My Reaction To "The Greak Geek Sexism Debate" (Part 1)

I'm sorta kicking myself for not seeing this article when it first came out, or maybe I did but didn't read it because I was at work. Not sure, either way, I just read it today. It's a roundup of three women's experiences at conventions, all nerd-related. It summarizes the incidents and aftermath pretty wekk, I think the piece speaks for itself, but I do have some commentary to add.

You can find the original article here.

This ended up being a little long so I'll write this in three parts, each entry dealing with a different incident in the article.

The first incident deals with a woman at Readercon, a literary convention in Burlington, MA. A convention volunteer followed her around, making sexual comments, and her attempts to walk away and shake him passively didn't work. At an evening event, things got physical as he pressed against her in front of a lot of people, and she loudly told him to cut it out. Even then, he continued to follow her around for the rest of the convention. She filed a complaint, but despite the convention's zero-tolerance policy, the volunteer wasn't banned because he was "sincerely regretful." At least not at first. Eventually the whole board of directors resigned and the volunteer was permanently banned.

I see the problem here. See, volunteers are extremely valuable to conventions. Most of the conventions are run by nonprofit organizations that can't pay for a huge staff of people, so running these cons is a labor of love for all involved, and I have a lot of respect for volunteers. They sacrifice their time, energy, and sanity to make sure things run as smoothly as possible, and dealing with their fair share of entitled douchecanoes in the process. So when someone willing to do this breaks the rules of the convention, not only do people find it hard to believe that one of their own could do something so distasteful, but the decision-makers are reluctant to let go of someone who - in their eyes - is an otherwise valuable asset to the convention. It's not like they have people lining up to take his place. No convention has a surplus of volunteers.

I don't mean to justify his behavior, of course! He still did a bad thing and should have gotten the banhammer right away. Fact is, as a volunteer he is representing the convention and needs to act as such. How can someone feel safe at a convention and trust the staff to act on incidents of harassment when even the volunteers are guilty of it?

Also, the entire board resigning was a little hasty. Yes, they made a bad decision, but I'd rather see them release an apology and then proactively work toward preventing this in the future, learning from their mistake. The problem with a changing of the guard with regard to conventions is that it never really works. They have experience planning the convention, and they've built a relationship with veteran attendees, and completely replacing the entire board may have negaive consequences for the overall convention.