A message to fans, professionals, and armchair quarterbacks, from a voice of authority:

If you think for one minute that a female in this industry who speaks up to management or to HR isn't risking retaliation, I've got some bad news for you.

It is so very easy to tell everybody what these accusers "should have done" or ask in a loud voice, "well, if they were having problems, why didn't they say anything before this?". It is apparently much more difficult for some men to wrap their heads around the reality that comics has a long history of not taking women seriously. In part because *especially* in comics we want to think we're superheroes, men have a way of brushing off women's complaints with "she's just being sensitive" or "What? I didn't mean anything!" But if you never believe anything I have ever said before or will ever say again, believe this one thing: even male employees and male freelancers in comics very often get punished for speaking truth to power, so *imagine, then, how women fare in a male-dominated industry.*

Yes, I am *notoriously* outspoken, and I have been since the day I walked in the door as a young assistant editor since my self-preservation skills are REALLY, REALLY TERRIBLE, but that proves nothing other than that my career is at least 50% luck. You don't get to speak out without almost-guaranteed repercussions, and I still remember what it's like to get smacked down hard even when you know you're in the right and how powerless and demoralized that makes you feel. Because I'm reasonably talented, reasonably lucky, and because I have no dependents, I've been able to navigate over the years to a place where I have the luxury of being loudly intolerant towards bullying behavior. But there are so, so many others who have not been able to get anywhere near there--and most of them are women.

Here's what I want to share: what I am learning--what I am being educated about by my female friends, as hard as it is for me to hear--is that intent doesn't matter nearly as much as you think it does. What matters more, right now if not forever, is a woman's takeaway from any encounter where she feels like the one with less power. This sucks for everybody. It is unbearably hard to hear this. I know; I was upbraided recently by someone I'm close to for something I thought and still think was completely misconstrued. And it was awful to hear. It went against every instinct I have about fairness, about intent, about misunderstandings, and about who I am as a person given that the absolute bedrock of everything I am rests on the concept of fair play. I didn't--don't--want to hear that my own narrative isn't a factor. But when I've been asked to consider that my own narrative isn't the one that's important right now, that uncomfortable feeling--if I'm to be honest with myself--cannot compare to the uncomfortable feelings the women in my life have endured on a routine basis. I've been giving this a lot of thought. I would invite the men reading this join me, even if they--we--feel threatened and nervous in the current climate.

Even at the very top of my game, I've been blackballed from publishers for no crime other than speaking out--so imagine the job insecurity a female assistant faces, or a woman just starting out as a freelancer. It's not going to kill any of us to shut up for a while and listen to what they have to say without dismissing them out of hand.

Guys like us have been making the rules for around 200,000 years. Guys like us have been in charge for around 200,000 years. Maybe we should try riding shotgun for a while and see what comes of it.