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silveradeptChallenge #7 asks us to speak of ourselves in the ways that others speak of us. Which seems like a contrary phrasing to the way this challenge is introduced:
It's very easy to see, though, how AFAB people are expected to conform to a box that says their value is not intrinsic, but extrinsic, and any failure to seek or take seriously the opinion of others (often, but not exclusively, AMAB people), solicited or unsolicited, about their appearance, career, children, parenting style, or any other facet that someone unqualified chooses to comment upon is very swiftly punished, whether socially, social media-ly, or physically. There's more than a few social media experiments around about swapping presentation on the Internet and having things so much more smoothly when someone is perceived male, or that a compliment given is swiftly retracted when the presumed woman on the other end agrees with it. Or you could examine the pick-up playbook technique of "negging," where the target of conquest is given a backhanded compliment and then expected to desire to prove to the person giving her negativity that she doesn't deserve it, up to and including sleeping with the person who insulted her. The entire tactic relies very specifically on a woman having been socialized to believe her value depended on others, and that she should never do anything that might make a man angry or upset at her, because he holds all the power to make her life happy or miserable. (The latter has an easier fix, inasmuch that it "just" requires men in power to prosecute and punish other men for their bad behavior toward women to the point where that behavior is severely curtailed.)
So, one part of this challenge is to say nice things about yourself, in public (or locked) spaces, because they are true and you should be able to say nice things about yourself without inviting the wrath of J. Random Egg and the bot armies and followers that swarm with them. I think there's another part, too, which has to do with the reclamation of words. Most obviously, you see this with the way that compliments about the attractiveness of a woman turn into slurs against her if she's not interested in the person giving those compliments, or if she simply acknowledges them and continues on her way, without stroking the ego or stopping for conversation. Or in the way that someone who is not conventionally attractive gets a broadside of insults immediately, as if somehow it will shame her into choosing to strive for the unattainable idea of conventional attractiveness. Several of the slurs in use will talk about body size and others will talk about either sexual orientation (as if being uninterested in men is the greatest crime a woman could commit), or a lack of discretion in the choice of sexual partners someone has (up to the point of rejecting them, which is clearly unacceptable). Those words have power in them, in that they can shape the expectations or excuse and justify antisocial and criminal behavior by dehumanizing the victims. So the people who are frequently the targets of those slurs can reclaim them as markers of identity and bring them (and the people using them) back into the realm of acceptable discourse, or as signifiers of where they choose to step outside the bounds of the society around them and celebrate the things that make them weird and wonderful. A full accounting of an identity or of a list of things to be proud of may very well entail using reclaimed words, talking about NSFW subjects, or otherwise taking pride or ownership of things that might invite The Discourse or take what was meant to be a detriment and make it a strength.
(Call people by the identifiers they wish to use, even if that's a word that you would never use for yourself and would find highly offensive if someone used it to describe someone else.)
With that lengthy introduction, I also note this challenge and the last one are both personal. Last challenge asked us to write about what we wanted, in and outside of fandom, to look outward and ask if there were things that could exist that would make things better for us, whether personally or as a community. I talked some about why having wants and asking for them takes courage, because knowing what someone wants can be a path to fulfilling that want or obstructing it. This challenge asks us to look internally, and find the things we are most proud of about ourselves and tell others about them, which carries a similar risk. Knowing what someone is proud of can lead to other people sharing their interests or their pride in you, or it can be used by someone to strike at you where it would hurt the most.
This challenge is difficult for me, as well, because skill is relative, as is morality of conduct. How do you accurately measure your abilities, knowing that there is always someone better and always someone worse? How do you measure "good", whether about morality, ethics, or fanfic? The Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department can show you how to make anything order the way you want it to, even if that ordering distorts reality. And there's the known quantity that where you are economically and socially, as well as your perceived race and gender, contributes to how you perceive your own abilities and how you compare them to others, leading to the phrases "being born on third base and convinced they hit a triple" and the all-purpose invocation "give me the confidence of a mediocre white man". How difficult it must be for a significant amount of the population to say things they believe are good about themselves, without qualifications or comparisons, and to say them somewhere that they believe won't provoke repercussions or getting piled on.
I want to say accurate things about myself, to not cross the line into bragging or claiming what I don't have, but that's difficult because it's almost a guarantee that I can't assess myself accurately enough.
