#requireshate

[bullshit-usa]

The worst people you know are cannibalizing each other

Worst person #1 writes 3rd grade tier horn-fisted futa fetish porn about Greek gods

Worst person #2 is a “feminist” who’s mad at scientists for saying Mao was misogynistic. Mao, the guy who dumped his wife for a young actress and executed a critic for saying the leaders of the party were creeping on young women

[yaguruma-blog]

on Benjanun Sriduangkaew's past activity

Incidentally, she may try to hide it these days but Winterfox/RequiresHate/Benjanun Sriduangkaew's circle was responsible for some of the worst dogpiling of Isabel Fall in 2020.

thread by the person who later originated the "year 1988 as Nazi dogwhistling" line and one of the earliest and most widespread "criticisms" of the story, complete with conspiracy theories about the author being a stealth TERF:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210118200009/https://twitter.com/EffInvictus/status/1215994150094626816

from this user's profile:

[trannytitties5ever]

no, benjanun sriduangkaew (aka winterfox aka requireshate) is cis. she used to be kinda infamous in the SFF writing space for organizing mass harassment campaigns (like shed post murder/rape threats + encourage ppl to sent murder/rape threats, celebrate when a target attempted suicide, etc.) against authors whose work she deemed bad rep or "problematic". and also these like, crazyass machiavellian social manipulation schemes to get anyone she perceived as a threat totally exiled. while most of the writers she targeted werent even white or straight or cis themselves, she especially seemed to have it out for trans writers, transfems in particular. to top it all off shes a rich heiress. its crazy shes been able to rebrand to the degree she has, the online "queer SFF" community is an insane mess its just full of people like this

listening & learning sm

[yaoist]

Winterfox/Sriduangkaew comes from an insanely rich family and despite having transfems as her primary follower base, she has a documented history of transmisogyny (add racism and classism) as she would make such comments on a reactionary gaming board while she went by her ‘progressive’ Requireshate persona. She hasn’t changed as a good while ago I saw an ex-fan of hers on here say she was fairly involved in the harassment campaign against Isabel Fall until public opinion of Fall’s story reversed and people realised they’d just traumatised her for no reason, when BS suddenly shut up. She clearly just learned to find more ‘acceptable’ targets to dunk on, which she clearly has a lot of time to do as a millionaire heiress.

I can't verify all this drama but I will say that I do hate her and think she's dumb as fuck

[mercyoftoren]

There’s a cis woman who does this schtick to trans men on Twitter, bullying anyone who disagrees with her on trans in the name of trans women (not the ones who disagree with her tho.)

Something that stands out to me re: the whole PDB situation is that if things were reversed and this was a cis woman speaking over transfems and sucking up to transmascs extensively these folks would (rightly) conclude that this person is probably some sort of crypto-TERF chaser. But since it’s a cis man speaking over transmascs, even though he’s literally regurgitating TERF rhetoric AND MRA talking points, transandrophobes are falling all over themselves to defend him.

The double standard is atrocious and it’s so transparently because he’s a cis man. Like come on folks. And this isn’t even getting into the racism of it all but it’s also a huge component because why else would so many of these folks be completely fine with a cis white man telling tmoc what they do or don’t experience? It’s almost like transandrophobes haven’t actually done the work to deconstruct the patriarchal values they’ve absorbed from society and defer to the judgement of the “correct” kind of man.

[egelantier]

Have you seen Winterfraud on Wordpress, it shows Benjanun using slurs and being racist, classist and transmisogynistic on some channer-esque gaming forum while touting her social justice values on her RequiresHate blog? I’d also recommend searching her name on here because somebody mentioned she was apparently involved in the Isabel Fall situation but immediately shut up when people decided that being cruel to Fall was a bad thing. Rin Chupeko also claimed she told her to get r*ped by dogs as well.

oh yes, her batshit transphobic exploits on the gaming forums is documented in the Mixon report (which makes it extremely gross that she re-labels herself as an ally author of books with transgender characters), and I have no doubt that she's been behaving atrociously since then, hasn't changed or showed a shred of remorse, and never particularly bothered to cover her tracks very well. but i figure out the initial cluster of links is enough to inform people who're completely uninformed, and prompt them to investigate more if needed. and if those files aren't enough for some people, well. alas.

