reminder that the communities around us are made up of individuals, and if each person stood up for what they believed was right, then we could transform our spaces towards a shared goal of social and justice evolution.

I’m Not Too Fat For Your Larp

July 1, 2019 by Shoshana, posted in Body Positivity, Criticism, Game Design, LARP Discussion and Theory, Not Ready To Make Nice, Speaking Out

I’ve got a pretty lousy memory, but I remember a lot of firsts in my life.

I remember the first time I got a solo in a choir performance. I was so excited, I could hardly stand it. I remember going in to get fitted for my costume and the seamstress frowning. “She can’t be up front,” she said, “what’s that going to look like? Put her in the back row.” I didn’t realize then she meant because I was fatter than the other girls. I didn’t figure that out until a bully in my class made it abundantly, loudly clear at recess the very next day.

I remember trying out for the role of Ms. Hannigan in Annie. I told the drama teacher I wanted to be on Broadway when I got older. “You’ll need to lose weight for that,” she said, “being heavy doesn’t work on Broadway.” I didn’t learn until later she, herself overweight, had tried to be on Broadway once. Learned from experience, I guess.

I remember the first time I got up the nerve to ask a guy out in college. It was at a sorority party at a bar. He was a little drunk. We’d been hanging out for weeks. I’d been over his house, we’d talked video games, I thought he was wonderful. When I asked him, out in the rain, I’ll never forget what he said. “Sorry. But you know how some people don’t like some kinds of porn? I don’t like fat people porn.” I never spoke to him again.

I remember. I might not remember what I ate for lunch two days ago or where I left my bag some days, but I remember every damn comment. Every doctor who never took me seriously and told me I just needed to lose weight. I remember every comment, every time I got laughed at in the street. Stories like those are memories worn into my mind. I won’t forget them any time soon.

But there are good memories too.

I’m going to tell a story here about a poignant fat-related story. And then I’ll get to my point. I was at an event where a number of small larps were being showcased. I signed up for one game because it abstracted emotions and events using music, which I thought was cool. Little did I know until too late that the game was about relationships, people falling in and out of love. I panicked. I was afraid of seeing the disgust in someone’s eyes knowing they’d have to date a fat girl in character. I was so cautious and scared it almost made me leave the game. But I stuck it out. And in that game, a guy I didn’t know at all played my love interest with such care it made me glow. When he stood up and asked me to slow dance, I nearly burst into tears. It was all I was able to do not to step on his toes. I’d never slow danced with a man before. I’d never had the chance.

Larps have given me experiences that escaped me in my life because of a lot of social anxiety due to weight. I experienced what it was like to be a woman in a position of power, confident and powerful, when before I would hide. I got a chance to be on the arm of the most handsome men and women at a game. I’ve had the chance to play out love stories, stories of triumph. To lead battles and armies. To learn to be confident in my own skin.

20045353_1553789684686565_1252021450300716629_o — To play a badass teacher at Wizard School (Photo: New World Magischola)

I’ve also had a guy at a convention game look at me and then go to a game organizer and say he needed to trade characters because “I would never date THAT.” He was meant to play my husband.

I’ve had a guy meant to be an enemy of mine in a game say, “I’d feel bad beating you up, I can run rings around your fat ass.”

I had a woman tell me I wasn’t allowed to play a sidhe in a Changeling: the Dreaming larp because “there aren’t any fat sidhe.” (Jokes on her who helped put THAT change in the 20th-anniversary edition, but hey…)

I remember a lot of stories about what it’s like to be fat in this world. And to be fat in the larp world too. And I have only one thing to say about it after all these years:

I’m not too fat for your larp.

10644554_10100384372745893_4077298588222454517_o — Because screw you, I’m a goddamn badass. (Photo: Dystopia Rising NJ)

You heard me. Larp is a fantastic place, a blank canvas upon which to build whole new worlds, worlds where you decide the structures, the rules, the norms. And as the designers, writers, organizers, and producers of games, it is in your power to challenge the status quo of how fat people are treated in your games. You have the power to make the decisions about how people are treated in your community and in play based on the atmosphere you cultivate and the games you design. So why do so many games still have atmospheres where people who are fat are mistreated? Where being fat marginalizes the positions you’re allowed to have? Or the fun you’re allowed to enjoy?

The simple matter is being fatphobic and hurtful against fat people is the last socially accepted bigotry enacted by almost every single group anywhere. Otherwise progressive communities and marginalized populations will still turn inward on fat members and harass, shame, ostracize, or minimize them when they would never consider letting that treatment go unchallenged to their own group. We as a society celebrate striving for tolerance in much of our media, giving us feel-good messages about love and kindness and acceptance with one hand, and making awful fat jokes with the other. And this same process happens everywhere, in every subculture group. Including larp.

58374297_10100971248537103_4590840368886448128_n — Don’t be that person. Just don’t.

The problem is universal and yet hits different groups disproportionately. For example, it’s no secret that fatphobia affects women disproportionately more than men (although mistreatment of fat men is absolutely a thing). Women are put under the lens, pulled apart by people of every gender for the way they look, and their fat pointed out at every turn. Yet in a medium where we create our worlds, why is this still the case? Because we bring our bigotries with us. And in a real world where we can’t imagine not picking everyone apart for that stray pound, why the hell would you not do it in your games?

Because it’s not right. And by continuing to do so, you’re creating hostile larp environments. Even if your game purports to be progressive, if you don’t consider fat bigotry in your events and designs, you’re not making progressive environments that are equal for all. You’ve failed in your inclusivity.

Here’s a handy dandy list of how you might mess up at including size discrimination in your larp. We’ll call it the “If You ________ Then Your Game Might Be Fat Phobic.”

If you don’t have any fat people playing characters of social status or power.
If you don’t cast fat players in romantic roles.
If you design costume requirements for games which won’t allow fat people to participate comfortably (such as providing costumes for the event and make the sizes inaccessible to fat people).
If you use fat-phobic language in your game descriptions of characters (associating fat with evil, slovenly, lazy, disgusting, etc.)
If you encourage social stratification based on appearance in your games.
If you do not use people of all sizes in your larp promotion, instead relying on people who represent only the status quo in your advertisements and documentation.
If you make being fat an accommodation one must ask for when participating rather than considering people of all sizes from the beginning.
If you allow fatphobic comments or mistreatment to continue on in your game, either from other players or from your staff. (Bonus points on this one if you accept “being fat is unhealthy” as an excuse).
If you adjust the power dynamic of a character being played by a fat player once they’ve been cast because they’re fat.
If you accept bullying in character based on someone being fat and accept that as just the status quo (bonus points if you make a whole game about this, or try to subvert it and fail miserably *ahemFatManDownahem*).

Okay. So here we are at the end of this rather scathing list. And you might be asking: so what do I do to make sure my game isn’t fat phobic? Well, take a look at that handy dandy list and don’t do those things. Work hard to make sure people who are plus size, people who are fat, are in positions of power. Fight back against fatphobic jokes. Make sure you recognize the power dynamics being played out against fat players and their characters and help adjust the narrative so they are not pushed out by those who equate fat with things like laziness, slovenliness, lack of power, etc. Do the work to represent the life of fat people accurately and do not focus your games on the life of fat people and their challenges unless you know just what you’re doing.

As for me, I know that the world isn’t going to change overnight. I’m aware that there are plenty of places which will never shift the way they think about fat bodies (the clothing industry, for example…) But I solidly believe with a little conscious work we can make larp spaces more accessible and friendly towards body types of all kinds. By making sure people of all sizes fell comfortable coming to your game, you’ll enrich your game by bringing new experiences and new voices into your space. And you’ll prove that you recognize that fat people need not and should not be erased from your stories.

Embrace a new way of thinking. Or join in fatphobia as a phenomenon. There is no middle ground. And if you’re about bringing fatphobia into your games, just tell me so. Because then you get from me a big old…

Nostalgia Warriors And The Backlash Against Progress

April 25, 2018 by Shoshana, posted in Feminism, Geek Culture, Not Ready To Make Nice, Politics, Speaking Out

I recently saw a video online taking pot-shots at an academic whose studies included deconstructing the representation factors in older roleplaying games, specifically Dungeons and Dragons. The video by Michelle Malkin is a screed against the supposed politically correct ‘party poopers’ intent on ruining games like D&D by bringing ‘social justice warrior’ politics into the picture. I won’t link the video itself (because it’s from a Facebook channel that’s pretty horrendously conservative) but I think the tag below it on Facebook…

Social Justice Warriors are the biggest party-poopers on the planet!

Is there no realm safe from the diversity police?!

… that really says it all.

It’s no secret the last few years have seen an ongoing march towards progressive creation in the creative arts. The fight for better representation in comics, film, television, toys, and games have sparked debates that have reached from the smallest communities to the largest stages of media coverage. You can tell how big the discussion is when films not yet released are dissected for their representation of minority groups and feedback is received by companies immediately from consumers. And whether you like this immediate feedback loop or not, it’s clear the days of companies simply producing material without considering the economic ramifications of a growing progressive demographic are over.

Still, in the face of such creative evolution and representational progress, there has been a significant backlash by those who believe progressives are trying to ‘ruin fun.’ People calling for better representation in creative fields are labeled ‘liberals’ and ‘social justice warriors’ and far worse terms. They’re called crybabies, party poopers, people out to turn everything into a political debate rather than just letting others have a little harmless fun. (Clearly, they never ascribed to the idea that everything is inherently political, but that’s a debate for another time). Instead, their response is to decry any discussions about progressive feedback so we can all just sit back and have a good time without interrogating what we’re enjoying.

The funny part is by making this very discussion, they’re doing exactly what they rail against: they’re looking critically at the material they’re being presented with and making an opinion on its content. They ARE questioning the politics of their media. They’re just choosing a different response than progressives. They’re choosing a different view, an opposition to growth, which I’m calling protective nostalgia. They put down ‘liberals’ for being social justice warriors when they’re taking up their own warrior mantle themselves. These ‘traditionalists’, these ‘conservatives’, are what I like to call Nostalgia Warriors.

Picture it with me: a new game hits shelves, and the hordes are attacking. They come with their banners of ‘Better Representation Now!’ and chants of ‘What About Us?’ They bury fun new products in political discussions, drowning out the chance of escapism with constant reminders of blah blah representation and blah blah stereotyping and blah blah blah. The noise distracts from the chance to just sit back and have fun, like in the days of yore, when no one assaulted the fun! When it was just about basements and friends, sitting together and enjoying without complications or political rhetoric! Yes, these fun times and beautiful memories are under assault by the SJWs and are in need of defending!

And lo, the defenders arive, with their cries of ‘Party Pooper!’ and ‘Can’t It Just Be Like It Was?’ Their shields are the memories of times gone by, when things were simpler, and media was just fun. They are the Nostalgia Warriors! Ready to tell you you’re wrong for having progressive opinions! Ready to insult, degrade, and dismiss any idea challenging the status quo! And all armed with the greatest cry of all…

These Nostalgia Warriors stand on their ramparts, zealously protecting new media in the name of what’s come before. They use the happy memories they have of simpler times, when people didn’t talk about the politics of media creation so actively, as proof that such conversations are ruining fun now. After all, they had fun in the past with their TV shows and comic books without these silly discussions about race and gender representation, why would it be needed now? In fact, looking back at the media before and criticizing it only defiles the memory of their beloved favorites. And how dare those pesky Social Justice Warriors go after their favorites, entwined so deeply with the sugar-coated memories of the past.

To take a step back for a second, I don’t want people to think all nostalgia is bad. Nostalgia can be a good thing! It gives us a chance to look back over our lives and see the good things amid the bad, the positive experiences we had cleaned up so they provide bright spots in otherwise complicated lifetimes. It lets us hold up things we find beautiful, things we find important to our identity, and present them with all the love we had for them when we were younger. Nostalgia can be beautiful, our memories can be beautiful, and the way they formed our fundamental years is a testament to experience building the people we are today.

To my people, those who hold fondly to the television shows and comics and films of the past with love and true nostalgia, I embrace you as brothers and sisters! The past gave us amazing, wonderful, fantastic things that should be cherished. This argument isn’t here to dismiss or attack all Nostalgia, or all media in the past that is important to people or beloved.

But.

It’s hard to accept that our pasts are as fraught as our presents and that our futures are going to be just as hard. So we shine up our best experiences and hold them up as examples that in the past, everything was better. Everything was easier then and our precious favorites had no problems, or else those problems didn’t matter, because we loved them. And they gave us joy. And no one can assault our joy without assaulting a fundamental part of ourselves.