Almost none of this matters or comes into play with how we talk about other people. And, at least in fannish circles, it's often seen as rude to give qualified praise, unless it's specifically requested. Because a lot of people do their fanworks for reasons other than "I intend to get technically better at this craft and your feedback helps me figure out where my technique is lacking" or "I intend to replicate the canon as faithfully as possible in this story, so feedback about where I have strayed from this is warranted." And the way a thing is delivered really does impact how it will be taken. You can deliver a fact (French schools do not have homeroom as the U.S. conceives of it), but if it comes in a package of "I really enjoyed this work, and as an FYI, there's no such thing as homeroom in French schools", that's going to be taken very differently than "This was cute and all that, but it really pisses me off when people don't do any basic research about the French school system and commit stupid mistakes like assuming there's a homeroom class. It completely ruins my experience of the fic." Commenting guides written for people that have trouble figuring out how to write comments often use as prompts things like "what did you like about the fic," "were there any memorable lines that you enjoyed," "what did you enjoy about the characterization," and things that focus on the good things that happened in the work. For the contrary idea, there's usually "Didn't like? Close the tab / use the back button."
The norms of conversation, at least where I am and in many of the circles I have been privileged to observe or participate in, say that it is a cardinal sin to stomp on the enthusiasm of a person who is creating for free, because they want to participate in the conversation with a fanwork. Usually because the craft involved takes practice and time before skill matches taste, and getting a negative reception to early offerings may very well cause someone to abandon that pursuit, and thus deprive the community of the polished, powerful works they could have created. So when we talk about others, we accentuate the things that are positive about them and their work, and usually we do so in a way that doesn't require qualification or comparison. We are far more complimentary, and more effectively so, about others and their works than our own. (I'm sure there are several cognitive biases at work with this, but I do not know them well enough to say which ones.)
And thus, having burnt through a thousand (or two) words explaining myself, we get back to the reason that I phrased the challenge the way I did. Because if you ask me to say good things, nice things, things I'm proud of, that are an intrinsic part of me, or that are things that I have done, I am going to fail so hard at it. Yay, I have a fic with more than 300 kudos. (Yay, one of my friends in the same fandom gathered way more than 300 kudos within the first day of posting a fic and routinely has more than 300 kudos on their works.) Yay, I have people telling me my Story Times do actually work well for neuroatypical children. (Yay, there are people doing so much cooler things in the library world and being recognized as Movers and Shakers for this.) Yay, my recipients enjoy the world I make for them for exchanges and other prompts. (Yay, other creators have their recipients and a lot of other users and guests saying they enjoyed their works created for prompts and exchanges.) Yay, I contributed a chapter to a book about making change happen in the library profession. (Who the fuck is going to spend $60 on the book that chapter comes in?) This can go on for just about anything that I can think of that might go in the column of things worth promoting. If there's nothing that can be said that's unqualified, then the exercise backfires, because it's supposed to be about defiance of excess humility and taking pride in yourself and your work.
If you asked me, though, and we know each other well enough, I could come up with five-ten things about you that are excellent and should be promoted. And might very well brush aside the qualification, temporization, or other things that would try to diminish the awesome. It's far easier to say good things about others, even if I have a certain amount of understanding of those people's inner lives and environments.
Physician, heal thyself, and all that.
So, to achieve something like what the challenge wants, I have to treat myself like an outside observer would. Theory of mind is an awesome skill. So, let's start with when I tried to imagine what hook a profile writer might use to describe my fic output positively, settling on how doing so many exchanges every year is akin to being a short-order cook serving up beloved favorites in short amounts of words. It's a way of making being multifannish into a benefit, and being multifannish and willing to write for things that look interesting has produced some works that I really liked, in addition to the recipients.
I've been told repeatedly that I do exchange prompts well. Apparently, the ability to summarize and explain what you are looking for in a way that gives a creator an idea and enough flexibility to do it is a skill. (I don't usually have a Dear Creator letter. Partially because I don't know myself well enough to know what things are bulletproof and what are absolute DNWs, but also because I feel like I can summarize the idea or key concept(s) for what I would like in the space provided, and let the creator fill in the details of how that gets done.) It seems to work out reasonably well so far.
I had a work performance evaluation today, and the running theme through that seemed to be "consistently helpful," so that's a thing. It can be backed up by having helped people move when it was just myself and them (outside of a work context), and many of the comments in the work context said specifically about being helpful to others and being willing to volunteer to fill shortages in staffing at my location and elsewhere. This is apparently not the norm, which I did not know. I think "consistently helpful/supportive" is what I aim for when it comes to online and fannish interactions as well as more embodied ones, so when that happens, it makes me happy. (The replies to the various "love meme" style comment threads I've participated in bear out that "consistently helpful/supportive" is achieved.)
