Apparently I am not done trying to kill this horse with my bare claws tonight, so:

One of the arguments I see about not calling out first-time harassers, or younger harassers, or god forbid, talented harassers, is "what if we lose their work?"
"What if we hold them responsible for their ACTUAL ACTIONS, the things they ACTUALLY CHOSE TO DO, and it means we don't get more of their ineffable genius? WHAT THEN?"
Then genre will be fucking better for it.

Yeah, I mean that.
As I stated in an earlier thread, the first time I can say, unquestionably, that I was harassed by a genre professional--one old enough to have been my father--I was fifteen. FIFTEEN. Where was the concern about MY work?
The most recent time I was told, to my actual face, that I wasn't hot enough to be successful as a writer, I was thirty-two. Where was the concern about MY work? About losing MY ineffable genius?
"But Seanan, it's arrogant to claim that you're a genius, and losing your work would have been a blow to the genre." All writers are arrogant. We're like cats. Big sacks of anxiety and hubris.
You have to be a little arrogant to put a bunch of words in a line and assume people will want to read them, much less give you money for them, so. Let's play the game of credentials.
I am forty-two years old. My first book was published when I was thirty-one, sixteen years after my ass got groped by a man whose name appears on lists of all-time giants.
I am the first person to appear five times on a single Hugo ballot. I am the only person ever to win three Alex Awards. I am the third filker to win an Astounding Award. I have published, in under eleven years, more than fifty traditionally-published novels under three names.
I cringe even making these factual statements, because I feel like an arrogant jerk--and that's wrong too, we let men be proud of what they've accomplished, while women are supposed to downplay and self-efface--but they're all true.
So where was the concern for MY genius, when I was fifteen, eighteen, twenty-five? Where was the concern that these men, these lions of the genre, might drive me away by treating me as a tits-and-ass buffet? WHERE?
I will never not resent that becoming a brick in the wall of the castle where I grew up required first turning myself into Molly Grue.
But y'know what? I was fifteen and running around SF cons, and I managed never to grope anyone. I was twenty-one and drinking with men I admired, and I managed never to sexually assault anyone. I was thirty and desperate to break in, and I managed never to gaslight anyone.
I chose to focus on my "genius" and not my hormones, and I refused to be driven away, and if anyone wants to come at me for being the fuck OUT OF PATIENCE, whatever. Let them. Because no one cared about my genius when I was still a unicorn.
And now that I'm a Molly Grue, I'm still being told that my genius matters more than the boy who may or may not have any, but has so much POTENTIAL.

You want a red bull? This is how you fucking get one. We will drive your harassing asses into the sea, and run close behind you...
...and cover your fucking footprints.

OUR genius matters to. And so did the genius of every woman these literary lions and entitled little boys have driven away in the last fifty years. THEIR names should be on these walls. And they never will be.
THAT, more than anything, is what breaks my heart. We'll never know what we've lost. But we know, here and now, today, what we can afford to throw in the garbage.

There will always be more genius. Let's focus on the non-toxic kind.
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