This progression into nostalgia defense is when nostalgia slips into toxic territory. When defending our sacred cows becomes a roadblock towards creative evolution.

It’s no secret to anyone paying attention that our society is evolving away from shitty behaviors we once found acceptable in the past. I think most middle-road Nostalgiacs (new word again!) would recognize things like systematic slavery, for example, is an institution we thank god destroyed over a hundred years ago. Most would even say things like the civil rights movement, the evolution of the rights of women, all these things were great. Heck, most would say going across the ocean to punch Nazis and stop their genocidal reign of terror was a good thing! These were all examples of Good Progress.

So why is it when talking about the continued progress of our society in media, we see such a vicious backlash, even from people who would otherwise say Big Issue Progress (like those listed above) is a good thing?

This is where Toxic Nostalgia comes in.

(Sure, there are people who would question whether these were good events. They’re called Ultra Conservatives, Neo-Nazis, Misogynists, Racists, Bigots, and all around Backwards Problem Children. And this article isn’t going to find a solution for them, so we’re just going to move the heck on from THAT giant problem. Instead, to them I say this).

Look, change is difficult. Change makes people look at themselves and the world around them with a critical eye and makes them question what they really believe. It makes them wonder if they’re complicit in big bad things like racism and intolerance, in systematic oppression and institutions of privilege. It makes people feel like they might be the bad guy, or part of a bad group, make them feel vilified and ashamed and attacked.

And when the whole world seems to be talking about rectifying centuries-old systems of oppression, people start taking a good long look at where they are on the power pyramid and all these complicated feelings start coming up. They have to ask ‘am I really profiting from oppression?’ They get defensive, responding: ‘But I can’t be privileged! My life is hard, I suffer too!’ They bring out words like reverse racism and tout the suffering of the white lower classes, of the nice guys being ignored by ‘militant feminists’ and cry about how ‘All Lives Matter.’ And this is in response to the Big Issues being brought up across the media, across the internet. It’s everywhere they live. They can’t get away from it. They have to consider it.

And then, just when they’re sure they’ve had enough attacks on their identity and their status quo, the progressives come for their fun.

And so they cling to the last shreds of safety, the last places where they felt they were comfortable and could forget the politics of progress for a little while. When they watch TV or a movie, when reading a comic, they don’t want to think about the Big Issues. They want to escape for a little while. But unbeknownst to them, the progressives are looking at these media and questioning loudly whether the status quo was representing them well or at all. Whether the people whose representation was always there have taken a look at their privilege lately. Progressives are asking for equality, and to the Nostalgia Warrior, that is a challenge to the last bastion of escapism they’ve got.

And so, the backlash begins. The outright dismissal and attacks against those calling for critical analysis of media has been unbelievably harsh. But what’s worse is it’s often without substance too. Instead of engaging with the Big Issues being presented in the context of media critique, Nostalgia Warriors deny the need for discussion outright and banish anyone trying to have a dialogue with labels like ‘party poopers.’ And to those who agree with them, it’s the best defense, because who wants to have party poopers around? No one! So get rid of these SJWs and their party pooper ways, ignore them! There’s no need to have an actual conversation about issues! We can just label them with names you’d throw at kids on a playground and call it a day.

Because that’s all the conversation is to the Nostalgia Warrior: a throwback to days gone by, when you could talk about fun things with the simplicity of school age name-calling and maturity. Why be an adult when talking about play? Simply regress to those childhood feelings and defend your stance with the same playground mentality. Hold tight to your play as the last vestiges of childhood you’re allowed and don’t let anyone damage that with talk about Big Issues. Because that would require the adult in the Nostalgia Warrior to have to face change and its complexity.

Some of the worst offenders in this progressive backlash in entertainment have unfortunately been creators whose work is being critiqued. Whereas these creators, still relevant and important to the evolution of their mediums, could join the new generations of artists and contribute in new and fun ways, they often doggedly cling to the work of the past, defending their creative choices against critique and driving away new thinkers with their derision. What they fail to realize is their defensiveness about their nostalgia, fed by fear of being vilified and becoming irrelevant, is driving them TOWARDS irrelevancy as their mediums march on towards a progressive future. Simply put, the harder they cling to the past, the easier the future and their part in it slips through their fingers.

The sad part about the backlash against progressive thinking by Nostalgia Warriors and conservative thinkers is the ultimate damage it does to creative evolution. Creative mediums have come a long way since the days of cave paintings, Shakespeare, the Rennaissance and even the beatnik generation. Every wave of creation builds upon what came before, informed by the politics and social movements all around them. The fact that each generation has also participated in the see-saw of progress towards greater equality has informed said artistic creation, and to ignore those influences in favor of nostalgia only stunts the growth of new ideas and new forms of art.

They say there are no new ideas under the sun, only new ways to express them. Yet if we’re only ever looking back to those so-called ‘better days’ thru the lens of willfully ignorant nostalgia, we’re cutting new creative expressions off at the knees. People yawn at remakes and rehashes of the old, asking for new movies, new television, innovative creations, and then complain when those new expressions involve evolving social thematics.

You can’t have it both ways, Nostalgia Warriors. Either you want new ideas or you want things to stay the same. And I have some bad news: things won’t stay the same, no matter how much you shout about it. Progress happens. The world moves on. And your sacred cows lose their shine under the scrutiny of the future. The only question is: will you put aside your blinders and accept the complexity of media and the critical analysis around you, or hold on stubbornly to the past?

The battle for progress continues across all mediums. And wherever people believe fun is under assault, the Nostalgia Warriors will be there, ready to refute every claim with childish rhetoric and nay-saying. And all the while, they don’t even realize they’re already involved in the political conversation: they’re just not doing a very good job at it.

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Go Away: Imposed Debriefs And Social Pressure

March 4, 2018 by Shoshana, posted in Criticism, Game Design, LARP Discussion and Theory, Not Ready To Make Nice, Personal, Speaking Out

[Note: This article was meant to be included in my submissions for the Knutpunkt 2018 companion books. However, due to being short on time, I ended up only submitting this article about personal games instead. I figured this is a topic I still wanted to explore, and so here we are. Please enjoy.]

I didn’t want to cry after the game.

We sat around in a circle, everyone still breathing a little heavy from the last few minutes of the game we’d played. We were testing out a new live-action roleplaying game at a convention, a serious subject black box game where we played political prisoners about to be executed and experiencing the last hour of their lives with their comrades. The very end of the game is a harrowing experience (which I won’t ruin for anyone) but I had a very strong emotional reaction. I’d played very tough during the game, but once the last few minutes before the end happened, I turned into a panicked, weepy mess. Then game off was called and I had a lot of feelings to unpack, and I wanted nothing more than to be on my own.

Too bad that wasn’t really an option.

You wouldn’t know it, but I’m a pretty private person sometimes. I can talk forever about topics that interest me, but when it comes to my feelings I am very self-protective. Being vulnerable around people takes time for me, and certainly can’t be turned on and off like a switch. It’s only through the alibi provided by a larp that I feel comfortable enough to open up and show vulnerability in character, exploring deeper emotions in front of others and even feeling comfortable enough to cry in public.

But once the game is over and the alibi is stripped away, I am often not interested in sharing my personal feelings with others. However, the recent trend of mandatory debriefs has provided me with a serious conundrum after a game.

There have been many articles written about the importance of debriefs or de-rolling exercises. In the perfect practice, these post-game sessions allow people to separate from their characters and seek an understanding of their own emotions provoked in game for the purposes of managing bleed. (Quoted from the Nordiclarp Wiki: “Bleed is experienced by a player when her thoughts and feelings are influenced by those of her character, or vice versa.”)

Debriefs manage the closure players allegedly ought to have before returning to their regular lives and begin a process of uncoupling from the intense emotional experiences one can have during a larp. They also serve as a way to reconcile the often deeply personal relationships developed between player characters during the game and allow players to resolve any potential serious feelings (both negative and positive) they’ve had during interactions with others in play.

Debriefs may take the form of a workshop at the end, a roundtable, or even a series of steps begun after the game and spread out over the weeks (or even months) post game. These steps are meant to be put in place to help players not only go back to normal life, but get the most out of the game experience by resolving negative feelings, solidifying positive ones, and offering the best possible emotional resolution for everyone involved.

And on paper, in theory, that all sounds perfectly fine. And when these debriefings are optional, they remain a positive addition to any game design.

The problem becomes when they’re mandatory.

I have been to several games which have instituted mandatory debriefs, or debriefs which have been ‘strongly suggested.’ In the latter, members of the game staff have gone around and pressured people into going to the debriefs if they seemed uninterested in attending. The premise behind their pressure was simple: as a participant in the game, you not only owe yourself the experience of a debrief, but you are responsible for giving others a chance to share their feelings with you as well. If you participated in the game and impacted someone else, you need to give them an equal chance to share with you and hear what you have to say in return. To be part of the community of play you entered into, you must complete the game experience with this sharing to honor the spirit of the social contract you agreed upon when coming to the game.

But what if debriefings and the open emotional sharing in public are not good for you? What if the very idea of such a public airing of feelings is nigh on horrifying to you, or even traumatic?

In other words, what if all you want to say to the mandatory briefing is:

I sat in a debriefing after a game, and my heart was in my throat.

Everyone was going around the circle, speaking about their feelings, and I knew it was almost my turn. I knew I was going to have to talk about the experience, and the moment I did, I’d start to cry. The game was very intense for me and had tapped into some very fundamental, dark and difficult feelings I hadn’t expected to experience. There were elements of past trauma uncovered during the game, deep feelings I needed to process. And as I looked around the circle, I didn’t see a single face I trusted enough to want to unburden to that moment. I needed time. I needed people I trusted. I needed to get out of that room.

But the peer pressure was on. Everyone had been told it was best if we stayed and it wouldn’t be fair to others if you left when everyone was sharing. So I stayed. And the moment they got to me, I did start to cry. I felt instantly ashamed, on the spot, and betrayed by the organizers and myself. I kept my explanation short and sweet. My fingers knotted in my sweater as I tried and failed not to cry. I felt dirty and embarrassed and I wanted to flee.

I wanted to say:

Afterward, while everyone else went to a party and drank and laughed, I sat in a corner and tried to shake the feelings of intense unease at how badly I felt. I’d been peer pressured into sitting in a room and sharing my feelings with people I didn’t trust, all for the sake of being a good player. I felt raw and furious.

A person’s emotional experiences are their own and are myriad in the way they are expressed. Expecting everyone to respond to intense feelings the same way or to homogenize their way of processing their feelings ignores the fundamental issue of the complexity of human emotions. Moreover, forcing people to be involved in debriefings which require speaking about those emotions publicly as a matter of rote, prepared only one way and presented as a must for all players, raises the possibility of inflicting emotional harm on your players.

Moreover, it presents a serious question: just who are the debriefs for anyway?

I’ve seen a lot of reasons people put forward for the importance of debriefing. Emotional safety and the management of uncoupling from alibi for a return to the real world, as mentioned above, is one. Allowing people to air their feelings about one another before they go their separate ways, as I also already mentioned, is another. There’s a third, which is the opportunity for organizers to hear feedback about their game, as well as letting the staff open up emotionally about their experience as well.

But all of these reasons come back to a single underpinning idea, an underlying message of, “this is what I need.” Whether it be the players involved needing to unburden their feelings or the staff members needing to process, the feelings involved in a debriefing are, in many ways, inherently selfish. They reflect an individual’s needs, or the expectation and assumption of what players need, to de-roll their feelings and experiences.

“I need to share how I feel with others.”

“I need the players to do this so I can mitigate liability if they get lost in bleed.”

“I as a staff member need to hear the players’ feedback, or make sure they’re okay for my peace of mind (and liability).”

“I need to air my grievances to the other player and confront them about our interactions, both positive and negative.”

I and I and I. Debriefing is about the consideration of what an individual or a group feels is necessary for others at the end of the game.

But what if what they believe is necessary or what they’d like to see happen is wrong?

What if, by insisting on a mandatory airing of feelings, you’re spoiling the game experience and opening up the player to negative feelings that can create temporary or even lasting distress?

I’d had an incredible weekend. One of the best larps of my life, in fact. I packed up my gear and was ready to head home when someone reminded me of the thing I dreaded the most: the debrief. I tried to beg off, say I had some things to finish before getting into my car. And yet I got the stern look. Other people should have the chance to talk to you. You’ll feel better if you go. It’s part of the game, it’s mandatory.

