Anonymous wrote:The way in which people like Roxane Gay think it is ok to pile on this woman who was dragged in The NY Times and is being dragged nationally is appalling. It literally makes me sick to my stomach.

Anonymous wrote:More observations on disability. I think this is a good point. I have never been able to figure out why they despised Dorland so much except that she didn't communicate somehow "correctly," which seems code for possible ableism. For instance, in the awful encounter described by Chip Cheeks, Dorland seemed to do everything technically right (welcomed him, gave him advice, etc.) but he still mocked her mercilessly behind her back. The savaging of the group seems beyond normal dislike, and I do wonder if there is some virulent ableism underneath it all (probably also classism).

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The way in which people like Roxane Gay think it is ok to pile on this woman who was dragged in The NY Times and is being dragged nationally is appalling. It literally makes me sick to my stomach.

Same. Then the fact she feels so entitled not to be challenged at all, too. You don't get to behave irresponsibly with no accountability when you have that sort of platform.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:More observations on disability. I think this is a good point. I have never been able to figure out why they despised Dorland so much except that she didn't communicate somehow "correctly," which seems code for possible ableism. For instance, in the awful encounter described by Chip Cheeks, Dorland seemed to do everything technically right (welcomed him, gave him advice, etc.) but he still mocked her mercilessly behind her back. The savaging of the group seems beyond normal dislike, and I do wonder if there is some virulent ableism underneath it all (probably also classism).

I don't think their disdain for Dawn comes from ableism. Some groups of people are just mean and enjoy being mean. The fact that in all of this, not one of them can point to or share anything concrete that Dawn did to draw their vitriol is most telling. Who remembers the b*%#& eating crackers some e card thing from back when memes were getting started? Dawn clearly was the B eating crackers for this group of people, and every single thing she did (or didn't do) became fodder for them to ridicule her more. I think their dislike of Dawn is grounded in classism and a need to keep people in their place, and Dawn was clearly not aware that this group was still playing those mean girl games.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think the reason so many prominent people have publicly and strongly sided with Larson, and the support for Dorland has been slower to emerge and often veiled in anonymity (as here) is that powerful people identify with Larsen and the writing group. They identify with the idea of people they don’t like wanting to be friends with them, and with the idea of being polite to their face while trashing them privately because that is something they have done in the past.

The people who identified with Dorland are, by definition, people who have been traumatized by in/out group dynamics and may carry a lot of shame and grief. I have been obsessed with this story since in came out but there is no trace that I’ve even read it on Twitter or elsewhere. I have only talked about it here and in, yes, a group chat with people who know my connection to the story. I am afraid any public discussion about this story would draw the attention of the people who used to stalk my social media expressly to make fun of me while smiling to me face. I always police my public activity for this reason, but something like this feels especially risky.

This reminds me of those studies/social science theories where increases in wealth are associated with a decrease in empathy. Maybe in order to function in those circles, you have to lose your humanity. Perhaps that is the price of admission to exclusive literary society, but because it has happened to all of them, they don't see the loss.

Anonymous wrote:I was appalled when I heard about this story and sided with Dawn, but damn when I read her posts about her donation my eyes roll back so far in my head it hurts.

I would have had a very hard time not being sarcastic to her. Maybe my problem is I know too many women who do charity for attention. One message she sent to Sonya she talked about attending a charity function with Jayne Seymore and being so proud that the doctor who took her kidney mentioned her kidney "just gushing urine". Ugh.

I would have stopped talking to her and avoided her but I know I would have made comments to a mutual friend about her. In any group I've been in there would be at least one adult who would shut the nastiness down so we would only go on so long.

No one in that group admitted that they were the ones doing the stalking. What an empty echo chamber they were.

Anonymous wrote:I was appalled when I heard about this story and sided with Dawn, but damn when I read her posts about her donation my eyes roll back so far in my head it hurts.

I would have had a very hard time not being sarcastic to her. Maybe my problem is I know too many women who do charity for attention. One message she sent to Sonya she talked about attending a charity function with Jayne Seymore and being so proud that the doctor who took her kidney mentioned her kidney "just gushing urine". Ugh.

I would have stopped talking to her and avoided her but I know I would have made comments to a mutual friend about her. In any group I've been in there would be at least one adult who would shut the nastiness down so we would only go on so long.

No one in that group admitted that they were the ones doing the stalking. What an empty echo chamber they were.

Anonymous wrote:I was appalled when I heard about this story and sided with Dawn, but damn when I read her posts about her donation my eyes roll back so far in my head it hurts.

I would have had a very hard time not being sarcastic to her. Maybe my problem is I know too many women who do charity for attention. One message she sent to Sonya she talked about attending a charity function with Jayne Seymore and being so proud that the doctor who took her kidney mentioned her kidney "just gushing urine". Ugh.

I would have stopped talking to her and avoided her but I know I would have made comments to a mutual friend about her. In any group I've been in there would be at least one adult who would shut the nastiness down so we would only go on so long.

No one in that group admitted that they were the ones doing the stalking. What an empty echo chamber they were.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:More observations on disability. I think this is a good point. I have never been able to figure out why they despised Dorland so much except that she didn't communicate somehow "correctly," which seems code for possible ableism. For instance, in the awful encounter described by Chip Cheeks, Dorland seemed to do everything technically right (welcomed him, gave him advice, etc.) but he still mocked her mercilessly behind her back. The savaging of the group seems beyond normal dislike, and I do wonder if there is some virulent ableism underneath it all (probably also classism).