And then there are the comments themselves on fic I've written, y'know, literally using other people's words to talk about the good things I've done:
I suspect, for many of us, if we could see ourselves as others saw us, without the brainweasels invading to try and tell us not to believe those perceptions, it would do us all some good. Because whomever that person is that gets those kinds of comments, I want to write like them! (Oh, wait, I am them.) So it can't be all bad. Some of it, even, has to be good.
The world tells us we must be humble, we must take a compliment, but never to compliment ourselves. Never toot our own horn and many other cliches about how to be proper and not overbearingly egotistical. We at FSC say, f&#k that! Tell us of all the ways you are the BEST! All the things you’ve done, want to do or will one day do. All the ways you are marvelously you.This insistence on humility and acceptance without self-promotion is also highly gendered. Given the makeup of transformative fandom, it's not a bad assumption to make that humility has been a cornerstone of their social instruction, but it is still an assumption. AMAB people are generally not taught they must be humble and accepting and to avoid demonstrating competence where others might have their feelings hurt about it. It's more complicated for not-white AMAB people, because white supremacy is swift and vicious when it believes someone who isn't white is demonstrating too much competence, but from what I've read about how not-white people survive in white supremacy, it's about code-switching, rather than never believing you have worth, except as defined by others, in the first place. It is entirely possible in completely wrong about this, because I am white and so, I don't have the personal experience to back up what I'm saying.
It's very easy to see, though, how AFAB people are expected to conform to a box that says their value is not intrinsic, but extrinsic, and any failure to seek or take seriously the opinion of others (often, but not exclusively, AMAB people), solicited or unsolicited, about their appearance, career, children, parenting style, or any other facet that someone unqualified chooses to comment upon is very swiftly punished, whether socially, social media-ly, or physically. There's more than a few social media experiments around about swapping presentation on the Internet and having things so much more smoothly when someone is perceived male, or that a compliment given is swiftly retracted when the presumed woman on the other end agrees with it. Or you could examine the pick-up playbook technique of "negging," where the target of conquest is given a backhanded compliment and then expected to desire to prove to the person giving her negativity that she doesn't deserve it, up to and including sleeping with the person who insulted her. The entire tactic relies very specifically on a woman having been socialized to believe her value depended on others, and that she should never do anything that might make a man angry or upset at her, because he holds all the power to make her life happy or miserable. (The latter has an easier fix, inasmuch that it "just" requires men in power to prosecute and punish other men for their bad behavior toward women to the point where that behavior is severely curtailed.)
So, one part of this challenge is to say nice things about yourself, in public (or locked) spaces, because they are true and you should be able to say nice things about yourself without inviting the wrath of J. Random Egg and the bot armies and followers that swarm with them. I think there's another part, too, which has to do with the reclamation of words. Most obviously, you see this with the way that compliments about the attractiveness of a woman turn into slurs against her if she's not interested in the person giving those compliments, or if she simply acknowledges them and continues on her way, without stroking the ego or stopping for conversation. Or in the way that someone who is not conventionally attractive gets a broadside of insults immediately, as if somehow it will shame her into choosing to strive for the unattainable idea of conventional attractiveness. Several of the slurs in use will talk about body size and others will talk about either sexual orientation (as if being uninterested in men is the greatest crime a woman could commit), or a lack of discretion in the choice of sexual partners someone has (up to the point of rejecting them, which is clearly unacceptable). Those words have power in them, in that they can shape the expectations or excuse and justify antisocial and criminal behavior by dehumanizing the victims. So the people who are frequently the targets of those slurs can reclaim them as markers of identity and bring them (and the people using them) back into the realm of acceptable discourse, or as signifiers of where they choose to step outside the bounds of the society around them and celebrate the things that make them weird and wonderful. A full accounting of an identity or of a list of things to be proud of may very well entail using reclaimed words, talking about NSFW subjects, or otherwise taking pride or ownership of things that might invite The Discourse or take what was meant to be a detriment and make it a strength.
(Call people by the identifiers they wish to use, even if that's a word that you would never use for yourself and would find highly offensive if someone used it to describe someone else.)
With that lengthy introduction, I also note this challenge and the last one are both personal. Last challenge asked us to write about what we wanted, in and outside of fandom, to look outward and ask if there were things that could exist that would make things better for us, whether personally or as a community. I talked some about why having wants and asking for them takes courage, because knowing what someone wants can be a path to fulfilling that want or obstructing it. This challenge asks us to look internally, and find the things we are most proud of about ourselves and tell others about them, which carries a similar risk. Knowing what someone is proud of can lead to other people sharing their interests or their pride in you, or it can be used by someone to strike at you where it would hurt the most.