[mikanlardyclinic]

I can see Celeste dealing and gambles for Black market organs and anything to keep her going for another day

"ash if.. My boy requiresh quality only i can provide it"

Ignore the scar in her flabby chest.. It definitely wasn't a transplant..

"and you shay that like if any of your plebean organsh w..would be enuff for meh!"

THUNK!!

The anon got hit with a blunt object from behind knocking them out!

"I'll add it to the pool ms celes!"

"yesh thank you dear.. I hope that one has a nishe heart.. Or liver i...i dunno how much i can last.. But~ I love our casino nights! ~"

Mikan dragged the body of the anon to another room giving celes a weak little smile..

[n0t-today-satan]

for posterity: benjanun sriduangkaew on people without healthcare dying from covid

yeah, pretty much. they're bitter little freaks, and I'm pleased that 1) considering where most of them live, they'll probably get reinfected by COVID over and over and 2) will not ever amount to anything.

and 3) there's no free healthcare for what those reinfections will do to their bodies. What a pleasing world.

original: link

mirror: link

[olderthannetfic]

May I ask who is Winterfox? /gen

--

A psychopath.

She's a blogger who decided to break into English-language SFF publishing and set about destroying her competition, starting with other WOC and other queer women (her own two claims to minority status). She presented herself as an ethnic minority, which is technically true as far as it goes. She's ethnically Thai-Chinese rather than purely Thai... She's also an heiress of a hotel empire. Her most impressive close relative is worth over a billion. The rest are merely millionaires. She does have US citizenship, but this is a person raised in Thailand who has primarily lived in Thailand and then Hong Kong. I leave it to readers to decide how much of an oppressed minority that makes her.

No one knew just how wealthy she was when this all started, but they did know she was a Thai woman living in Thailand, not diaspora in the West. They also should have been able to see she was a bully. Should.

That whole Worldcon-y SFF crowd is so dumb at all things race-related that this toxic parasite was able to manipulate them for years. Not everyone, but more than enough. Even now, many people still think the callouts were racists cruelly going after an innocent minority.

Before all that, she used to be a book blogger who hated everything and ripped books apart in her reviews. She managed to tank 50bookspoc, which was a com for the self evident reading challenge.

Her pro writing name is Benjanun Sriduangkaew. Her writing... well... you're not missing out.

She was and is a cancerous tumor on the side of SFF fandom who gets away with it because credulous fools can't tell the difference between a disadvantaged minority and a Thai kajillionaire or between genuine critique of racist media and targeted strikes on professional rivals.

Here's a quote:

"She stalked authors she disliked online, talked about subjecting others to violence (acid attack, beheading and rape, for example), and apparently enticed earnest social justice allies into private correspondences which then gave her blackmail material. Her "performative rage" methods even contributed to one author attempting suicide via overdose."

It's normal to be angry about racism and even to have the occasional scathing book review, but requireshate (yes, really) aka winterfox hated everything. Her style was nothing but hate, and that should have been a red flag for people. At some point, rage becomes either an out of control coping mechanism that has turned into self harm or a deliberate tactic.

Beware when you see one of these people.

But more than that, beware being the patsy they use against their enemies. No bully like this is effective alone. They weaponize all the dumbasses who want to elevate a voice, any voice, to assuage their own guilt and helplessness in the face of societal racism.

Another quote about the destruction of 50bookspoc, also from hesychasm's post:

But I was surprised -- and frankly, very angry -- at how many of the honest, earnest advocates in that particular community bent themselves into all kinds of contortions to give someone like Sriduangkaew legitimacy. At how some of us had to patiently explain that calling an author a "stupid fuck," for example, was kind of messed up and served no social justice purpose whatsoever. And that trumpeting the idea that this was actually a laudable action was also messed up...because why? Honestly, why? The prize at the end of all of this is supposed to be equality, and that kind of bullshit not only takes our eyes off the prize, it has us staring daggers at each other.