And all I could think was: No, I don’t want to talk to people. No, I won’t feel better if I go. And it wasn’t part of my game experience. I’d left that behind before putting my character away in my suitcase when I got out of the game. I knew what I planned on doing to debrief my way. I had a car ride home and my friends to talk out my feelings, the people I trusted.

Instead, I ended up at a table, sitting around with others I’d gotten to know over the weekend. And they weren’t bad. I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel vulnerable or awkward. Except when the facilitator came around. Staring at us at the table, making sure we were ‘getting along okay,’ and prying. Prying with their questions, with their ‘guiding’ by leading us towards speaking about our feelings. In the moments before we’d been joking around about war stories from the game and I felt happy, lighter, and safe. The next moment we were being reminded this was not about telling funny stories and joking around, but sharing how we felt.

This was about what others expected we should feel, and not my emotions at all.

I clammed up. I was furious. Because the interference wasn’t about my feelings or even the people around the table. It was about the facilitator’s expectations of what we needed, their job to steer us towards being vulnerable. And again, all I thought looking at the facilitator was the underpinning behind their words: I need you to have these expected emotional experiences now. Otherwise, you’re doing it wrong.

And all I wanted to say was:

It was about them, not me. They wanted us to come out saying we had some kind of emotional catharsis, lead by their expert hand. It was about ‘positive guidance’ towards exploring your feelings, even if the feeling we had might not be positive at all. There was no room for real emotional exploration, I knew, but the measured sharing of polite company. Crying was allowed. Being angry, being negative, would have to be mitigated by ‘I’ statements and rephrasing into words of encouragement and mutual support.

What if that wasn’t what I was feeling? What if my unburdening of feelings involved telling another player their roleplay made me feel awful about myself, or I felt they’d been selfish and treated me or another person like crap during the game? Would that honest emotional response be allowed, or would I have to find some calming I statement to make everyone feel safe?

I didn’t feel safe. I didn’t feel positive, perhaps, not entirely. I didn’t know what I felt because I had complicated feelings, as any person can. But we had our guidance, and it was based on the ‘learned’ experience of our facilitators, most of which I knew were not mental health professionals. They had taken on the responsibility of helping guide people on their emotional journey back from alibi to reality without any professional training and only based on what they perceived as the proper way to handle strong emotions. All packaged and prepared and homogenized to work for a large group of people, rather than the individual.

I know how to run this debrief. I know how to help you handle your bleed.

How? You barely know me. And you probably don’t have the training to know how to handle the complexities of multiple human beings’ mental health. So why should I trust you with mine?

I had intense feelings. I wanted to get them out. But as I looked around the circle, I wondered if there were others who didn’t have intense feelings that were both negative and positive to be dealt with. But someone around the table must have just the opposite. Someone’s feelings might just be ‘meh’ and not be in need of the complex debrief and airing of emotion. But here we were, being watched closely for proper responses. Here we were, being molded and shaped into a single narrow ditch of express your feelings now. And I wondered if we’d all know what we were feeling later at all when we were being pressured into needing an outlet for strong feelings at all.

I wondered what the facilitators’ intentions were and what they were feeling. At the end of the day, they’d go home after the game to their lives, having completed their task of guiding their players towards game’s completion. And I would go home with my feelings, still convoluted and complex and ready for unpacking in a positive form of my own choosing. I’d go home to my Monday morning after game and all the responsibilities therein. Only I’d be adding all the tangled emotions a mandatory debrief added, feelings of forced vulnerability and emotional flaying, being put on the spot and feeling shame and distrust and imposition. Feeling as though my emotions were not respected.

Mandatory debriefs have an undercurrent of inherent selfishness. By requiring people to open up and speak about their in-game experiences, those who are doing the requiring are putting their emotional needs ahead of those whose mental and emotional processes don’t need or even sometimes allow for public unburdening. It says everyone, no matter their own individual mental health and emotional status, is inherently required to set aside their own processes for the sake of being part of a community of play, no matter if it isn’t what they need. This is a selfish action on the part of those doing the requiring, and can even reach the level of victimizing another for the sake of that selfishness.

But for the sake of safety, and managing intense emotions brought to the surface by larp, we put our fear of players having a negative reaction after game ahead of individual needs. For the sake of the many, the few are sacrificed to the altar of peer pressure and concerns of liability.

I sat on the internet a month after a game. My hands shook as I typed.

A month before I’d had a terrible experience in a game. I’d had a very public confrontation with a male player who was larger than me, and who humiliated me in character in front of nearly fifty people. When I lost the confrontation and sat on my knees on the ground in front of him, the player in question mimicked unzipping his pants right above me and urinating on my character.

I sat on my knees on the ground, my body shaking. My good friends rushed to my side in character and carried me off the field. The moment we were out of sight of the group, they checked in on me out of character. I was in a daze. I told them I was just tired. I told them I was okay, that the shake in my hands was just adrenaline. I jabbered, stammered, my eyes far away. I was in shock and didn’t even know it.

I made it through the end of game, but I was out of sorts, jumpy. When game was over, there was no debrief. I left with my friends and went to a diner, where the player of the character in question sat a few tables away with his friends. It took all my courage to get up and head for the table. I joined his conversation and jokingly asked what he thought about what had happened. He responded by defending his character’s actions, saying my character “deserved it.” My hands kept shaking. I tried to joke about it too, then tried to say how screwed up the whole thing was. I tried to talk about it with him. And he blew me off with jokes, unwilling to let me tell him what I needed to say. I walked away from the table and within two weeks wanted to quit the ongoing game.

It took me three months of dreading going to game, of ducking out of events and making excuses, for me to figure out what was going on. It took a friend talking to me on Facebook Messenger about it and pointing out I was having serious negative bleed that I fully accepted how traumatized I was by the in character events. That the very act of this man standing over me when I was vulnerable in character, winded out of character, and on my knees in supplication, triggered awful things for me. That when he unzipped his pants and pretended to urinate on me, humiliated me further, it triggered issues of past sexual assault buried deep in my head. I had bleed and after game, I’d tried to talk to the player in question. And his saying my character “deserved it” only made the shock and trauma of the experience all the worse.

At that moment, I needed a debrief. I needed someplace to take those emotions and unpack them, to uncork the bottle and get those feelings out before they started to fester. But for three months, because of a lack of debriefing, those feelings did fester and nearly ruined the whole game for me. Every time the player in question came near in the subsequent games, my hands started to shake. It took him cornering me again in the game for me to realize I needed to get through the feelings once and for all. A friend of mine had to drive the player away from me as I had an anxiety attack. I was not okay. And I didn’t feel I had an emotional outlet or recourse to help deal with the way I felt.

There are instances when sharing is imperative. When having the resources to unpack serious emotional experiences after game are not only important but essential to a healthy resolution of intense in character events. But what if those same events had occurred and I’d instead been forced immediately to confront this other player in a mandatory setting, rather than in a manner more comfortable and my speed? If at the very end of game we were required to sit across from each other, led by someone who was not a mental health professional? What if in that setting I’d been told I “deserved it” and was forced to speak to this person in front of others, triggered as I was, feeling unsafe and in shock?

I needed a debrief. But I needed options. Not a one-size-fits-all approach.

For debriefs to work as positive experiences for all, it’s my opinion they need to be a toolbox rather than a list of steps, not linear exploration with a single means and an expected end. Instead, having multiple options for unpacking one’s feelings, without a forced time and place expectation takes the weight off the individual to perform emotionally on the spot, but gives them the chance to tailor their needs towards closure with the tools provided.

Optional roundtables, optional discussions with staff members at a time and place that is equitable to both parties (because forcing staff into mandatory interactions is equally as unfair to the staff who just went through running a game, their own emotional labor extended and often taxed), and later-date de-rolling with other players are all tools available for inclusion. And should those needs require further and more serious emotional unpacking, one of the tools offered should be the suggestion to seek out more professional mental health resources rather than (often) well-meaning laypeople.

In the end, I’ve had a lot of different experiences with debriefings but as yet I have never had a mandatory debriefing that hasn’t left me feeling uneasy when forced to express emotions. Those which are simply checking in or offering optional chances to speak aloud, or else those used only to offer the toolbox of debriefing choices have provided ample safety for me to choose my own path to closure. But the more popular choice of mandatory debriefs remains a terror for me attending games and, in my opinion, one of the least healthy choices made in the name of creating safety in our larps.

Reconsideration of the techniques used and the personnel employed is paramount, I believe, in truly making sure the needs of players and organizers are tailored to provide actual emotional support in games to come.

Otherwise, I will have to continue my own practice of simply (sometimes) saying:

To Mayim: Women Are Not The Problem

October 15, 2017 by Shoshana, posted in Not Ready To Make Nice, Personal, Sexual Harassment, Speaking Out

I remember the first time I realized as a girl I was the object of a man’s sexual interest. I was ten years old, walking to the bus inside the gates of my all girl’s religious school. Yes, there were gates, tall ones that went two stories high. The bus was pulled up just before the gate, ready to take us home. I remember, as I shouldered my backpack, that I hoped we got home before the rain kicked in because there was a terrible storm brewing. As I was stepping up onto the bus, the wind kicked up hard

As I was stepping up onto the bus, the wind kicked up hard and blew my skirt up over my knee. I nearly dropped my backpack trying to cover my legs, but it was too late. I heard a whistling noise from beyond the gate. Two boys stood just beyond the chain link, high school age and no older. One of them leaned in and made a kissing face at me. He said something in another language and both boys laughed. And I knew, for the first time, they were staring at me. At my legs.

I got on the bus so fast I fell on the top step and ripped open my elbow. Only a few weeks later, my mom had ‘the talk’ with me about being a woman, and what would happen to me soon. I put two and two together that night, after Mom had gone to bed, and realized things for me had changed. I wasn’t exactly different, even though I was about to get hit by puberty like a hormonal freight train. No, this time, something had changed outside of me. Before, I was just a little girl. Now, I was seen.

That was just the first time. That wouldn’t be the last.

In high school, I had a kid in a movie theater line push up against me from behind so I felt his erection through his pants. When I spun around, he looked sheepish and said I shouldn’t wear a skirt if I didn’t want attention. My skirt was ankle-length and black.

In college, I had the friend of a friend, a guy who was one of those “tell it like it is” nerd guys who mansplained everything, grabbed my chest in the school cafeteria from behind using the pretext of a hug. When I instinctively elbowed him in the side of the head (oops), for weeks he mewled that I’d hit him and denied the groping. I heard him say later that he’d never grope “someone like her.” And by that, I knew, he meant fat.

I had a guy in college take advantage of me being drunk in the backseat of his friend’s car. I was on my way home from a party. I was wearing a tank top for the first time in public, my first show of rebellion against religious upbringing. It was black, with a silver Superman S on the front, which I insisted was for Supergirl instead. This guy, who was a friend from school and knew all my friends, stuck his tongue down my throat and his hand down my shirt, and almost forced my hand down his pants. I barely got out of the car without things going further. My two friends, his best friends, sat in the front seat the whole way back to my house to drop me off and did nothing to stop it. The week after this incident, they made a crude joke about how we’d “hooked up” in the backseat, to which the guy in question said, “it’s not like I’d date her.” That party was my twenty-first birthday. To this day, I get nervous wearing tank tops in public.

I was twenty-seven and coming home on a train from work late at night. I was wearing my work clothes: jeans, store t-shirt, big scarf and jacket for the cold. I looked like the Stay-Puff Marshmellow woman. It was late and I fell asleep against the window. When I woke up, a guy had grabbed my hand and pressed it to his crotch. I screamed, pushed him off the seat, and started roaring at him. When the cops on the next stop’s platform came aboard, he started shouting that I came on to him. It took two dudes getting in my way to keep me from murdering the guy, I was so scared. And I’d finally had it.

These aren’t all the instances of sexual harassment, street harassment, and even assault that happened to me. They aren’t even the worst of the lot. Instead, they’re examples to highlight a fallacy in recent arguments in regards to cases of sexual harassment and assault levied against women in Hollywood. Specifically, women in the Harvey Weinstein case. It seems some folks believe that to avoid getting sexually harassed, women in Hollywood should have known that the mousy, ‘less attractive’, less flirty women stay safer and others should learn from that example since we don’t live in a perfect world.

