Benjanun Sriduangkaew Counterattacks

Benjanun Sriduangkaew, who wrote as Requires Hate and now returns to the internet as “Bees,” has started a new, unlocked, Twitter account to defend herself: https://twitter.com/talkinghive

The first tweet might be this one:

https://twitter.com/talkinghive/status/575646140130983936

The sf community hasn’t heard much from her for awhile – by design:

https://twitter.com/talkinghive/status/575923885012463616

She says what made continued silence intolerable was a particular Hugo endorsement:

https://twitter.com/talkinghive/status/575889240380211200

Sriduangkaew has also posted “Six Months and Counting” to Medium.com.

Hi, I’m Benjanun Sriduangkaew. Friends call me Bee. I’m a writer of science fiction and fantasy, mostly of the ‘queer ladies have sweet love and also board spaceships’ variety.

I used to run the review blog Requires Only That You Hate (a nerd reference, not a statement of intent; surprise, I also wrote positive reviews). Last year, September 2014, I was very publicly doxxed and my professional identity connected to the blog. Almost instantly, my stalkers came back. The campaign of defamation and harassment began. In November 2014, a hit piece went live to round up my alleged sins based on speculation, anonymous gossip, and forum posts half a decade to a decade old; it implicitly called for the total destruction of my online existence. Wherever I’m published or positively covered, the comment section will immediately become a landfill of concern-trolling and anonymous rage. Anywhere with comments enabled becomes an attack vector. Anyone who speaks up for me will be swarmed almost instantly by a mob out to, allegedly, purge the Internet of harassment.

And Sriduangkaew is being defended by an ally on Tumblr – “The Tale of Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Part I: A Brief:

In early October of 2014, one of Benjanun’s editors and friends, Nick Mamatas, attempted to get in front of the burgeoning whisper campaign and outed her as RH, in a (perhaps misguided) attempt at damage control and taking control of the narrative. Over the course of the next month, writers and bloggers fell over themselves to talk about what an awful person she was, with the word “troll” constantly coming up. A troll. Someone whose main purpose is disruptive, evoking emotional reactions. Which is true, as far as it goes. But a troll does that for its own sake; think what you may of her methods, her goal was to increase awareness of the many issues endemic to genre fiction, issues of racism, misogyny, QUILTBAG representation and stereotypes, and scads of other issues. And that doesn’t even get into representation among creators. All of her criticism, as insightful and incisive as it was, reduced to “trolling.” I’m not exaggerating. I’ll be getting into this in detail, but suffice it to say that calling out writers for homophobia and racism was treated as “abuse” by the community. As most of the people posting in namespace about it were white women and men, some people of color expressed discomfort with how it was shaking down, including doubts about one of the major sources of allegations. This culminated in a blog post by one Laura Mixon (you can grab a PDF of it here, with comments, because apparently it broke her blogging platform…

4 thoughts on “Benjanun Sriduangkaew Counterattacks

  1. What a bunch of bullshit.

    She conveniently leaves out her death threats, threats to throw acid on people, and her attacks on fellow WOC because they dared to like to books or games she didn’t.

    I was on her old LJ flist for years and we were both on the various versions of the GAFF forum (Godawful Fan Fiction). She uses the language of the social justice movement to give more punch to her attacks on people who dare to like things she doesn’t. She has never given a goddamn about social justice as anything but a bat to wield

    Anyone who believes what she says about her own behavior is a fool.

  2. Benjanun Sriduangkaew and her moral outrage seem increasingly irreverent to me. Laura J. Mixon’s essay has the ring of truth and integrity that Sriduangkaew’s blog postings lack. I believe Laura J. Mixon, and I don’t believe Benjanun Sriduangkaew. It’s as simple as that.

  3. There are people out there far more toxic than Requires Hate.

    I won’t name any names.

  4. 350 tweets in less than a week? And nearly all of them angrily declaring herself a victim, with nearly no reflection on all the terrible things she did that led to the reaction against her. Nice. If she were a decent writer, she might at least be interesting, but I find her stories to be overwrought and vapid. So I’ll happily be ignoring her whinging for the foreseeable future.

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