Here's her Fanlore.

And again, her first targets were other people she perceived as the competition: genuinely disadvantaged WOC and/or queer women. That is nearly always how this type of bully operates. We see them in every fake-authentic fuckface in our part of fandom too. It's a distinctive pattern once you've encountered one of these.

Don't be the sucker who gives them power.

[canmom]

comments on a guy who isn’t even online anymore

‘rant by a condescending British guy’ is a sort of stable fixed point in critical writing. this afternoon i lost a few hours reading this guy Stephen Bond, from the old days of the internet, following a link to his articulation of the difference between ‘camp’, ‘kitsch’ and ‘trash’. (which despite the presentation of a two-variable schema, can fairly easily be mapped to ‘good’, ‘mid’ and ‘crap’, since the deciding variable is mostly whether they fit his personal tastes, but of course you get nowhere in this sort of writing by hedging.)

mostly my impression of this guy is that it would be really exhausting to be him. it reminds me of moorcock’s disappointing essay “epic pooh”, or benjanun sriduangkaew’s old blog requireshate, in that just kind of prioritises the spectacle of demolishing some popular cultural artefact and heaping scorn on the sort of pathetic nerd who would find value in it. so even if I agree with the aesthetic opinion being advanced, the posture the rhetoric encourages is defensiveness and reluctance to express enthusiasm or appreciation towards anything, lest it betray some corruption of the deplorable middlebrow. and when the critic does dare to venture a positive opinion, it is all too tempting to turn it back. “lol, after all that crap he said, he’ll give a pass to Dragon Age: Origins of all things?”

his later writing from the early 2010s is a bit more substantial and interesting than his mid-2000s stuff; his account of breaking from the ‘skeptic’ movement is as solid as any from the people who ended up on that road, but mostly it’s exactly the opinions you’d expect of a 2010s ex-skeptic on the fringes of the nascent SJ subculture, carrying a lot of guilt about associating with the foul, cringe nerds and the accursed British. (he went to Oxford. so did the writers of Ferretbrain, which I used to read avidly, and I was reminded of a great deal reading this site. something in the water, perhaps.)

probably the most interesting article on the site is the one about the time he tried to go pro as a critic, because it is not just scorn but an actual specific experience, one that provokes some moments of self-reflection - but also because you see him throw out some mean comments at Yahtzee, hardly undeserved but amusing because both are minor variations on the same Type Of Guy.

[bullshit-usa]

"Assigned Feeble at Birth."

The last tweet...her saying she is surprised that none of her dissenters are calling it transphobic...meaning that she, as a cis woman, knows it will be interpreted as transphobic by people (who are almost always trans) yet says it anyway.

Ah, yes, using a feminine name to describe those icky trans men "MRAs."

Whataboutism. Nobody she is arguing with thinks that is an ok thing to say to trans women. Strawmanning 101. She can fight fire against hypothetical fires and we're all supposed to go along with it.

Looks like the transphobic insult comes from another cis woman. A cis woman who for some reason...in her tweet...implies that she sees us as dangerous. Unsafe is the opposite of safe. If she feels safe around trans women, yet feels less safe with trans men, then to some degree she sees ALL trans men on some degree as unsafe.

Which is transphobia. Not a hard conclusion to come to. However, Benjanun is absolutely appalled whenever she encounters people who can read.

Here's another example of what reading comprehension reveals:

The point of the word "and" is to link one phrase with another phrase or word.

Breaking this down--"Trans men especially have an unchecked entitlement to female spaces." AND "Trans men especially have an unchecked entitlement to women's support" must both be true for DatredGyal's statement to make sense.

Oftentimes people like Benjanun and pals will try to state that they meant the conditional form of "and" where two things must be the case for the condition to be met. For example:

"I need the red dye AND the blue dye to dye this shirt purple."

The red dye + blue dye -> purple shirt.

But we can obviously see that DatredGyal did not write the sentence in that way. We can see this by making a similar equation.

female spaces + women's support -> ???