Yeah, I’m looking at you, Mayim Bialik.

mayimbialik_prayer — Former *Blossom* star and *Big Bang Theory* regular Mayim Bialik.

I read Mayim Bialik’s post about how she avoided being harassed in a Hollywood full of predatory men with a sinking in my stomach. Here was an ostensibly brilliant young woman, an accomplished actress with a doctorate in neuroscience, pointing to her background as being a relatively “Plain Jane” in Hollywood as evidence of why she had avoided being sexually harassed and exploited. Moreover, she drew a direct correlation, it seems, between her perception of herself (and perhaps other people’s perceptions of her) as dowdy or less attractive as a reason why she avoided being harassed.

To quote the op-ed:

I still make choices every day as a 41-year-old actress that I think of as self-protecting and wise. I have decided that my sexual self is best reserved for private situations with those I am most intimate with. I dress modestly. I don’t act flirtatiously with men as a policy.

I am entirely aware that these types of choices might feel oppressive to many young feminists. Women should be able to wear whatever they want. They should be able to flirt however they want with whomever they want. Why are we the ones who have to police our behavior?

In a perfect world, women should be free to act however they want. But our world isn’t perfect.

No, Mayim, our world is not perfect. But neither, it seems, is your feminism.

This kind of response to reports of sexual misconduct by people like Harvey Weinstein and other Hollywood execs and, dare I say it, our own walking disaster in the White House, is the perfect example of how NOT to support victimized women. It’s the same bullshit that told women who were targeted in gaming communities to just “stay off the internet” when facing harassment and doxing and stalking by abusers. It’s the same mentality that has for generations pointed the finger at women who are victims of assault and rape and tells them they were “asking for it.” It’s the same old stories of warning passed down from mother to daughter, telling them to cover up, for god’s sakes, lest the predators of the world find you. It doesn’t tell the world to hold men accountable. It tells women it’s on them to hold themselves accountable for whatever triggers might set a man off and make them the target of his unwanted affections.

So I guess when I read Mayim’s response, my first knee-jerk reaction was: was my ten-year-old little skirt, down to my ankles, too flirtatious for those boys outside the school gate? Was my long-skirt in high school? My tank top? My puffy winter coat?

Mayim spends a great deal of the article talking about how she was never that attractive in Hollywood, and how that seemingly protected her perhaps. How she spent her time cultivating her talent, her mind and relied less on her looks. In a modern twist on the puritanical mindset, she encourages young women to focus on things other than just their looks (a noble idea on its own) and downplay their sexuality to protect against predation. As if to say “tone it down, ladies, and pick up some books instead, and men won’t come after you as often.” Like being a nerd or being dowdy will keep the molesters away.

Look, Mayim. If we want to talk about women who aren’t a perfect 10, let’s get one thing straight. I’m a 34-year-old woman who has been overweight her whole life. If we were using the Hollywood scale of beauty, I wouldn’t even be up in the running. And that’s not me knocking myself. The impossible standards of Hollywood beauty are stupid and exactly that: impossible to meet. I know what that means in terms of societal standards for overweight women, no matter how pretty we might actually be in the reality that is the rest of the world. I also know the reality of being heavy in how other people look at women who are overweight. Being fat is the last acceptable bigotry, one shared by nearly every group of people, marginalized or otherwise. To most people, being fat is the final frontier of being acceptably called ugly. So if your rubric worked, Mayim, then I’d be safe from harassment, right?

Well, I gotta tell you, either I’m the unlucky outlier, or your op-ed is privileged crap.

Bullshit, Mayim. Your lesson here is bullshit. I’m an educated woman who is fairly serious, who wears covered up clothing, who is considered fat by the world. And who has dodged groping, cat-calling, harassment, and sexual assault since I was in my high school years. What was it that was enticing about me, Mayim, when I was eleven then? I was in a religious school uniform covering everything from my neck to my wrists and down to my ankles and I was eleven. Be careful to answer that one, lest you run into some VERY awful answers.

Now, I’m not surprised by Bialik’s answers entirely. Many of her responses sound eerily like the conservative excuses I heard growing up in the Jewish community, a community Mayim and I share in common. There, modesty and piety were often pointed-to as the ways to protect against the dangers of abusive men. I’m also not surprised considering Mayim stars on Big Bang Theory, which she points out is the #1 Sitcom in America, and is known in many circles to not only be the most nerd-shaming but also FULL of sexist and misogynistic crap. So when I hear her opining this kind of twisted feminism, it doesn’t surprise me in the least.

Mayim Bialik’s answers are the regurgitated messages of generations of women who have seen the imbalance of power in the patriarchal world and instead of facing it head on and demanding change, have turned their powerlessness into a message of shame for women everywhere. Cover up, don’t be too provocative. Don’t be seen, don’t be heard. Stay under the radar and don’t make waves. Beauty is a curse to women, even while it brings privilege. Don’t shine too brightly or make any sudden moves, and maybe they won’t see you. If they do, you must have done something wrong.

And if something does happen, the message changes to: If they hurt you, it was your fault for catching their eye. They predators are wrong too, of course, but so are the women involved. Because they weren’t careful enough to avoid the hunter’s trap. By this metaphor, we can start blaming Bambi’s mom for getting shot too. After all, she didn’t run fast enough into that thicket before the bullet came.

What’s truly irksome about this article is that Mayim Bialik’s opinion piece couches itself in the empowering language of some feminist ideology, while turning back the clock to pearl-clutching times when modesty was the watchword of “good girls.” The fact is, Mayim, a woman should be able to walk stark naked through a room and not have to worry about being sexually assaulted. But in your world, a woman with a nice figure is the problem instead. And this is the message you’d put in the New York Times, when brave women like Asia Argento and Rose McGowen, and allies like Terry Crews, are coming forward to talk about the sexual assaults they’ve endured in Hollywood. The article comes off as self-aggrandizing, backward, and frankly cowardly.

By comparison, there is a clip going around from a decade back of Courtney Love on the red carpet. The notoriously controversial rocker was asked what advice she could give to young women trying to get into Hollywood. She looked off camera, said “I could get libeled for this, right?” then looks back at the reporter and the camera furtively and says, “If Harvey Weinstein invites you back to his place at the Four Seasons, don’t go.”

Here is a woman who had every reason to be afraid of legal reprisals from a powerful man like Weinstein. Yet instead of giving blanket assertions about modesty protecting women from the predations of molesters, Courtney Love risked legal reprisals to say to the camera what so many had turned a blind eye to for years. She didn’t tell girls to cover up their bodies, don’t flirt, don’t be themselves. She told them to look out for a known bad actor being protected by the powerful. She stepped up and showed bravery.

Meanwhile you, Mayim, made excuses for the world of patriarchy at large.

These days, more and more women are coming forward to disclose their stories of assault and harassment. Casting couch horror stories, interview horror stories, workplace horror stories, childhood horror stories. They tell us that our world is dotted not just with men who can’t seem to keep their hands to themselves, but that our world is still a place where the victims are blamed while the predators are coddled. It’s not their fault, it’s “just how they were raised” or “just the way things were back then” or a dozen other excuses made to distract from the fact that a woman’s worth is still valued lower than man’s reputation. Where men are labeled good members of the community or boys with their whole futures ahead of them, while women are slut-shamed for being the victims of men’s inability to control themselves.

As Mayim writes, it’s not a perfect world. Not by a long shot. But it won’t get better if we keep framing this as a women’s modesty problem and not a question of recognizing a woman’s worth, a woman’s word, a woman’s life, as valuable equal to a man’s. We don’t need more modest clothing, more skulking below the radar. We need more recognition, more equality, and less hemming and hawing over just who is responsible for the dangerous world women walk every day.

Me, I’m not going to sit and question whether I should have worn something other than a tank top on my twenty-first birthday, or whether I should have covered up my legs faster when I was eleven. But I still have problems wearing anything revealing, and I spend my time ready to bare my teeth at any man who dares overstep on me or any other woman I know.

Because I know what Mayim doesn’t seem to recognize, in her privilege: that perhaps she was just lucky, but not all of us were. And no matter what I wear, I’m still a target, as are other women, when a man doesn’t know how to control himself. And unlike Mayim, I know where to point the finger.

Gal Gadot And The Hope Of Jewish Representation

June 8, 2017 by Shoshana, posted in Comics, Criticism, Film, Geek Culture, Not Ready To Make Nice, Politics, Speaking Out

Candles hold a special place in my heart. In my mind, they’re a symbol of serenity, peace, focus, and prayer. They’ve stood as a testament to the flame one holds in their heart for a connection to the divine since I was a little girl. For as far back as I can remember, my mother would stand before the candles on Friday night, her hair covered and face solemn, as she covered her eyes and recited the blessing to invite the Shabbat into our home. I remember standing with her, or in the home of a friend on Friday night, all the women standing before the candles, covering their eyes to say the prayer.

‘Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu Melekh ha‑olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Shabbat.’

‘Blessed are You, LORD, our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to light Shabbat candle[s].’

The blessing of the Shabbat candles has stood out to me as one of the most humble, beautiful, and soulful practices of the Jewish faith. It ties Jewish women to a tradition meant for us alone, a task meant to usher in the twenty-six hours from Friday to Saturday evening when the family dedicates themselves to take time and rest, just as God supposedly did after the six days of creation. I grew up knowing that Jewish women for generations, going back into time immemorial, have been standing before similar candles the world over on Friday nights, putting their hands over their eyes to welcome in the Shabbat every week. I remember standing with my mother to learn how to say the prayer, covering my hair just like her, knowing I was a part of a long chain of tradition, held by the light of the candles and my faith.

It’s been years since I was what you’d consider very religious, but the ceremony of lighting Shabbat candles has stayed with me. It’s so important in fact that I chose to write a Larp about it for my contribution to the War Birds anthology by Unruly Games. Keeping the Candles Lit tried to capture not only the importance of traditions like the Shabbat candles, but the relationship of passing those traditions down from one generation of Jewish women to another. I tried to capture that importance, that beauty, when explaining it to non-Jewish players, or even my non-Jewish friends.

And every time, I wasn’t sure I could. The practice couldn’t have the same meaning, and most of my friends had no cultural context, no experience with the practices I grew up with. And that was normally okay: I love the diversity of the people I know, how we come from such disparate backgrounds. But every once in a while, I wished my closest friends could understand that feeling the candles inspired in me, and understand my culture with the same familiarity I’ve been forced to understand Christian culture.

Living Jewish In A Christian World

By virtue of living in a predominantly Christian oriented society, I’ve become intimately familiar with the trappings of the religion. It dominates popular culture, the iconography of everything from our holidays to stores in which I shop. I know the story of Christmas and all the songs as they’re blasted over the airwaves every year, every year getting earlier and earlier. I know the story of Jesus, of the Apostles. I know about some of the saints, how they go marching in, and the difference between different Christian groups. I hear conservatives scream about wars on Christmas and how Christian values in America are being challenged every day. And I snort, because I was at least raised to believe America was a land for all, not one with an official religion.

I also grew up being told to keep my head down when I tried to voice those ideas. My grandmother once told me one Shabbat, “Non-Jews won’t want to hear that from you. They’ll put up with it, with you, but don’t forget – they don’t understand.”

I remembered that lesson as I grew up, and watched every game, every TV show, every movie, and its implicit western Christian bias. Its morals baked into every piece of art, every bit of our society. I remember wishing I could share my favorite music growing up with my non-Jewish friends, and realizing they wouldn’t understand a lick of it. I remember realizing when I heard music and it talked about faith, or God, or losing their religion, they weren’t talking about my faith. The icons were always of a man with his arms spread out, a lonely look on his face.

I remember being confused and a little heartbroken when I was told The Chronicles of Narnia was a Christian story and Aslan, one of my favorite characters, was really Jesus. I remember the Jewish holiday of Purim being called “the Jewish Halloween,” as if that represented the beautiful tradition at all. I remember being told The Ten Commandments was an Easter story, even it was literally the story of Passover being shown over that very holiday.

ten_commandments-moses — Literally where the holiday comes from, folks. Moses did this, and we walked through some water, ate some really dry matzah and got away from that pesky Pharaoh.

Most of all, I remember the Shabbat and lighting the candles, and realizing so few people even understood what the Shabbat really was. And this was among those people I knew, forget about in the media.

And then, there were the exceptions. The beautiful, beautiful exceptions.

Finding Your Heroes

Claudia Christian playing Susan Ivanova on Babylon 5, who lit the Channukah candles and sat shiva for her father, all while being a commander on a 23rd century space station.

