Thread by @AlexandraErin

So, here's a quick thing about power differentials and the view from inside vs. the view from outside.

Everything that you do normally is normal to you. Everywhere you go often is familiar to you. What is normal and familiar to you may be very comfortable for you.

If you don't make a habit of imagining the view from outside, it can be easy to imagine they're just *comfortable*.

If you're a friend hosting a friend or whatever and there's no appreciable power differential -- you don't hold anything over them -- if you suggest a change of venue and they're not feeling it, they'll probably say something and you'll probably be okay with it.

But imagine you're a Person of Business. Nay, a Man of Business, a veritable Business-Man, and you're a big deal in a relatively small community. It's not just the business you do but the business that gets done through and because of you. Introductions. Social gatherings.

There's a coffee shop just a couple minutes' quick walk away from your office and you like to take meetings there, because it's comfortable and it's away from both the hurly and the burly of the office. It's normal, familiar, close, convenient.

So imagine you've got somebody traveling for work and you ask them to come see you in your office to resolve some contentious business. They arrive and you have a stroke of inspiration - wouldn't it be better to have this meeting at the coffee shop? More private? More friendly?

So you invite your visitor to leave their suitcase in your office and relocate to this familiar, comfortable spot that is so close by.

Later, after relations break down completely, you find out that the person you extended this warm invitation to has accused you of behaving in a high-handed manner, and applied all manner of scurrilous embellishments. They said your neighborhood cafe was "far". It wasn't!

So you and your defenders make a point of pointing to this embellishment as a sign that other accusations against you are similarly overblown. A person who would claim your neighborhood cafe is "far" from the office is obviously prone to exaggeration, right?

But consider the difference between a two minute walk through a bustling city for someone who makes that walk regularly and somebody who is visiting what already feels like hostile territory.

Consider the difference between a two minute walk when you have everything you need with you that you could leave and one where, no matter how the conversation goes -- how the negotiations go -- you have to walk back with the other person to get your belongings from their office.

This example is not a pure hypothetical but is extracted from two accounts of one meeting, the first of which was pulled from Medium but is archived here. Ctrl-f for "where Bitsummit is" to read it, or see screen sot.

archive.is/kmBzn

Dangen Entertainment's response is here. Ctrl-f "Sumitomo Building", or see screen cap.

As you can see, they are focusing on the definition of "far".

medium.com/@dangen_ent/of…

Throughout Dangen's response, the primary focus is quibbling on the original writer's description of Ben Judd and Dangen personnel forcing/insisting on face-to-face meetings. Every time they note that there was no ultimatum, just an expressed preference. "No one made you come."

Judd said he didn't want to communicate in text and said -- outright said -- that if they couldn't meet face-to-face then he would be negotiating from a place of mistrust, but he didn't *insist*.

It is possible, just possible, that Dangen and Judd are overall speaking in good faith here and they simply have failed to realize at every step of the way what power they hold even while they wield it like a club to get what they want.

And that's possible because the world as a whole doesn't demand men like Ben Judd be aware of what power they wield, in order to wield it. He can just be a normal guy doing normal stuff. That's his power. That's his privilege.

"You're suggesting he did something sinister in saying 'You can leave your luggage here instead of dragging it around with you'?"

Not really. I imagine if you could read his mind in that moment, he thought he was being nice. Helpful.

Not considering the view from outside.

The thing is that predatory guys mostly don't go around thinking, "I'm a predator, grrr! I'm out to get you!" I mean, there are some redpilled man-o-sphere types who have formally adopted an antagonistic mindset towards the women they pursue, but it's not the norm.

But when you've got the money and the clout and the person you're dealing with is trying to negotiate on behalf of teams, plural teams of multiple people who *really* need you to come through... you've got them over a barrel, and acting like you don't doesn't change that.

Acting like there's no power differential doesn't eliminate it. To level the playing field, you have to actually acknowledge it's tilted. Just being chummy ("Oh, why don't you come by my office instead of meeting at the con?" "Oh, why don't we go somewhere else?") doesn't cut it.

The chumminess with someone who isn't your chum, is on your turf, and is relying on you to come through doesn't level the playing field. It's another way of brandishing power. Whether you're consciously intending that or not.

And here's a certain thing: past a certain point, it doesn't matter if it's not conscious. When you adopt a pattern of repeated behavior that benefits you, you're doing it because it benefits you. Even if you got there by trial and error without thinking about what it MEANS.

I can honestly believe the men of Dangen Entertainment buy their "We're all friends here, right?" schtick, which allows them to be loosey-goosey with things like contractual obligations, to treat prior agreements about things like meeting places as starting points, etc. I can!

Because it's better for a person's self-image to think of themselves in those terms.

But it's still self-serving. And the behavior it enables and protects has been predatory.

It lets them do things like measure "far" in terms of "minutes walked" while the people they deal with have to measure it in terms of "distance to escape route"... while ensuring the escape route runs through their office.

You don't want to be like Dangen Entertainment? You don't want to "get #MeToo'd"? You don't want to find out whole groups of people who worked with you had a very different impression of your affable, well-intended casual air?

There's no one trick. But it's not actually hard.

You just have to consider the view from outside.

You have to remember that your comfort zone is yours, your way of doing things is yours, your turf is yours, your power is yours.

I actually regret that this thread became as unhypothetical as it did, because I started it meaning to do a general thread about communication and power relations inspired by this conflict... but the specifics of it actually have me too angry to lay them aside.