but somewhere here in between the city walls of dying dreams

Ooof. There's a disturbing list of sexual predators making the rounds, being collated by Josh Simons, and it seems to feature an incredibly high number of streamers and gamers.

This is extremely painful to read through, but it goes into more of the accusations. We're just at the forefront of this, so more information will be coming, but it's already a daunting amount of names to winnow through. I highly recommend if anyone finds a name of a Twitch streamer or a YouTube lets-player that they follow, at the least, Google them. Find out if there's any basis. Find out if it's become a he-said-she-said issue--not that that changes the accusations, exactly, but there is a difference between someone contesting something that's been said, and someone apologizing for something.

There's at least one name on the list that's causing some mild personal pain, but it does explain this video. At the time I first saw that, I was watching YouTube through Chromecast in the living room, where I have very little access to any video's description. So I really had no idea why Cryaotic was suddenly part of the call and response of abusers.

Now I know. It's very disheartening.

One of the things he says in the description is that nothing "physical" happened between him and anyone under-aged--and, I mean, okay, that's good, but that's also him acknowledging virtual involvement. Which rings some dire bells for me personally--I've never interacted with him, that's not what I mean, but one of my loves in the past...I'd been involved with him for two years, and one day one of his friends ported in with a breezy "Hey, dude, happy 18th!", and my heart hit the floor.

Because I can count. I knew when we became a couple. And I knew we became a couple before his birthday two years back, significantly before. So I was dating someone that effectively, in my mind, I considered a child. That was not a good day.

But. As scarring as that incident was, as paranoid as it made me, I was unaware. Cry, from everything I've been able to discover, was aware. That's an important difference.

I'm now unsubscribed from him on YouTube, but that entire situation is playing large on Twitter also, because there are a great many people who knew abusers on the list, and they're getting attacked because how could they not have known? Why didn't they warn anyone? Why didn't they care about the damage their friends were causing?

And I think the best answer to that comes from writer Seanan McGuire in a thread of tweets. She's speaking mainly of writers, but this also applies to any serial abuser. I'll be reprinting some of them here:

As we're discussing harassers in SF/F yet again, we're getting the aftershock wave of "how did SHE not KNOW?!" which always follows on, usually aimed at women who are shaped like me. (June 21, 2020)

And part of the answer is that all abusers have a type. Maybe that type is someone you consider hot, maybe not. Maybe it's a point in their career, an emotional state, whatever. And for whatever reason, some of us missed the mark.

(This is neither a mark we were aiming at nor anything to be ashamed of. It's just that some people--most often men, but some people--walk around painting targets on anyone they find attractive, and they skipped over us. We were fat, or mouthy, or too well-connected.)

And no, not every abuser is a secret genius. But the ones who last long enough to trigger whisper networks, who can build a career before they fuck up in public or on camera...they're canny, even if they're not clever. They know how to not get caught.

Several abusers have used me and @infamousfiddler as cover, because if the mouthy bisexual feminists like them, they can't be bad men, right? And we're fat frumpy girls with weird hair, so clearly they're not shallow predators! Right? Right?

...wrong.

We didn't know because they never indulged in those behaviors while we were around. They were clever enough to be careful. And because we were known to be friends of theirs, no one came to us when the whispers were brewing. We only get looped in AFTER the explosion.

No one deserves to be harassed or treated like a vending machine for sex, ever, for any reason. I have a good friend who is smart--brilliant, even--and gorgeous enough to be a little annoying. She dances pole. She glues googly eyes to her butt and spins them to amuse people.

Her Instagram is a wasteland of [a**holes] assuming that because her butt can see them, they have the right to demand she post pictures with less clothing, or send nudes, or sit on their faces. And they don't.

No one has a right to demand anything of her that she doesn't freely give. She's lucky in that she's not in a genre-adjacent job, so when she does cosplay at things like SDCC, she doesn't have to worry that telling a creep to fuck off will hurt her job.

For predatory dudes seeking camouflage, surrounding yourself with women where you know that the snap judgement of anyone who sees you will be "see? He has female friends he doesn't want to [f*ck]!" is a cheap and easy way to get it.

So I guess I don't have a conclusion here, beyond "he can be predatory when you're not in the room; him being good to you doesn't make him good" and "some predators don't [sh*t] where they eat, we really don't always know."

And a pertinent reply from zuyadragon:

how did she not know? easy. she wasn't his preferred type of target so he treated her well.

And, uh...there's this.

See, I know, I know, with absolute surety, there are good men out there. I've met many of them. I know several. They exist. But I think that's why episodes like this are so disheartening--when we think it's been long enough that culture would have caught a clue as to why using this sort of influence is so very wrong...only to be proven wrong again. And again.

Because while it's still wrong, it's one thing to point to a Weinstein and say, well, that's bad, but that was his generation. It was wrong, but they were raised that way. But--pointing at a 30-something gamer? A 20-something gamer? Who we think at least was raised to believe women were people if nothing else?

It's hard to take. And it's harder not to say things like "No man can be trusted", or "they're all like this", because...that's no more true than that all women want is a stern hand and babies. People are people, individual, distinct, different.

And, very often, disappointing.