Felicity Smoak on Arrow answering her friends asking what she was doing on Christmas with, “Celebrating Channukah” and sharing cultural understanding with Ragman, a gay Jewish boy wearing an ancient, nigh sentient Egyptian burial shroud.

Rufus on Supernatural telling Bobby Singer he couldn’t dig up a dead body yet, because it was still the Shabbat. (Okay, and maybe taking advantage just so he wouldn’t have to dig).

Jews — **Chanukah shared by many of Marvel Comics’ most famous Jewish characters including The Thing, Shadowcat, Sasquatch, Songbird, Wiccan, and Moon Knight.**

Kitty Pryde in the X-Men wearing a Star of David and proudly declaring herself Jewish, comparing the discrimination against mutants with the discrimination faced by Jews.

Magneto, a Holocaust survivor, standing tall and villainous against the bigotry that ended his family’s lives so long ago.

Willow Rosenberg on Buffy straddling the line between growing up Jewish and embracing the Wiccan inside to become one of the most powerful magic users in the Buffyverse.

And yet these were characters on TV shows and in comics, amazing and affirming as they were. I was looking for real life media figures who could tell me that Hollywood wasn’t just full of stereotypes of Jews. We weren’t all Woody Allen or Barbara Streisand. We weren’t comedians and nerdy people, known for lack of athleticism and a cynical, dry wit. We weren’t The Nanny and Annie Hall. I kept looking for more Ivanovas, more Felicitys, more Willows. I found Natalie Portman and discovered Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alyson Hannigan were both Jewish. With some Googling, I found a list of Hollywood actresses who were Jewish.

And yet, in their interviews, in press junkets, I didn’t hear anything about their identities. While other celebrities thanked Jesus non-stop, I didn’t hear anything so outward about these women. In the age of social media and celebrity openness to the world, these women’s media image was so devoid of anything indicating they were Jewish I had to go Googling to find notable Jewish women in Hollywood. And that was okay, because their choices were their right, and their right to privacy was absolutely valid. But still, in a world saturated by the Christian identity, I yearned for something I could identify with.

And then, I saw an Instagram photo of Gal Gadot.

Representation Matters

In the photo, she stood in front of a pair of candles along with her little girl. Both of their hair was covered as they prayed before a pair of Shabbat candles.

Gal Gadot, who would be Wonder Woman.

They say representation matters in media. They say it’s important for people to be able to see those who look like them in the media. For a Jew, that issue can be a complex one, as many Jews of Eastern European descent largely blend into the overall white population. And though Jews were not considered as white until very late in the US and world history (we’re talking somewhere between the 1940’s and the 1970’s), we receive the same advantages in many ways as those who are perceived as white by the population at large.

Instead, Jews face different oppression based on our religious backgrounds, called anti-semitism, which has remained a constant and insidious form of discrimination throughout history. But at the end of the day, those Jews of largely Ashkenazi descent (meaning those whose ancestors migrated during the Jewish diaspora to Europe and got way, way pastier than our brethren who settled elsewhere) are perceived as and grouped into being white, with all the baggage and privilege and advantage that comes with it.

Still. Representation matters. And we all want to see someone in our media who is like us. As a little Jewish girl, I wanted to see characters in things who were Jewish. I cheered when I found out there was an Israeli-Jewish super hero in Marvel Comics called Sabra, a kickass woman super-soldier who defended Israel against her enemies. I worshiped the character of Susan Ivanova as a model for a strong Jewish woman on television. And I looked for actresses who showed me you could be Jewish and be a media star and still have a proud, public relationship with your culture.

And then that photo. Gal Gadot, in front of the candles, with her daughter.

Gadot’s Jewish Identity And Controversy

I remember my eyes filling with tears as I read a quote from Gadot, stating:

“I was brought up in a very Jewish, Israeli family environment, so of course my heritage is very important to me,” she said in an interview with Totally Jewish. “I want people to have a good impression of Israel. I don’t feel like I’m an ambassador for my country, but I do talk about Israel a lot — I enjoy telling people about where I come from and my religion.”

Here was an Israeli-born woman of Ashkenazi descent (her family was from Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Austria), who was proud of her heritage. She spoke openly about her religion, her culture, her home. And yes, that included speaking up about Israel and her feelings about the politics there. That has drawn heat from many pro-Palestinian groups, including BDS, who have called her out for supporting the military actions of her home country and for serving in the Israeli military.

(I would point out that military service in Israel is mandatory at the age of eighteen for everyone who is able. Gal served her two years as a fitness instructor, teaching gymnastics and calisthenics).

Many have called for boycotts of the Wonder Woman movie because of her pride in her homeland. Many have pointed to the Wonder Woman movie as being fairly white washed and lacking in diverse representation. And while those issues are very, very valid (I’ll point to this article expressing some very serious issues about the lack of or poor representation of women of color throughout the film), I’ll point out there is one minority who did get to be represented in Wonder Woman in a real and fantastic way.

Shattering Records and Expectations

You’d have to be living under a rock to have missed it, but Wonder Woman has defied the Hollywood trend of bad women-led comic book films. It has come away with critical acclaim and a massive fan response. And it has catapulted Gal Gadot from little known actress into a household name all in the span of a few weeks. This insta-fame has brought much of the aforementioned controversy into the limelight. And though I’m all for discussing political questions and issues of representation, I’ve had a foul taste in my mouth when looking at the way Gal Gadot’s actions and media presence has been scrutinized. In the end, the only thing people have been able to find to diss her portrayal is that she served her country as a soldier in mandatory service, that she looked like a model, and that she is part of a film which has sadly stereotyped people of color and other nationalities.

And while I acknowledge all those issues as valid to discuss, I also acknowledge that a film can have problematic issues and still have a supremely important contribution to the representation of another group. In this case, Jewish women. And that contribution is profound and important and cannot be ignored.

Because somewhere, there are little Jewish girls able to point to Gal Gadot in her tiara and silver bracelets, holding her sword and shield and lasso, and say there, there is our Jewish warrior, there is the ashet chayil (in Hebrew a “woman of valor”) we sing about every Shabbat. There is a powerful feminist actress who is proud of her heritage, passing down our traditions to her own daughter, who trained to fight and did her own stunts in both Wonder Woman and the Fast and the Furious franchise. Here was a woman who is proud of her heritage and who is representing our people, an often forgotten minority group, as one of the world’s most recognizable and lauded super heroines in a film that has shattered movie release records in its opening week.

Wonder Woman is a hit, and Wonder Woman’s actress is Jewish. My inner little girl is so proud I can barely express it. Because when I point to the screen during Wonder Woman, I can say now: see, see there, we aren’t all the yente and the nag, the funny girl and the nerdy weakling, the shady lawyer and money grubbing business person, the Jewish American princess and homely intellectual. We aren’t the hidden, overlooked group, our celebrities laughed at when they go to a Kabbalah Center or talk about their kosher cooking in public. See, in that woman, an ashet chayil at last, a proud, powerful woman, standing tall on the screen.

And somewhere, little girls can see that and believe they can be proud Jews, standing tall to be whatever they want to be while still being part of the traditions of our people. Representation matters to Jews too, and Gal Gadot has given us that representation, complicated as it might be in terms of politics and other problems with the film. And from everything we have seen in the media she is a positive role model both as Princess Diana and in her own life, a true ashet chayil in so many ways.

I am proud to be around to see my comic book idol played by such a woman of valor. Because I’ve finally seen representation that gives me hope that we Jewish women can be seen, really seen, in all our facets and strengths and traditions at last.

And all it took was one Instragram photo to instill that hope, that pride in me too.

The Women’s March On Washington: The View From A Wheelchair

January 23, 2017 by Shoshana, posted in Not Ready To Make Nice, Speaking Out

7AM. I hate getting up at 7AM. Especially when I’ve been up all night writing. What’s more, I hate getting up at 7AM on a weekend. But lo, on Saturday January 21st, my alarm went off at 7AM and I peeled my eyes open. I’d been asleep for an hour and fifteen minutes, having stayed up all night to finish writing deadlines. But it was all worth it. It would be worth it.

I stared around my largely unimpressive motel room and listened to my roommate Nico snore in the other bed. He’d be up in a minute and we’d be out the door in less than fifteen. We’d pack up our meager gear, make sure we weren’t carrying anything we weren’t supposed to. See, we had instructions. Carry everything in a clear plastic backpack or bag. No other bags allowed. Bring lots of water and snacks. Wear warm and comfortable clothes.

Oh, and bring milk or liquid antacid t0 help counteract the effects of tear gas or pepper spray. And write the number for the National Lawyer’s Guild on your arm in sharpie. You know, just in case you get arrested.

The things one has to think about on the way to a protest. But this wasn’t just any protest. This was the Women’s March on Washington. And we were ready.

When I heard about the Women’s March on Washington, it was early in its inception. There were posts all over my Facebook wall, calling it a Million Woman March. In the face of the madness of the recent election and what can only be called the slow, horrifying slide of America into a conservative, regressive spiral, activists and organizers were planning to take to the streets and bring women from all over the country to protest in Washington DC. I’d seen protest planning before and thought perhaps calling it a Million Women March was presumptive, if a little coopting (there had already been a Million Women March in October 1997 in Philadelphia focusing on bringing attention to the plight of African American women).

Still, there was almost immediately a sense that this march was going to be historic. The day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as our next president, women would take to the streets to protest the state of our nation and women’s rights. Of course, I had to be there.

It took me until the week before the protest to figure out an attendance plan. Being a woman in a wheelchair with serious chronic health issues, one always has to attend these things with planning and consideration. I enlisted the help of my friend and fellow game designer, Nicolas Hornyak, to get to the protest. Nico has acted as my wingman before and we’d been on a few protest excursions, including two protests during the Eric Garner case in New York. Those protests had been hectic affairs, full of some close calls with cops. We were once nearly run down by a police motorcycle while marching onto the FDR Drive. The cops charged the protest line in Time Square and we nearly got trampled. We sat in to block the Lincoln Tunnel when the cops wouldn’t let us get to Time Square in the first place. That time, sitting in my wheelchair in front of a giant Greyhound bus with the cops nearby pulling out zip tie handcuffs, I was sure we were going to be arrested. Still, each time, we’d been fine. But of course, people I knew had concerns.

“This is Trump’s America,” a friend of mine said, “I don’t trust how cops are going to handle this. You should be careful.” My mom was worried. Friends offered bail money.

We were careful. We made plans. We packed everything we thought we might need: first aid kit, spare food, extra water, spare doses of my medication in case of arrest or getting stuck somewhere, camera for recording any incidents, liquid antacid for dealing with tear gas or pepper spray. We downloaded the March guide and printed it in case our phones lost power. We set up friends with contact information and the numbers for legal aid in case we were arrested. I brought extra socks (“my feet get cold”) and told my mom the signal to pick up the phone on the Sabbath in case I was arrested (“three rings means you pick up the phone”).

We drove down the night before to a motel outside the Baltimore airport. We’d be parking at a friend of mine’s place on the outskirts of DC, then heading into the protest by Metro.

5877b18a1700008501929b45 — artist: Jennifer Maravillas

When we left the motel, I stuffed extra muffins in my pocket along with beef jerky and power bars. I had with me two signs I printed from Staples. I got them laminated in case of rain. One was a poster provided by artist Jennifer Maravillas for this march saying “Our Bodies. Our Minds. Our Power.” Another I had made myself. It proclaimed: “I am alive today because of Obamacare. Save women’s lives. Protect the ACA.”

Of all the issues I wanted to put across, protection of the ACA and the 30 million Americans who would lose healthcare immediately if Obamacare was repealed was paramount to me. Obamacare saved my life when I was first diagnosed with Cushing’s Disease and had to remove a pituitary tumor we nicknamed Larry, and it’s kept me alive ever since. So obviously, it was an issue near and dear to my heart.

Signs in hand, I was ready for the protest. We drove through a hazy, grey morning, chugging along through thick traffic outside of DC, surrounded by other cars full of women heading to the march. Stuck between charter buses, we blasted Fall Out Boy (one of my defiantly guilty pleasures) and chanted along to the catchy, if slightly teen-angsty lyrics.

“You are a brick tied to me that’s dragging me down
Strike a match and I’ll burn you to the ground
We are the jack-o-lanterns in July setting fire to the sky
Here, here comes this rising tide, so come on.”

