New Year's Forecast: Quiet, with a large system of change on the horizon

[missroserose]

It's been a nice holiday. What with not having many social contacts in the area, along with post-Christmas brokitude and some pretty severe cold/snow, we decided that a quiet observation at home was in order. But it was lovely nonetheless. Last night, I made one of my favorite incredibly rich meals, so Brian got a holiday off from cooking. When midnight rolled around, we had champagne cocktails and lay down on the hardwood floor by the fire (Brian: "I think 2014 might have to be the Year of Rugs") and recounted our many blessings for the past year. Today, we slept in before braving the (continuing) snow and taking the bus down to a nifty little Jewish deli in Lakeview for lunch, and after getting back I cleaned the bathroom and had a nice bath with one of the fancy bath bombs from my Christmas stocking. Now there's lemon pudding cakes in the oven, and when they come out we'll have the rest of the bubbly with them and watch Sherlock. {That part was written a few hours ago. The lemon pudding cakes were amazing, and so was the show. For a story about a protagonist who's completely clueless about human relationships, it's so incredibly smart about interactions and the power dynamics inherent therein.}

I don't have a lot of resolutions per se. I did tweet my wish for 2014: "Wishing us all new and better opportunities, and new and better guts to stand up and say 'I'll do it.'" I admit it's a bit of a selfish wish, given my plans for the upcoming month/year, but it's nonetheless true - I don't want to be the only one making scary plans and doing scary things!

About those plans...one of the biggest changes that's going to be happening is that I'll be making a concerted effort to raise my public profile somewhat. I don't know by how much, since popularity is a difficult thing to predict, but I'm hoping to make inroads in author communities and the like - I've met a lot of cool author-y people online, but even aside from that, name recognition is a good thing, and can often translate into sales. I've already re-Twitterpated myself (and even attracted a few followers, thanks to a few interactions with the ever-hilarious Chuck Wendig), and I'll be starting a writing blog this week, probably on Wordpress.

All of which is to say that I'm trying to decide what to do with my Dreamwidth/LiveJournal accounts. So far I've been fine with keeping them 99.9% public, as I tend to curate my friends carefully, pick low-drama folks to hang out with, and generally be obscure enough that even when I weigh in on a hot-button topic, it doesn't attract a lot of attention. But that may not be the case in the future. And there's a lot of history here - more than a decade, now, including many bits of myself and my growth process that I'm...not ashamed of, precisely, but that could easily be taken out of context. It doesn't help that I'm planning on writing in a controversial genre/about some controversial topics, and while I'll do my best (as always) to be fair and diplomatic on the subjects, that doesn't mean I won't piss some people off.

I've been thinking for a while about exercising LiveJournal's (and, I assume, Dreamwidth's) "change all your past posts to friends-only" feature, but resisted it so far largely because I know at least a few of my friends read this because they see the links through Facebook or an RSS reader, and if I were to only make posts under friends-lock the only people who would see it would be the ones who check LJ/DW regularly. Which - let's face it - is an increasingly small number.

I'm still deciding what the writing blog should focus on. If I make it a personal blog like this one, chances are that I'll stop posting here almost entirely. If I decide to focus on a few specific subjects (feminism, sexuality, the role of porn in Western society, and the cultural experience of sexually proactive women all seem likely topics, given my interests and the subject matter of my writing), I may keep this blog up separately for more personal journal-style posts. But either way, chances are I'll be going exclusively friends-only, here. So if you'd like to keep up here, and aren't already signed on my friends list on either site, let me know.

Comments

[jamesd]

One of the unfortunate things I did many years ago was make work-related posts from an LJ account. That caused me to cease all use of that account for personal posts, except with friends lists, often custom friends lists. It's also why I'm replying here, not there. I simply don't want my co-workers to know all or even much about my personal life unless I make an explicit choice to tell one of them something. Worse still, back in the middle of the last decade I was quite high profile at a very high profile place and that was mentioned, so could be linked to me at LJ. That profile has dropped while the current work one has increased.

In your context, that causes me to wonder whether you might usefully try to create a clearly distinct namespace for work and persona life, so it's not possible to easily use web search tools to link the two via things like account names.