This challenge is difficult for me, as well, because skill is relative, as is morality of conduct. How do you accurately measure your abilities, knowing that there is always someone better and always someone worse? How do you measure "good", whether about morality, ethics, or fanfic? The Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Department can show you how to make anything order the way you want it to, even if that ordering distorts reality. And there's the known quantity that where you are economically and socially, as well as your perceived race and gender, contributes to how you perceive your own abilities and how you compare them to others, leading to the phrases "being born on third base and convinced they hit a triple" and the all-purpose invocation "give me the confidence of a mediocre white man". How difficult it must be for a significant amount of the population to say things they believe are good about themselves, without qualifications or comparisons, and to say them somewhere that they believe won't provoke repercussions or getting piled on.
I want to say accurate things about myself, to not cross the line into bragging or claiming what I don't have, but that's difficult because it's almost a guarantee that I can't assess myself accurately enough.
Almost none of this matters or comes into play with how we talk about other people. And, at least in fannish circles, it's often seen as rude to give qualified praise, unless it's specifically requested. Because a lot of people do their fanworks for reasons other than "I intend to get technically better at this craft and your feedback helps me figure out where my technique is lacking" or "I intend to replicate the canon as faithfully as possible in this story, so feedback about where I have strayed from this is warranted." And the way a thing is delivered really does impact how it will be taken. You can deliver a fact (French schools do not have homeroom as the U.S. conceives of it), but if it comes in a package of "I really enjoyed this work, and as an FYI, there's no such thing as homeroom in French schools", that's going to be taken very differently than "This was cute and all that, but it really pisses me off when people don't do any basic research about the French school system and commit stupid mistakes like assuming there's a homeroom class. It completely ruins my experience of the fic." Commenting guides written for people that have trouble figuring out how to write comments often use as prompts things like "what did you like about the fic," "were there any memorable lines that you enjoyed," "what did you enjoy about the characterization," and things that focus on the good things that happened in the work. For the contrary idea, there's usually "Didn't like? Close the tab / use the back button."
The norms of conversation, at least where I am and in many of the circles I have been privileged to observe or participate in, say that it is a cardinal sin to stomp on the enthusiasm of a person who is creating for free, because they want to participate in the conversation with a fanwork. Usually because the craft involved takes practice and time before skill matches taste, and getting a negative reception to early offerings may very well cause someone to abandon that pursuit, and thus deprive the community of the polished, powerful works they could have created. So when we talk about others, we accentuate the things that are positive about them and their work, and usually we do so in a way that doesn't require qualification or comparison. We are far more complimentary, and more effectively so, about others and their works than our own. (I'm sure there are several cognitive biases at work with this, but I do not know them well enough to say which ones.)
And thus, having burnt through a thousand (or two) words explaining myself, we get back to the reason that I phrased the challenge the way I did. Because if you ask me to say good things, nice things, things I'm proud of, that are an intrinsic part of me, or that are things that I have done, I am going to fail so hard at it. Yay, I have a fic with more than 300 kudos. (Yay, one of my friends in the same fandom gathered way more than 300 kudos within the first day of posting a fic and routinely has more than 300 kudos on their works.) Yay, I have people telling me my Story Times do actually work well for neuroatypical children. (Yay, there are people doing so much cooler things in the library world and being recognized as Movers and Shakers for this.) Yay, my recipients enjoy the world I make for them for exchanges and other prompts. (Yay, other creators have their recipients and a lot of other users and guests saying they enjoyed their works created for prompts and exchanges.) Yay, I contributed a chapter to a book about making change happen in the library profession. (Who the fuck is going to spend $60 on the book that chapter comes in?) This can go on for just about anything that I can think of that might go in the column of things worth promoting. If there's nothing that can be said that's unqualified, then the exercise backfires, because it's supposed to be about defiance of excess humility and taking pride in yourself and your work.
If you asked me, though, and we know each other well enough, I could come up with five-ten things about you that are excellent and should be promoted. And might very well brush aside the qualification, temporization, or other things that would try to diminish the awesome. It's far easier to say good things about others, even if I have a certain amount of understanding of those people's inner lives and environments.
Physician, heal thyself, and all that.
So, to achieve something like what the challenge wants, I have to treat myself like an outside observer would. Theory of mind is an awesome skill. So, let's start with when I tried to imagine what hook a profile writer might use to describe my fic output positively, settling on how doing so many exchanges every year is akin to being a short-order cook serving up beloved favorites in short amounts of words. It's a way of making being multifannish into a benefit, and being multifannish and willing to write for things that look interesting has produced some works that I really liked, in addition to the recipients.