A car passed us on the right with an older woman driving, a young woman by her side, three teen girls in the back. All were wearing Pussy hats.

We were heading in the right direction.

After parking the car at a friend’s house (thank you, Shalom!), we headed for the Metro. I’d never taken the Metro, but being from New York I figured I knew how subways worked. Yeah, okay. It took ten minutes to figure out which Metro station subway card to get, then we headed down into the station. And faced the harrowing issue of getting a wheelchair onto a train so packed you could barely see individual bodies anymore. Ever see videos of station officials stuffing people onto trains in Japan? Yeah, this was just like that. Only maybe worse, since we had a damn wheelchair.

It took eight trains going by and some serious stress, but we got on. I stood for two stops before my leg went out from under me, then I was back in the chair, squished between a cranky family with kids and a helpful pair of protestors from (of all places) Brooklyn. We transferred at Metro Central and it took a National Guardsman helping to get us on the next train, it was so full. He stood in the way, cleared folks out, and got us some space. Only then we hear our stop is being bypassed. “Too full at L’Enfant,” someone said, “and Federal SW is closed too. Smithsonian is your stop.”

At Smithsonian, a helpful station manager got us into the accessibility elevator and we got above ground. And that’s when we first saw the protest and realized the enormity of what we were in for.

16231519_10212142859476119_2031876434_o — That’s a lot of Pussy hats.

Independence Avenue was packed for something like fifteen blocks. We had come up at the very back of the marchers, packing in to hear the speeches at the main stage all the way down. We could hear cheering echoing along the canyon of DC buildings, all the greyer in the drizzle. Still, the crowd was lively, chanting, marching, buying T-shirts. A woman with a shopping cart sold giant pretzels and water. There were families, huge groups with banners from colleges, people of all ages. And they were everywhere. Up on stairs, railings, high walls, trees. There were guys selling t-shirts and I grabbed one with the Million Woman March logo on it. I wanted to commemorate the day.

We passed a giant screen broadcasting the speeches. Gloria Steinem was there, in all her glory, rallying the troops. I was a little awed. I man, Gloria Steinam. She was only, you know, a dozen blocks and a hundred thousand people away. And she was talking to all of us about women’s rights. I was jazzed, inspired, and a little overwhelmed.

That feeling of overwhelmed continued to grow as I realized we had about eight blocks to go if we wanted to get to the Disability Caucus tent. They had a safe area for wheelchairs to congregate near the medical tent, and I knew with my health concerns it was the best place to be. The trouble was, they were eight blocks away. And there was a sea of humanity in the way. So I did what any good girl brought up in Brooklyn would do: I got a little loud. Polite of course, but loud. There was a lot of “excuse me, pardon me, sorry, watch your toes, sorry, gotta get through” but we started the process forward. Within half a block, I was already exhausted and frustrated, and the crowd only got thicker. Then, out of nowhere, two women came to help: Hana, an ADA compliance consultant for the Seattle Metro, and Katie. The two offered to act as blockers in front of me so we could get the wheelchair through. Together, our little squad swam upstream from 14th Street to 6th and Independence where the Disability tent stood.

I can’t describe the feeling of working our way through that crowd. We passed down canyons of people squished together so tight you couldn’t see light between them. From down in my wheelchair, I felt like an X-Wing making the canyon run to destroy the Death Star. I apologized a million times, clutching my laminated sign about Obamacare to my chest, hoping to the gods we didn’t run over a million toes on the way.

We passed literally thousands of people who backed up, squished in, and shuffled over to make way for a wheelchair. Not a single person complained, or said a harsh word. In fact, most of the time people stopped and smiled. They thanked me for coming. And while sometimes it seemed a little patronizing (thanking the disabled person for just showing up? why was I any different than anyone else?), and some folks patted me on the shoulder in that ‘go you!’ kind of way (rule of thumb: no touching unless someone gives you permission), the whole experience was a humbling, anxiety-inducing, but amazing one.

I joked more than once, “If we can do this, Trump can stop being a shmuck” to ringing laughter. Hundreds upon hundreds of people read my sign. And we made it to the Disability Caucus tent.

I was immediately greeted by volunteers who offered us water and snacks and a place to rest. I got out my CVS sandwich and tried very hard not to cry. Outside, Ashley Judd recited the poem “Nasty Woman” by 19-year-old poet Nina Donovan on the jumbo screen outside. A group of deaf marchers signed rapidly to one another with the help of an interpreter. Outside, the crowd stood shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow, and listened, cheered, shared in the joy. No cops in sight, no tension, just celebrating the cause.

I’d like to say the march went off for me without a hitch. Sadly, that wasn’t the case.

It began with a simple question. “Where’s the bathroom?” Yes, some things are more important than immediate activism.

Now, you’d think someone would have put some bathrooms behind the Disability Caucus tent for, y’know, the folks with disabilities who’d have a hard time getting around in the crush of humanity. But the porta-johns were a block away and about seven or eight thousand bodies packed in like sardines were between us and the gross little boxes. The National Air and Space museum however was right across the street, and they had bathrooms. Except between us was, again, about a metric ton of bodies. I decided to lead the charge for myself and two other wheelchair-bound folk to the loo. I had confidence in my New York voice and people’s good graces. We were joined by a somewhat befuddled march volunteer and there we went, attempting to cross the River Jordan – I mean, Independence Avenue.

Well, there was no ramp for the wheelchairs on our side of Independence Avenue, turns out, so we had to go all the way around the building. Half an hour later, we were swimming upstream against the crowd while the volunteer helpfully announced to anyone who could hear, “Step aside, three wheelchairs, trying to go to the bathroom!” I would have been mortified had I not spent the entire time calling after the gentleman. “Sir? Sir. We don’t need to announce that we need to go to the bathroom. Sir?” People laughed with me. I had to laugh. It was all so absurd. But everyone helped us along. It was pure kindness and magic.

It took forty five minutes to reach the porta-johns on the Mall between the Capitol building and the Washington Monument, where only one day before Trump supporters had lined up to watch the inauguration. I wouldn’t know it until later but the Women’s March had already blown the doors off the inauguration attendance numbers. Nico and I took refuge up on the steps of the National Air and Space Museum and looked out from our vantage point on a sea of pink hats and all kinds of signs. The marchers weren’t just on Independence, but every street we could see. Across the way, cheering people sat on the steps of the National Gallery. The whole area was shut down, no cars in sight.

“They’re saying there’s 700,000+ people here,” a helpful woman told me. She’d flown in from Seattle with her friends the day before and like us had stayed outside of town. Around us flowed a sea of pink Pussy Hats. Both Nico and I promised we’d buy a couple if we could find anyone selling them.

Amid the ocean of pink, we spotted a few red caps emblazoned with the preposterous “Make America Great Again.” I thought it took particular chutzpa to walk around wearing those hats, the mark of Trump supporters everywhere, during the protest. But there was no heckling. Maybe some snark, but nothing mean said that I could see. As we figured out how to get down into the march, I saw a bunch of Trump supporters readying to go into the museum. To them, it was a sightseeing day, and the march was giving them plenty to see.

The trouble started when we tried to go back down into the crowd. I stopped when I started getting massive pain in my leg. Nico pulled aside while the pain shot up my leg, into my hip, went up into my chest, and arm. Sounds bad? It was. I couldn’t take a deep breath. We were petting someone’s gigantic golden lab (the thing could have been ridden into battle) when I started to get woozy. I don’t remember all of what happened next, but it was clear I was in need of medical help. It wasn’t the first time I’d had episodes like this. Cushing’s Disease means I’m supposed to be careful about my stress levels and, well, a protest on so little sleep, in the cold, when I’m anxious in crowds? It was a recipe for problems.

The march was about to start in earnest, heading towards the White House. I had the map in my pocket but when I tried to pull it out, my hands shook. We got out into the flow of traffic heading back towards Independence, but there was no movement. With people pushing in on all sides, I suddenly couldn’t breath. Have I mentioned I’m claustrophobic? Hyperventilating, I told Nico we had to get back up to the stairs. He did one better and got me to the security guards inside the Air and Space Museum.

The next thing I know, I’m being whisked downstairs into the bowels of the museum to their nurse’s office. Yes, the museum has a nurse’s office. And it is better stocked than some doctor’s offices I’ve been to. There, a rather harried man whose name I cannot remember took one look at me and said he wanted to call EMTs. Oh goodie, I thought, what a way to spend a march.

Well, they called EMTs all right. But you know what happens when every block in every direction is shut down? No ambulances can get through. Twenty minutes passed. A half an hour. Dizzy, nauseous, a little incoherent, I sat in the office with a woman who had fallen and dislocated her shoulder and a woman with rheumatoid arthritis who had been overcome from standing too long. We waited. No EMTs came. Security got on the overhead PA and asked for any doctors to please come to the security desk.

Ten minutes later, a skinny middle-aged guy with a blue biker’s shirt and a tan showed up. He had a southern drawl and a good ol’ boy kind of attitude. He was an ER doctor up from Daytona, and he had volunteered to help after the PA announcement. He got me on oxygen and asked me about my medical history. He was kind. He was attentive. And more than that, he took me seriously. He was concerned about the EMTs being unable to get to us. He stayed with me while we talked out what to do. Gradually, the oxygen helped. We figured it was just a bad anxiety attack coupled with some trouble from my wacky endocrine system.

I thanked the man profusely for his help through the oxygen mask. He reached out, patted my arm, and said seriously, “Of course, it’s no problem. After all, I’m a Trump supporter.”

And folks, I nearly swallowed my own tongue. While we chatted some more, I couldn’t get his response out of my head. After all, I’m a Trump supporter. Here was a guy who’d come up for the Inauguration to support the man I seriously believe will screw our country into the floor. And he had been maybe one of the kindest, most attentive doctors I’ve ever seen in my life. He never once dismissed me, or gaslit me. He had taken time out of his day just being a tourist to come down and help me out. I almost cried.

Well, the EMTs never came. After an hour, the nurse came in and asked how I was feeling. We figured I was safe to move, symptoms having subsided. I took my regular medication, started to feel better, and me and Nico moved on. Crisis averted. As we left, I saw another group going by in their red “Make America Great” hats and I thought, you don’t have to wear those, some of you Trump supporters are already doing it, one act of kindness at a time.

Outside, the march had already moved on without us. I told Nico I wanted to catch up. We still had our signs, though so many folks had apparently abandoned theirs. They were lying all over the place, up against the building, against trees. We saw this one as we turned to head towards Constitution and the march route.

Just as we were taking this picture, I heard it: the first harsh voice I’d heard all day, raised over a bullhorn. Uh oh, I thought. We headed for the voice around where we’d left the man with his giant dog. The guy and dog were long gone. In his place was a bearded man standing on top of the refrigerators next to a closed McDonald’s kiosk. He held a giant sign and was yelling into a bullhorn. On his sign were giant block letters screaming, REPENT, and quoting scriptures. The man kept yelling about turning away from sin to accept Jesus as your savior. He called folks sinners, sodomites, told them they’d burn in hell. REPENT was the message, REPENT NOW.

I was furious. I was going to roll over there and give the guy a piece of my mind. But as we approached, I saw a group of young men and women around the man. They were holding up protest signs. They chanted over the man, raising their voices when he did. They shouted, “LOVE IS LOVE” over and over. One young woman stood right in front of the man and held up a sign supporting Planned Parenthood in one hand and a hand written sign saying “CHOOSE LOVE NOT HATE” in the other.

They turned their back on the hateful preacher and chanted louder, and louder, until he finally gave up. I started to cheer, and so did the dozen or so other people who had stopped to support the anti-hate chanters.

Then, a strange thing happened. The preacher started to get down off the refrigerator. He stopped, then reached down and asked the chanters if anyone had lost a water bottle. He held up a blue bottle, and they each said they hadn’t. One of the girls politely asked him if they’d left a sign up there (they hadn’t). Then, one of the guys politely asked the preacher if he needed a hand down so he wouldn’t fall with his sign and megaphone to juggle. The preacher, who had a moment before been preaching for them all to REPENT, took the offered hand and jumped down. Then, they all went their separate ways.

As they went by, I thanked the chanters. Two of the girls went by with tears in their eyes, but the rest were smiling. And by the end of it, so was I.

Nico and I went onto the mall and talked to some folks. A few people stopped me to ask about my sign, ask me about my story. In fact tons of people did over the course of the day. A lot of people snapped my picture. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with that, not sure where it would be used. A couple of them kind of gave me the creeps, to be honest. But most were there to document the amazing signs and the people of the day.