If you write about something controversial you'll be sufficiently eloquent that you will upset people who hold different views, just because of the quality of your arguments. The higher your profile gets the greater the number, regardless of the merits or otherwise of their views. Some of those will be sufficiently upset to seek anything they can find about you to use that to try to get you to change or have a lower profile somehow. If you can, try to structure things from the outset so that they will fail to find anything to use against you.

Having a place to simply chat with accepting people is useful for when you want a break from that sort of thing, so do try to keep or create one.

I tend to very strongly dislike strife, so I may be more keen on segregation than you.

[missroserose]

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly why I've been planning to actively separate personal accounts from public ones. I don't mind confronting uncomfortable issues, but lots of people simply don't understand boundaries and think that finding something less-than-complimentary from your past means they "win". As opposed to, y'know, actually addressing the issue at hand. I already have my Facebook more or less locked down, and LJ added a feature a while back where you can change all your previous posts to friends-only. Hopefully DW has it too.

Not to sound like a drama queen, but I'm trying to decide whether or not to create a pseudonym. Female writers on subjects like gender relations and sexuality are consistently targeted for all kinds of harassment, and I'm of two minds as to whether I want to put my name and likeness out there. On the one hand, there's safety concerns involved - I'm well aware it's not at all difficult to track people down via the Internet, especially when you have their name. But on the other, if no one stands up to the trolls, that's effectively letting them win. And I dislike the idea of hiding behind a pseudonym. I'm lucky enough to be in a privileged group that has relatively little to fear from raising a shitstorm (no current concerns about hurting job prospects, self-confident enough to deal with harassers, white and well-spoken and wealthy and thus able to expect that my concerns will be heard, should I raise them with police). But on the other hand, constantly having to be on your guard changes you, and there's a certain appeal in having a layer of insulation there. (Though that is, of course, no guarantee of safety any longer.)

Of course, this is all hypothetical - I may never reach the level of visibility that calls down that kind of ire. But it's worth thinking about, even though it's frustrating that all the options appear to be bad ones. I can't even express how frustrated I am that the whiners and creeps are holding any conversation about gender hostage, to the point where most venues don't even want to touch it. (I have a friend who works in penetration-testing and security, and has a talk she's wanted to give about gender and pen-testing - it's absolutely relevant! People, the number one security risk, react differently to female-presenting folks than male-presenting! - and she's submitted it to four conferences, three of whom had someone on the board actively ask for it. All four ultimately rejected it, I strongly suspect because they didn't want to spark exactly this sort of shitstorm.)

Hrm. Maybe I should write a post about this. :)

[jamesd]

I think that you should use a pseudonym. There is a long tradition of doing so in the arts in general and for authors in particular and there are many and excellent reasons why this is so.

In some ways it looks as though your usually very useful introspection is harming you here. Your focus is naturally on the part that gives you ethical trouble. Yet that part is not routinely used in the arts, including by males. You appear to be giving undue focus to it because it's the part that troubles you. Perhaps you might research the many and varied reasons why pseudonyms are so popular in the field and list those to help give you context for the decision with less focus on just that one aspect?

Your friend's presentation would probably be interesting. I assume that those attempting penetrations who pretend to be helpless, young and pretty women have higher success rates in many social engineering situations than those who pretend to be an authority figure or a routine employee.

[missroserose]

No, I don't see the use of a pseudonym as an ethical issue, per se. As you say, there are many excellent reasons to do so. However, I feel like it gives a piece (especially a piece about a controversial subject) a lot more punch if the author is willing to put their name to it - they're being willing enough to build their reputation around/stake said reputation on what they're saying, so they must really believe it. This may just be my own perception, and may or may not be true, but it's the part that sticks in my craw the most. That, and I actually quite like my name. :)

Re: pen-testing, yeah, that's part of it. Some of it is also likely related to the fact that people are much more likely to assume that you don't know much about anything technical if you're a woman, especially an attractive woman. Which can be a downside in many situations, but is probably a good thing if you're trying to access sensitive information, since they're less likely to be careful around you.