It argues that the best way to stop sexual abuse in tech communities is to watch for and fight it when people try to set themselves up as rock stars. That is, concentrate attention and adulation on themselves, not to mention making themselves indispensible to events and organizations, and enjoying the byproduct that they can get away with violating people's limits.
This resonated so hard with me in terms of the pattern of people in the BDSM community who turn out to be predatory, and seems to me to offer concrete advice we should follow. Here are some of the passages that particularly struck me:
Watch for smaller signs of boundary pushing and react strongly...
Sometimes rock stars don’t outright break the rules, they just push on boundaries repeatedly, trying to figure out exactly how far they can go and get away with it, or make it so exhausting to have boundaries that people stop defending them. For example ... stand just a little too close to people on purpose, lightly touch people and ignore non-verbal cues to stop (but obey explicit verbal requests… usually), make comments which subtly establish themselves as superior or judges of others, interrupt in meetings, make small verbal put-downs, or physically turn away from people while they are speaking. Rock stars feel entitled to other people’s time, work, and bodies – signs of entitlement to one of these are often signs of entitlement to the others.
Create a strong, specific, enforceable code of conduct for your organization – and enforce it, swiftly and without regard for the status of the accused violator. Rock stars get a kick out of breaking the rules, but leaders know they are also role models, and scrupulously adhere to rules except when there’s no alternative way to achieve the right thing. Rock stars also know that when they publicly break the little rules and no one calls them out on it, they are sending a message that they can also break the big rules and get away with it....
Start with the assumption that harassment reports are true and investigate them thoroughly...
if things have gotten to the point where you’ve heard about an incident, it’s almost always just the tip of the iceberg.
Narcissists are skilled at making good first impressions, at masking abusive behavior as merely eccentric or entertaining, at taking credit for others’ work, at fitting our (often inaccurate) stereotypes of leaders as self-centered, self-aggrandizing, and overly confident. We tend to confuse confidence with competence, and narcissists are skilled at acting confident....
Signs of a rock star... may include insisting on being the single point of failure for one or more of: your technical infrastructure (e.g., domain name registration or website), your communication channels, your relationship with your meeting host or landlord, your primary source of funding, your relationship with the cops, etc. This increases the rock star’s power and control over the organization. To prevent this, identify core resources, make sure two or more people can access/administer all of them, and make sure you have a plan for friendly but sudden, unexplained, or hostile departures of those people....
If people make the argument that some people are too valuable to censure for violating the code of conduct, remove them from decision-making positions. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you are asking yourself if someone’s benefits outweigh their liabilities, recognize that they’ve already cost the community more than they can ever give to it and get to work on ejecting them quickly....
We have been in this position – of being powerless against rock stars… we have all mourned the spaces that we have left when they have become unliveable because of abuse.
I've had thoughts along these lines for a while, primarily inspired by watching central figures in the erotic hypnosis community get banned over the past five years or so but only after violating the consent of numerous people each. How do we become more resilient to dropping such central figures? Or more importantly, how do we stop figures from getting so central, how do we stop raising people above rigorous consent standards in the first place?
I love a well-prepared class based on deep first hand experience, I get fired up when I meet someone with cool ideas and skills, and I'm excited so many people are writing new books about my kink. I'm also conscious of the hard, often underappreciated work people do to build big public events. At the same time, we shaped our Boston erotic hypnosis group, BEHIVE, to resist the idea of elevating any one person above the rest (for example by specifying a five person executive committee, all with access to the group's resources and an equal vote) and to emphasize by the structure of our events that when it comes to hypnosis, we are all Initiates, Virtuosos and Enthusiasts (that's what the IVE stands for!)
And we're becoming more convinced about this principle all the time, for example in my wife's writing "Queer femme tops thrive when you weed out patriarchal 'competence'". Because of our approach, for example using the Koala box and defaulting to believing accusations, no matter who they're about, I believe we have more success at cultivating new, confident hypno tops (and bottoms and switches!), particularly from those demographics, than other hypnosis groups. And each one brings amazing unique things.
That's what we want for the future of hypnokink, all over the place: a steady growth of new voices, and ideas that spark off each other in an egalitarian playground. No one a guru, god, maestro, mayor, sensei, dean, or rock star.
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