Nico took this one of me in front of the Capitol. I was there to spread my message, a message of one woman who lived because the Affordable Care Act existed. I thought back to recently, when I’d received a letter from the White House. I’d gone on the White House website and sent a thank you letter to President Obama for his tireless work defending healthcare. I said in my letter that I figured he didn’t hear enough thank yous in his job, so I wanted to simply say mine.

A month later, I received a letter back with a message from the White House, thanking me for my note. It was certainly a form letter and signed by the presidential auto-pen, but it had still made me tear up. Someone in the White House had read my letter and had the thought to respond. I framed the dang thing to hang on my wall.

Only days after getting that note, auto-signed with President Barack Obama’s name only a few weeks before he’d leave office for good, I sat on the Mall with the Capitol building in the distance and held up my sign, thanking the now former President once more in the only way I could.

As we walked down Constitution to rejoin the protest, a woman stopped me. “I’m so glad Obamacare could help you,” she said, tears in her eyes. “It was one year too late to save my sister.”

Across the way, a group of protestors called the Daughters of Liberty blasted Beyonce’s “Formation” and danced under protest signs with a cop car flashing its lights only a few feet away. I saw protestors taking selfies with the cops. One cop had on a pink Pussy Hat. It was all too fucking surreal.

Somewhere along the way, we lost the main body of the protest. The cops had cut off a single block because a bleachers had collapsed and ambulances were treating those hurt. It meant that the straggling marchers like us were funneled east instead of west. Some broke off and headed back to the Capitol, while Nico and I rolled on north, trying to find the rest of the march. The sun was going down, but people were still hype. We rolled through the unfamiliar city among thousands of people wandering, talking to one another, holding up their signs.

We ended up so far north we hit Chinatown. There, we bought a pair of newspapers commemorating the march. A photographer stopped us and asked to take our picture. I held up my sign and he snapped a bunch of shots. When he gave me my card, he told me I’d made his march. I shook my head, a little flustered, and we rolled on.

We spotted this sign, and I made Nico take a picture of it. It was the feeling I always had when issues of women’s rights came up, that nagging sigh of exhaustion in the back of my throat when I thought about how long this battle was going on and how much longer it would take to win. If it could ever be won.

Tired, hungry, in need of a break, we found shelter in a – no kidding – Hooters. There we gulped down wings and beer pretzels at the bar and drank some soda. I took medication, and we recovered a little. The sun went down. Outside, traffic had started back up again. On TV behind us, CNN was reporting on the marches worldwide. When Elizabeth Warren came on screen, the entire restaurant exploded in celebration. Video of giant crowds from dozens of cities flashed on screen, waves of pink Pussy Hats and signs from New York to Los Angeles and across the world. Three hundred marches across the US and the globe. And most of them looked a lot like this.

Bodily exhausted, mentally overwhelmed, I realized we had to call it a day. I could barely keep myself upright, forget keep my eyes open. The trouble with chronic illness is knowing when to throw in the towel. I wanted to go back out, to rejoin the protestors, to head to the Capitol building and hold my sign up high and remind anyone watching that this protestor, this disabled woman, was alive because of a bill Donald Trump and the Republicans wanted to destroy. But I also could barely sit up straight.

We had to Uber our way out of the area, the trains were too crowded. As the SUV pulled up and we piled in, people in pink hats with signs still streamed thru the area, looking for the protest, or a train station, or a place to catch a meal. People talked, chatted. I never once saw a cop being untoward. In fact, I barely ever saw cops at all. We rolled through the city, north, heading back towards our car and eventually, after a four hour drive, home.

In the car, before I fell asleep against the window, I opened the Etsy app and looked up pink Pussy Hats. I never wear pink, but for this, I’d make the exception.

Before the Women’s March on Washington, I’d sat down with some friends and had a serious talk about the future. What I believed Trump’s America might look like, what kind of damage the Republicans could do to our basic civil liberties, to the laws the previous administration had fought so hard to put in place. Queer rights, healthcare, protection for Muslim Americans, worker’s rights, protection for the poor, violence against people of color. Everything was up in the air, uncertain, dangerously out of control. I talked about what would happen to my healthcare if they repealed the ACA. I talked about the real option of going broke trying to afford my doctor’s bills and medicine, of leaving the US in search of somewhere I could afford medical coverage. And as I talked, I realized how little hope I had for our future.

After the March, when I got home, I sat in the same spot as I had when we talked about that dire America, a future full of rebranded neo-Nazis and their apologists, Republican millionaires destroying our country, and Donald Trump in his golden tower, overseeing it all with his ‘alternative facts.’

But after the March, I returned home feeling something I hadn’t in a while: hope. I found myself reciting Jyn Erso’s quickly becoming iconic line: “Rebellions are built on hope.” I thought of the signs boasting pictures of recently passed Carrie Fischer as Princess Leia telling women to rebel. I thought of the Hamilton quotes telling people to Rise Up. And I thought of those thousands of people in those silly pink hats, all moving out of the way to let a woman in a wheelchair go by, smiling and joking, helping one another out.

Rebellions are built on hope. And thanks to this march, I had found mine again.

The World Turned Upside Down

November 9, 2016 by Shoshana, posted in Not Ready To Make Nice, Politics

The sky’s grey over Jersey City. And I woke up from a good dream to a nightmare.

I fell asleep in exhaustion last night after watching the results of the election until 2AM. I sat with friends as we went through the stages of horror and grief right in their living room. We drank, ate pizza, and watched democracy deliver our country into the hands of a hate-filled demagogue. I went home and had a beautiful dream.

In this dream, I was living in a community together with my friends because we ran from a collapse, a societal nightmare. We came together and shared resources. We were there for one another. And in this dream, a man wandered into our community. He was starving, sick, homeless, lost. And one of my friends, a ferocious man who many find intimidating, went and sat beside the man. Shook his hand. Offered him food, warm clothing, a place to sleep. I went over and asked his name, and shook his hand. And the community expanded.

I woke up to grey skies over Jersey City and to an incredible uncertain future. I’m wishing I could go back to my dream.

When I was a little girl, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. Nora Stern was a Holocaust survivor who came to the US after losing nearly all her family to the horrors of Nazi Germany. She survived pretty much the worst things humanity could throw at her, walked out of Auschwitz and came to the United States to rebuild her life. She and my grandfather opened a sandwich counter shop and worked tirelessly all their lives. My grandmother then had to nurse my grandfather through cancer until he died when my mother was 16. She raised two children, ran a business, and when my mother got married and brought me home, she helped look after me. This woman kept a good home, even when alone, and gave tirelessly of herself, no matter what she had gone through in life.

She also taught me one of the lessons I carried with myself all the days of my life. One day when I was helping her look for something in a closet, I found a roll of single dollar bills nearly as big as my fist. I asked her why she needed a roll of money. She told me then about the hatred this world could have for Jews, for people who are different. She told me that no matter what you do in your life, no matter how comfortable you get, you must always be ready to flee, because “they’ll always come, no matter what.” My grandmother believed that fascists would one day come for her and her family, just like they did so long ago, and she wanted to be ready.

Back then, I didn’t believe it was possible. Back then, I laughed.

I’m not laughing today.

Watching the election coverage last night was like watching a nightmare world supplant your own. I sat in my friend’s living room, unable to believe it, unable to shake the feeling that my world turned upside down in one breath. I’d spent the day listening to the Hamilton soundtrack and the lyrics to Hurricane kept going through my head.

In the eye of the hurricane

there is quiet

for just a moment

a yellow sky

As we were leaving to go see my friends, to watch the election, I sat down outside and looked up at the sky. I remember thinking in that quiet instant, this is that yellow sky moment. And my instincts said, wait for it, because this is the last great gasp of air above water before the plunge, the stomach-churning second before the rollercoaster drops you back towards the ground. I had a bad feeling, and it came true.

We watched and went through the stages of grief. I wished I could drink again. I took anti-anxiety medication. I let a friend hold me when I was scared. I was glad I wasn’t alone as I watched states tick away. As maybe I watched the future tick away, vote by vote.

I raged. I raged against every “protest vote” that gave an inch to the opposition. I raged against those too apathetic or too entitled to go out and vote, the 160+ million who stayed home and helped hand our country over to this nightmare. I raged against every person who looked at a campaign full of lies and bigotry, misogyny and hatred, and allied themselves with this regressive nightmare who’ll now be our president. I raged that after the grace of a leader like President Obama, our president will now be this man. This. THIS.

I raged that “we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal” is now no longer valid.

I raged until I couldn’t anymore. And then that pit in my stomach I thought was just the queasiness before the drop yawned open and I felt the sorrow take over. Here was the stage of grief which could swallow me whole if I wasn’t careful. The unmitigated sadness took me over and I put my head down and cried.

And then, I started to plan.

In Trump’s America, I would be considered an undesirable from so many angles. I’m a disabled woman. I’m Jewish. I’m queer. I’m an outspoken feminist. A social justice advocate. A defender of progressive ideas. So, you know, a liberal.

I wear these identifiers proudly, as I was taught to stand up for what I believe in. From my parents. From the narratives I fell in love with that inspired me all my life. It boggles me to no end that these very identifiers might now put me in the crosshairs of a regressive, damaging agenda touted by a presidential candidate… no, oh God, by the president elect. I used to believe the days when the world would tolerate such open hatred in office, especially in America, were fading into memory. I thought we were on our way to a brighter future.

Instead today, I wake up to a world where I have to be afraid about losing medical coverage because the new president wants to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. Where queer people will need to watch their backs, will watch all the progress made by President Obama for the LGBTQ+ community disappear. I have friends whose marriages will be in jeopardy. I worry about my Latinx friends, some of whom are closer to me than blood. To Muslims in this country. To my fellow Jews. To everyone.

I’m afraid. But the fear can’t stay here forever. I won’t allow it.

And I’m starting to go past those stages of grief into what I hope is something more productive. A transition place where I can take all this fear and worry and rage and turn it to something constructive. And what is that? What can take all this movement inside me, this churning terror, and turn it into a force to go outwards? Because I’m afraid if I don’t find something, anything, to take this roiling fear inside of me and mold it into a positive force, it might consume me alive.

So I thought back to that song again, to Hurricane. And Alexander Hamilton’s solution struck me:

I wrote my way out of hell

I wrote my way to revolution…

And when my prayers to God were met with indifference

I picked up a pen, I wrote my own deliverance

Lin Manuel Miranda pens the answer: “I wrote my way out.” Anyone who is an artist can feel down in their bones the need to bring the power of their emotions into the world through their art. We bring our pains and our passions and our promises into being through songs and writing and games and paintings and comics. We make statements that ring true to so many more people than just ourselves because we reach them where they live through the expression of forms.

I’m a writer. I need to write my way out now, more than ever.

I’m still afraid this morning. I’m terrified of what the future will bring in a country led by a fascist. Our country may change in serious, dangerous ways in the next few weeks and months. There’s already been an instance of swastikas painted on the side of buildings in South Philly today. But instead of giving into that pain inside me right now, I’m focusing down and living inside the moment of acceptance. Not accepting for the sake of getting along, but for the sake of getting on to make decisions and plans.

Because the eye of the hurricane passed. And half of our country decided to drive us right into the face of the storm to see what survives at the end. Well okay then, but now that means we need to batten down the hatches and fight to stay standing, together.

A week before the election I wrote a post about the future we want being built by us, together. Well, half our country decided to take the history we all share and drove it to the bad place, the dark place, we all feared. And now, we who are horrified, who are afraid and angry, who are scared to see this country fall into the hands of hatred so toxic it could sweep away our liberties and even our very lives, we have to decide what comes next. And how we will help shape the narrative that is to come.

History may be written by the victors, but we decide if we let them write that narrative without dissent. And when the time comes, when we need to, we can write our way out. And act up, speak out, stand together, help one another, through the darkest of times. That’s my plan. And I’m certainly making plans, thinking ahead.

Because right now I’m working past the horror. And to quote one of my favorite TV shows, The West Wing, whose wisdom we could all use a little of right now, I say this now: “Mrs. Lanningham, what’s next?”

I love you all on this tough day. I’m with you. Let’s be in this together, shall we?