I don't think their disdain for Dawn comes from ableism. Some groups of people are just mean and enjoy being mean. The fact that in all of this, not one of them can point to or share anything concrete that Dawn did to draw their vitriol is most telling. Who remembers the b*%#& eating crackers some e card thing from back when memes were getting started? Dawn clearly was the B eating crackers for this group of people, and every single thing she did (or didn't do) became fodder for them to ridicule her more. I think their dislike of Dawn is grounded in classism and a need to keep people in their place, and Dawn was clearly not aware that this group was still playing those mean girl games.

+1

But I get the sense that part of the issue here is that Dawn never played “mean girl games.” Her descriptions of her childhood and adolescence are of a lonely existence being ostracized fit the crime of being poor, and worse— having the wrong parents. She talks about getting most of her validation and support from adults — teachers, musicians, others who took an interest.

It’s not that Dawn outgrew mean girl politics. She did not have the kind of upbringing that would have allowed her to participate. Larsen and Ng and I’m guessing other Chunky Monkeys grew up middle or upper middle class suburbanites. They may have experienced being othered as AAPI or mixed, but their SES enabled them entrance into the “typical” adolescent experience. That’s how they learned how mean girl politics even work. Dawn never learned. If she had, I think she might have been savvier about the situation and known when to cut her losses. As a perpetual outsider, she saw no benefit to that.

I can relate to Dawn and my upbringing was not nearly as challenging. Not everyone goes through a mean girl phase. It’s a language largely spoken by relatively privileged young women from specific backgrounds.

Anonymous wrote:I was appalled when I heard about this story and sided with Dawn, but damn when I read her posts about her donation my eyes roll back so far in my head it hurts.

I would have had a very hard time not being sarcastic to her. Maybe my problem is I know too many women who do charity for attention. One message she sent to Sonya she talked about attending a charity function with Jayne Seymore and being so proud that the doctor who took her kidney mentioned her kidney "just gushing urine". Ugh.

I would have stopped talking to her and avoided her but I know I would have made comments to a mutual friend about her. In any group I've been in there would be at least one adult who would shut the nastiness down so we would only go on so long.

No one in that group admitted that they were the ones doing the stalking. What an empty echo chamber they were.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I was appalled when I heard about this story and sided with Dawn, but damn when I read her posts about her donation my eyes roll back so far in my head it hurts.

I would have had a very hard time not being sarcastic to her. Maybe my problem is I know too many women who do charity for attention. One message she sent to Sonya she talked about attending a charity function with Jayne Seymore and being so proud that the doctor who took her kidney mentioned her kidney "just gushing urine". Ugh.

I would have stopped talking to her and avoided her but I know I would have made comments to a mutual friend about her. In any group I've been in there would be at least one adult who would shut the nastiness down so we would only go on so long.

No one in that group admitted that they were the ones doing the stalking. What an empty echo chamber they were.

For what it's worth, I had a similar initial reaction. But when I read the events in chronological order and observed the time gaps, I lost any sense of neediness from Dawn. One of the great errors of the NYT article is that it ignores the timing of all the messages and takes them very out of context. Read in chronological order, those needy-seeming messages start to sound instead like the thought process of someone who can tell, somehow, that she's being gaslit, but doesn't know quite how.

I actually think that the NYT presentation is really problematic, because it constructs a narrative that doesn't match the real world timing.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I was appalled when I heard about this story and sided with Dawn, but damn when I read her posts about her donation my eyes roll back so far in my head it hurts.

I would have had a very hard time not being sarcastic to her. Maybe my problem is I know too many women who do charity for attention. One message she sent to Sonya she talked about attending a charity function with Jayne Seymore and being so proud that the doctor who took her kidney mentioned her kidney "just gushing urine". Ugh.

I would have stopped talking to her and avoided her but I know I would have made comments to a mutual friend about her. In any group I've been in there would be at least one adult who would shut the nastiness down so we would only go on so long.

No one in that group admitted that they were the ones doing the stalking. What an empty echo chamber they were.

I basically agree with this. I think Dawn seems incredibly annoying and she is not emailing me demanding still further replies/explication/defense/etc. She is just so needy that I know I would avoid her as much as I could. I could also see complaining about her to friends when she emailed me yet again. In fact, I know that I would. Also, her motive in trying to get Sonya basically cancelled was either trying to get something out of it for herself (credit on the story, which she didn't deserve by the time we get to the published piece) or pure revenge; neither of those are exactly laudatory.

I also sympathize with Sonya's inclination to try to remain "nice" in her email exchanges. A lot of people hold this against her/say she was stringing Dawn along, but I think most women are trained to do exactly what she did: play nice, avoid confrontation, move along; Dawn was living in Cali by then, pretending to be her friend just avoids awkwardness and, possibly, her trying to cancel you. (I mean, Dawn really did not let this go and even if she was entirely justified, I can see why Sonya wouldn't assume that if she just bowed out earlier, Dawn would just let it go at that. The temptation to placate would be there for most people.)

That said, Sonya is obviously a total mean girl and went way too far. But, on some level, at least Dawn was reaching out and annoying her. The other writers I cannot empathize with at all. They don't even know this woman (Ng met her once??) and spend all of this energy totally trashing her? In my friend set, the non-involved people would *at most* be like "ugh, so annoying"... in no world would they randomly egg on/pile on. If it got too mean, someone would say so and probably remind us all that, totally cringey or not, she's ultimately a person who would donate a kidney to a stranger and we should all just move on.