I've been told repeatedly that I do exchange prompts well. Apparently, the ability to summarize and explain what you are looking for in a way that gives a creator an idea and enough flexibility to do it is a skill. (I don't usually have a Dear Creator letter. Partially because I don't know myself well enough to know what things are bulletproof and what are absolute DNWs, but also because I feel like I can summarize the idea or key concept(s) for what I would like in the space provided, and let the creator fill in the details of how that gets done.) It seems to work out reasonably well so far.
I had a work performance evaluation today, and the running theme through that seemed to be "consistently helpful," so that's a thing. It can be backed up by having helped people move when it was just myself and them (outside of a work context), and many of the comments in the work context said specifically about being helpful to others and being willing to volunteer to fill shortages in staffing at my location and elsewhere. This is apparently not the norm, which I did not know. I think "consistently helpful/supportive" is what I aim for when it comes to online and fannish interactions as well as more embodied ones, so when that happens, it makes me happy. (The replies to the various "love meme" style comment threads I've participated in bear out that "consistently helpful/supportive" is achieved.)
And then there are the comments themselves on fic I've written, y'know, literally using other people's words to talk about the good things I've done:
I admire so much how you wrote about the aerial silks themselves. It's Adrien's POV and it looks like MAGIC, and from me as a reader who knows nothing either, you really paint a vivid picture how elegant, graceful and baffling it was to look at. I am amazed how you can write about such a complicated technical thing in a way that it paints the perfect mental image: gorgeous and fluid and impossible.
I was full on cackling like 2/3rds to the end of the Pardoner's tale the first and second time I read it and by the third was like....[skeletons "oooh"ing.gif] (and the cackling again over the quatrain at the end). I mean he was so creepy but he was so honest about being creepy and idk, maybe this is just my shitty religious upbringing but I know the kind of douchebags he describes when he talks about the church so it was SO easy to believe everything he said was real. It probably is. Also I loved how you described him?? Like it was visually so coherent + the detail of his Southern Accent slipping away liiiiike. I was yelling! What an image! What a tiny, necessary, amazing little detail! That just defined the character for me. And how you told his story!!! So good!!!
[...]
I had seriously, zero expectations going into this fic and I am delighted to tell you that anything I could have dreamed up would not have been NEARLY as good as this fic.
Seriously, this was so brilliant and so clever. It forced me to think and to engage in the text in a way i normally wouldn't. If I hadn't left such a long comment and also wouldn't be breaking a thousand rules of fanfic, I would send this to the Medieval Lit professor who taught me to love Canterbury Tales because I think he'd get such a kick out of it. I certainly did!
Thank you so much for every word of it, for the dancing and the metalbending and how vivid and real it was. I felt like I was watching her do it and working through her emotions in a way that's more real to her than the way others among us brood and then Korra being naughty and Kuvira taken off guard at the end, then deciding to use and leverage it.
that marichat bit, tho
*snickers*
also aww
I'm delighted! This is adorable and hilarious -- I was snickering through pretty much the entire thing, and would quote like half of it back at you if I started quoting good lines -- and Elliot's horror at being a trigon coach was fantastic. All three of them felt so delightfully in-character, especially Elliot "I hate doing anything but hey would you like another five brilliant ideas right now?" Schafer and his ability to find loopholes and form community bonds without quite realising that's what he's doing until he's already done it.
I suspect, for many of us, if we could see ourselves as others saw us, without the brainweasels invading to try and tell us not to believe those perceptions, it would do us all some good. Because whomever that person is that gets those kinds of comments, I want to write like them! (Oh, wait, I am them.) So it can't be all bad. Some of it, even, has to be good.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 07:07 am (UTC)this is familiar
…I feel like I should apologize for being one of those examples but also I feel like if I did you'd tell me that's actively not the point of this challenge?
no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 07:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 07:52 am (UTC)One can probably draw a direct line from that to why there's [redacted] [redacting] your [redacted] right now.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 07:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 01:01 pm (UTC)I have no problems as such saying what I’m good at when ot’s about deeds, making things happen. So, how about saying nice things about me as a person?
...psshh, nevermind.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 03:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 05:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 11:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 10:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 11:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-15 04:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-15 08:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-15 05:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-15 08:12 pm (UTC)The struggle is absolutely real, and I'm not surprised that I wrote a whole thing about being an impostor without actually saying the thing by name.
Enjoy the fic! There's a little bit of a lot of things there.