The Future Is Not Yours

November 2, 2016 by Shoshana, posted in Criticism, Not Ready To Make Nice, Personal, Politics, Speaking Out

I wrote this post a few months back, then didn’t push the publish button. I suppose I’d run afoul of one too many articles this political season that made me mad or upset and I didn’t want to add to the noise. But in light of the escalation of the events at the Dakota Pipeline and the election now less than a week away, I think it’s worth revisiting. So when you read this, know a) it’s a post about politics again, so you’re forewarned, and b) the news articles and events mentioned at the beginning are from a month or so back. From there, enjoy.

I woke up this morning restless. It’s been a problem lately for me, an inability to sleep that’s had me feeling tired all day and irritable. I’ve stayed away from reading the news, which only seems to be making it worse. Only this morning, I woke up and turned on a video by Keith Olbermann cataloguing the myriad offenses by Donald J. Trump since his rise to the candidacy for president. If there’s anything to get irritable about, it’s Trump. But the video helped lock into perspective a lot of things that have been plaguing me for the last few months.

I’m a writer. Connecting points to make a cohesive narrative is what I do for a living. So when I look at today’s media reports, I often look for a coherent narrative to give me a view on the world. It’s what we all do for context of our lives. So I looked at my items in my feed the last few days and try to contextualize.

Item: Donald J. Trump leads one of the most bigoted campaigns in history to staggering approval from right wing Republicans. His candidacy brings out those who previously hid prejudiced ideas, uniting them under his banner in their rush to blame every ‘other’ group they can for their plight in life. All while ignoring the dangerous, uniformed, erratic, terrifying behavior of the man they support for the highest seat in the land.

Item: A pipeline is being created through Native American territory in the Dakotas, drawing protestors from across the world attempting to save sacred ground holding the bones of native ancestors. While many stand with the protestors, the media at large has remained silent on the unfolding issues, including the mauling of protestors by dogs.

Item: Recent Hugo awards winner N.K. Jemisin faces racist responses after winning for her novel, The Fifth Season. Hers is only one story in a continuing narrative of barely veiled hatred aimed at progressive storytelling in the science fiction and fantasy genres, led by conservative factions that wish to return to a time when fiction was less diverse in subject material and in creators.

Item: Stories trickle in from various media outlets about “alleged” rapists like Brock Turner receiving absurdly lenient sentences after being convicted in a court of law. Comparable crimes being perpetuated by people of color get more aggressive punishments, while white male defendants are often let off with nothing more than a slap on the wrist. The most recent unfolding case involves a man having sex on video with a toddler. While people outcry these deplorable cases, politicians still make statements about rape victims “just keeping their knees together.”

Item: A game organization issues a statement about not including potentially triggering content about sexual assault and rape in their game’s plots. This practice, while already standard in many organization’s policies (including my own), draws fire for constituting censorship and sparks bitter, often vicious debates, across the internet and convention spaces. The conversations become so embattled as to require admonishing posts asking people to remember that the person on the other side of the keyboard is a human being and not an invisible punching bag. This hallmarks a disturbing trend of harassment of creators for content that steps over the line from critique and conversation to bullying, exemplified by recent harassment by fans of a Steven Universe creator for supposed “queer baiting” in the show.

Item: A football star chooses to protest the rampant murder of black people by police by taking a knee during the National Anthem before a game. The incident draws a maelstrom of controversy wherein pundits and media alike try to paint the protest as unpatriotic, as an affront to our military and veterans, as worthy of sanction. They refuse to engage with the heart of the protest, namely the rampant trend of police brutality and violence against minorities across the country.

Item: Articles abound calling millennials lazy and directionless, citing their habits as killing everything from the housing market to our country’s competitive job market. Meanwhile, studies show most millennials face absurd financial burdens from student loans in an economy flooded with workers from a previous generation that has not retired. The narrative remains the same: the young are weak and directionless and ruining the world. The dialogue across generational lines goes on.

I could keep giving examples from the news. Yet here’s one from everyday life.

I was waiting on line for a prescription and chatting with my roommate. I point out how absurd it is that Hillary Clinton is being criticized for developing pneumonia while still going out on the campaign trail. I indicate how sexist the arguments against her have gotten, and how her behavior is indicative of so many women forced to work through their illnesses to survive in a male-dominated world. A man on line turns to agree with me and bemoans the chance of Trump getting into office. Yet when my roommate walks away, the man steps closer to add that Trump does have one thing correct: immigrants are stealing all our jobs, he says. When I protest that our country is made of immigrants, the man indicates his family come from immigrants too. But that “these Russians and Syrians” are the ones he means. Not every immigrant is bad. Just those.

And I’m left staring at him, as I often stare at my computer screen or at someone who tells me yet another example of unbridled prejudice running rampant in our society. From rape culture to the profiling of people of color as criminals, the blaming of millennials for society’s ills to the desecration of native people’s holy lands, to the hatred aimed at both Israelis and Palestinians from various sides, the list of things I simply boggle at is overwhelming. Because I often wonder… didn’t people grow up knowing this shit is WRONG?

I watched a lot of TV and movies as a kid, and read a lot of books. For that reason, I grew up with a lot of those media tropes we all know and love: Be a good person. Share. Love your neighbor. Stand up for what you believe in. Be yourself. Love others. Stand up to bullies. Eat healthy food. Friendship is magic. You know, all the good stuff. And what’s more, I believed it because these messages created a framework that backed up what I believed about the world: that being a good person, not just a ‘nice’ person but a person striving to do good, is what a person is supposed to do. Not only that, looking at the heroes of both fiction and the real world, they all are remembered for striving for better goals. Advancement of the world, it seems, has come from aiming for ideas like acceptance, fairness, equality, peace, courage, and empowerment.

And then I grew up and realized maybe some folks didn’t get the same programs when they were kids. Maybe they looked around and said “this is malarky” and looked for someone to blame, to other, over their problems. Maybe they rejected the narratives of tolerance for something else, a darker look at the world where the dog eat dog mentality is the only way to survive. Their narrative is so different to me it boggles the imagination. The future they envision is not mine.

I watched a lot of Star Trek growing up. And for all its flaws (and there are many), Star Trek presented a view of the future where people of all kinds existed side by side. Where people strive for a higher goal. Star Wars presented us with a narrative of people fighting for freedom against tyranny in a galaxy far, far away. Lord of the Rings showed a band of people unlike one another gathering to fight against a terrifying despot. X-Men battle not only despots but bigots willing to murder those unlike them. Harry Potter fights the wizarding form of white supremacy along with Voldemort. Katniss Everdeen fights a regime that represses the poor for the enjoyment of the rich.

The list goes on but the fiction of my life has carried the thru-line of people fighting for a future that involved equality, freedom, peace, and acceptance.

So it boggles me when I look at the world, at people, who can imagine a world where these are not the watchwords for their future. Where their peace and security comes at the expense of the hope of others.

Theirs is not my future.

“But Shoshana,” you may say, “these fictions aren’t real! They’re just stories, and things are easier in stories! Being the kind of good guy you’re talking about is hard and in a complex world-”

Not to paraphrase Kanye, but I’m gonna stop you there for a second. First off, isn’t part of the reason we create narratives like these to inspire us? To bring us to new heights and give us examples of better things, better times, heroes that point us to the better parts of our nature and say, “See, this is possible!” We aren’t going to be Gandalf in this world and hopefully we’re never going to be tossed into a child fighting ring on national television like Katniss, but we have choices in our lives we need to make and narratives like those I mentioned help can help us aspire to do better, be better, even in the face of hardships.

Also, and I’m going to say this with all due respect: who said choices to be good were meant to be easy? Or binary? Sure, in the books it’s simple. The bad guys wear dark colored hats and everyone knows Sauron is the bad guy while we root for the scrappy little Hobbits. Everyone knows making the right choices in life is harder. But just because it’s harder doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aim for it, aspire to it. Fight for it.

There’s a concept I’ve heard before: being on the wrong side of history. It presupposes, and rightly so, that history is written by the victors in any conflict and though context will remain part of a more complex narrative, events are remembered through the lens of the dominant viewpoint that survives. Anyone studying history realizes that historical time periods are washed in the context of who survived to take dominance during that time. So I often wonder, when we look back, what this decade and our current time will reflect. And I realize it entirely depends on whose ideals take root going forward.

Whose future will survive?

I grew up on Star Wars, on super heroes, on Harry Potter. I grew up the child of a thousand stories about how the world can be made a better place if we all come together in peace. The world outside is a far more complicated place than those stories, with nuance and difficulties so complex as to be nearly Gordian in their knotting. The impulse to throw up your hands and state that the ideals of our fictions cannot be applied to the muddled, gargantuan issues of our realities is strong. Yet history shows evidence of time periods where regression led the dominant narrative, and saw the backslide of civilizations and societies. Is that the story we want people to see when they look back at this time period? Is that the future we want to build?

I’m just a writer. I don’t make world policy, or social policy, or any policy at all. What I do is tell stories. I make games for people to live in through role-play, and spin fiction for people to enjoy. And I know in my own way, I have a limited impact on what the future will look like. But I think about how I can perpetuate the ideals I hold so dear. So I pledge to try and be conscientious in my creation. I will continue to strive to create fiction that reflects the kind of world I hope to see. I will push aside concerns about being labeled ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ or (heaven forfend) a ‘social justice warrior’ and instead recognize that everyone has an agenda in creating, and mine is to continue forward the ideas that drove me to believe in a better world when I was little.

I will acknowledge that we are all fallible. And we always have more to learn, and ways to improve, even if we think of ourselves as on the side of progressiveness and equality. I will recognize that one can make a choice that is progressive one day and then make a decision the next that harms another, even unintentionally. I pledge to try and learn from my mistakes, to listen to those around me, and to acknowledge and make amends when I’m in error or do harm.

I am fallible, but I pledge to try.

Nobody can tell me what my narrative will be after I’m gone, when it has become the future and my actions now are the past. As a favorite musical of mine laments, you don’t get to choose “who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” But I know that in a world seemingly at tug-of-war over acceptance, peace, and equality, I want to create towards a better, more equal tomorrow.

So I can say to those who perpetuate intolerance and bigotry and hate and fear: The future isn’t yours. The fate of this country, this world, belongs to all of us, together. And that is the exact opposite of your beliefs. The future isn’t yours, because your selfish ideas don’t believe in a future that includes others, and that selfishness is the opposite of what is good and true. I know it because even conservative views say so: be charitable, be welcoming, treat others as you’d like to be treated, love thy neighbor, etc. Except when those beliefs become tinged, tainted, corrupted, by intolerance do they become conditional and become the things we must fight against. When they become, “Love thy neighbor, except if thy neighbor isn’t like you.” Except.

That future of exceptions isn’t mine. It doesn’t belong to so many out there who stand as the exceptions to conservative, myopic rules. And since we have as much right to the world as anyone else (sorry, we do!), then your future doesn’t get to overrule ours. Your future isn’t ours and cannot hold sway for us to exist. Because you can’t wish people out of existence and your hatred cannot drive our world. Good people won’t let it happen. We can’t. And those views will only put you on the wrong side of history and resign you to a life in conflict.

And hey, I know even the most bigoted, intolerant person isn’t some mustache twirling villain. They’re people with concerns and fears and the earnest right to life, liberty, and all that… as long as that pursuit of happiness doesn’t try to snuff out that happiness for others. Once you step over that line, then we got some problems. I don’t have to be tolerant of intolerance as an ideal, because by its very nature, intolerance does not afford the same allowance to others. I don’t need to accept bigotry as an ideology because it doesn’t respect my right to exist. And that is where I draw the line and say to the bigots, the intolerant: think about how things go in the stories with the best happy endings and wonder, where did the bigots end up? Do you want to be Harry Potter, or a Death Eater? Folks might think evil is a little cool in stories, but in reality, it means harming others by your choices, your actions, your beliefs. Do you choose to bring harm into this world, or strive for a higher standard for yourself and others? You get to choose.

To quote Hamilton once more: “History has its eyes on you.” On us. On what we build as our legacy, especially right now.

And if you need any evidence that such fights can be won, look at the struggles progression has won over the years. Happy endings to battles aren’t like they are in the movies, because the struggle for a better world doesn’t end. It’s just little wins, stacking up into a better tomorrow.

This is our eye of the hurricane. We stand in it every day. And the question is left to all of us, in our own lives, in our individual arenas: what will you help make the future?

End note: We’re six days to what might be the biggest elections in our nation’s recent history. And history has its eyes on all of us now. Go out and vote, and consider what you’d like our future to look like. It really is in each of our hands.