See? We're missing one piece. This sentence cannot be a conditional statement. DatredGyal cannot use the argument that she is invoking a conditional "and" in defense. It's impossible.

Why are trans men so entitled for wanting support? Support is a broad word. DatredGyal used it in a broad sense for a reason...as her other statements reveal her biases, she is saying that trans men are "entitled" for wanting transgender support--aka rights. She can't expect us trans people to give her the benefit of the doubt. She's cis.

[not-this-crude-matter]

The German word for the horror of realizing that someone you follow and respect carries water for RequiresHate.

[freedom-of-fanfic]

Can you elaborate on the RequiresHate case? The first article you cited thoroughly debunked the second one? I'm left wondering what actually happened. Doesn't seem a good example related to what's happening now.

anon, thank you for this. I should have double-checked the links I was copy-pasting, because that first article was not intended to be linked. I meant to save it for reading at a later date, not add it to a post going live.

I have now corrected the link to the one that I meant to add: Being An Itemized List of Disagreements. written in 2017, and by a different person, it’s a decently quick read with a lot of links addressing the writer’s personal history with BS and recounting events that happened after the Mixon Report was published.

I was not active in the spaces Winterfox was systematically destroying; my knowledge of her history is entirely second-hand. I’ve read articles and accounts both for and against her, and ultimately I’ve concluded that

the terror she inflicted can’t be justified

the number of unconnected people who point directly to her as the source of the hell they went through is too high for this to be a smear campaign

particularly because if it was a smear campaign, the people doing the pointing would be a lot less terrified of coming forward.

the short version of WF/RH/BS’s origin story is this:

the SFF community was the focal point of RaceFail, a months-long upheaval that started with calling out SFF works for frequently neglecting and/or erasing people of color in their stories and going on to critique the serious lack of visibility for writers of color in SFF spaces.

A lot of good came of that upheaval, imho, and the ripple effects that spread outward resulted in a lot of increased awareness of racism & queerphobia in online creative spaces. but WinterFox realized how she could capitalize on white guilt and fear of being called out to bully the hell out of her fellow SFF fans/creators. and it worked very, very well.

(she’s still online, by the way, and getting published in SFF anthologies. she has a hell of a personality cult & keeps records of private conversations with her ‘friends’ so she can bury them in their own dirt if they betray her.)

As to what she did with that realization:

as linked above, Zen Cho’s ‘Being a List of Disagreements’, which nicely overviews all of the below.

The Mixon Report, the follow-up, and the rebuttal to the rebuttals

read all the comments on this post, too. it’s. a lot.

Rachel Manija Brown’s account (and comment on the Mixon Report)

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s account

Athena Andreadis’s account

and then, after Apex Magazine decided to publish a story by BS:

Rachel Manija Brown shared more thoughts

A Letter to Apex Editors - which had to be pulled from archive.org, because the author’s site has been pulled down. I have my suspicions about why, but it’s just speculation.

and the anon I got after posting yesterday:

Anonymous said:

Winterfox and I were mutuals on twitter because she followed me and I was hoping she could be useful (she was not) for like. over a year, because everyone in my semiprofessional social group loves her because poor Bee who the big mean racist exposed for harassment!!1, and it was so stressful I wanted to throw up like all the time? No moral here she’s just really extremely the same as ever and seeing someone else clock her as the first anti when I thought I was grudgewank is A+

(’Bee’ is what BS’s ‘friends’ call her - verified by editor Nick Mamatas when he doxxed BS, revealing she was RequiresHate in 2014.)

long story short: RequiresHate / Winterfox / Benjanun Sriduangkaew is bad news, in pretty much exactly the ways you’d expect of a bully and moral abuser. 

[pigeonneaux]

I requiresh i lawyer

Might rewatch kv1 with a funny cake tonight

[olderthannetfic]

Re weaponizing marginality and the vocabulary of social justice as bullying tactics: the history of SF author Benjanun Sriduangkaew, aka Bee, aka RequiresHate, aka Winterfox, is extensively documented on Fanlore.

