Tomorrow a story I wrote will be published in Boston Review. Today I am putting The Paper Airplane on hiatus, locking every post, and freezing the very small number of paid subscriptions—the clock is stopped, and no accounts will be billed, until I begin writing again. Unsubscribe if you like. It is not possible to start a new paid subscription at this time.
My Facebook page and email accounts have been handed over to a third party who will triage threats and archive admonishments.1 I will not be reading them.
The strangest blessing of Gamergate is that I have had a decade to prepare myself. If you are sympathetic, stay offline and don’t draw fire. Talk face to face with other people. Donate to the Boston Review, which is a reader-supported nonprofit and likely to suffer. Read Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind; Václav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless”; Joanna Russ’s “Power and Helplessness in the Women’s Movement” and How to Suppress Women’s Writing; Paul Graham on moral fashions and Mark Twain on corn-pone opinions; Dworkin’s “I Want a Truce”; or Dale Spender’s Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them.
Better still, read Darrell Huff’s short and accessible How to Lie with Statistics, Ben Jones’ similarly short Avoiding Data Pitfalls, Jordan Ellenberg’s How Not to be Wrong, and Cailin O’Connor’s and James Owen Weatherall’s The Misinformation Age to learn to discern truth from lies for yourself.
This note will make more sense tomorrow.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (San Diego: Harcourt, 1989) 74-6: “One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which they are written to divine that the writer was meeting criticism.... It was the flaw in the center that had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.
But how impossible it must have been for them not to budge either to the right or to the left. What genius, what integrity it must have required in [the] face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking…. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, [Jane Austen and Emily Brontë] alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue—write this, think that. They alone were deaf to that persistent voice, now grumbling, now patronising, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let women alone, but must be at them, like some too conscientious governess… admonishing them, if they would be good and win, as I suppose, some shiny prize, to keep within certain limits.... It would have needed a very stalwart young woman in 1828 to disregard all those snubs and chidings and promises of prizes. One must have been something of a firebrand to say to oneself.... Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”