--

[canmom]

I hate to dig into it (so please feel free to ignore this ask) but, as someone (non-white trans woman) who’s been waffling back and forth on BS for like the last several years since I got more into sff and learned about... all of that shit, what was her involvement w everything with Isabel Fall? I admit I mostly understand that BS keeps to her small circle on Twitter, and so I didn’t really see her around at all when this went down, so I’m curious (another stone to drop on my scales of justice labeled “so should I think BS is a person/artist worth investing time and emotion in or not”...)

i don't know that i necessarily want to rehearse old drama, but i did bring this up. please once again don't reblog this.

so B.S. was pretty loud in denouncing the story during the first part of the isabel fall furore. at the time one of her partners (i forget the name) wrote a 'parody' of the story on pastebin titled "CHALLENGING STORY TO BLOW YOUR TINY WOKESCOLD BRAINS WITH HOW POWERFUL AND MESSY IT IS" (not linking because i don't particularly want to propagate it) which she shared - the substance of the critique is pretty much right there in the title, conflating simultaneously the actual helicopter story, Mika/surfaces.cx genre of transgressive fiction and Felker-Martin’s whole brand of ‘queer and messy’. Tiny Wokescold Brains was a very tortured critique with lines like

Anyways, my body was filled with all kinds of additional sicknasty cybernetics, because what is a story that is intended to be pro-green without a horrified fetishization of technology as simultaneously annihilating and alluring? I was currently using them to heft an enormous fucking laser gun, which we totally have in the near future where this story is set so it seems topical. Sure, you might think that this kind of acceptance of gee-whiz shit is just a plausibly deniable form of military fetishism. But it’s not, OK? Just read this goddamned amazing, challenging, incredible story written by a fucking goddess in the flesh, someone whose brain is so vast it actually sucks the brains out from everyone else in the room.

and so on in that vein; it was just totally out of line as a criticism, even if you think there's some basis for it then it goes way further than is justifiable. no doubt the author was working through some shit but she chose a very public furore to try it at the expense of someone's first story as an out tw while missing what that story was actually doing. isabel fall never boasted about how mindblowing and messy her story is, she dropped it with no comment whatsoever; yet for the criticism to work she had to have been boasting.

anyway the reason i cite this as particularly reprehensible was that that (as she mentioned in that interview that went round) Fall, in typical early transition scrupulosity mode, went out of her way to read all criticism of the story. which, given just how vicious that 'parody' is, and how specifically it would have played on her anxieties, I find it very likely (though not directly confirmed) that she read the story and it affected her very badly. it would certainly have done a number on me in similar circumstances.

so i was disgusted by the way B.S. weighed in there because, it was so obviously her old tricks as requireshate but like, carefully calibrated to go after someone who at the time was seen as an acceptable target; it so happened that public opinion reversed a bit later and people started to twig that they'd really done a bad one here and B.S. shut up about it. just like when she used to habitually rip into 'some dude on reddit' offering (allegedly) bad writing advice before i unfollowed her; the point is to be able to spectacularly tear someone down online, no matter the consequences, and she just got better at picking her battles.

it took me so long to realise because 1. i'm an idiot cultist 2. she's very good at dressing stuff up in the sj language of the era, but she's just a garden variety bully and I would rather have nothing more to do with her. I still believe that coterie of white women sf writers did some reprehensible shit in building a whole stalker's dossier and patting each other on the back for it after B.S. dared to criticise some crappy book that a white woman wrote about thailand, but it's like... they all deserve each other basically.

at this point i basically believe the right thing to do with 'SFF' genre writing, certainly as far as concerns the mainstream publishing and fandom industry, is to extricate yourself as quickly as possible and find much less cultish avenues to write in.

and i will say one thing for surfaces.cx-brand webfiction which is that it's like, as much as it can be empty edginess and scene-performance, it's generally not trying to pretend to some false virtue as the progressive light of the future. at this point I regard all such claims with total distrust; it's all scene politics and "I dis/liked this book and want to make that legit" when you get down to it.