Firstly I want to apologise, this is not a feelgood post, this post does not have all the answers. You can't read this post and immediately gain +1 to not being a misogynist. You might read this post and take an immediate check on feeling mildly shitty for the rest of the day.If you are not in a somewhat decent space mentally, you should probably skip this post until you are, it's going to involve some not good subjects and things that make any average person feel bad about humanity, up to and including 'take off and nuke the planet from orbit' level of 'fuck this'.Are you sure?Okay, let's goWe're going to start with this, it's not the beginning but it's the point that kneejerked the beginning for me. I knew about the other factors i'll be linking to, but because I'd had had my dose of 'X is being dumb' I didn't keep on the subject figuring it would get more traction and better if more people promoted those issues. Thart didn't happen, so this is going to turn into a whole world of 'why is our industry so shit at being awesome to one another'.So here's the tl;drFrank Mentzer, the creator of red box D&D and assorrted other things around 30 years ago has been harassing women and victim blaming.Paizo have been accused of covering up the above, as well as bad conduct in handling sexual abuse accusations at paizocon and in the pathfinder society. And there's also the 'sex abuse is great' rules they released in a recent product.Names have not been changed to protect the innocent:First of all, because this person really went through the emotional ringer, you should read this, Ted Fauster sacrificed potential income to do the right thing:If you don't want to read the entire post, he had a casual then a business relationship with Mentzer, then walked away from it because of the revelations about Mentzer's behaviour.--So let's talk about Mentzer (it's okay, there'll be a let's talk about Paizo later).Mentzer approached Jessica Price, former staffer at Paizo, with a creepy PM. It's almost a stereotypical 'creepy old man' message with the whole 'if only I was 30 years youinger' as if him being younger automatically gives him what he wants. Then we have the cringy 'thanks for not whacking me' so khew he was being inappropriate, as much as he's now claiming to just not really get it. Other than, of course, when he's claiming that she was flirting with him, and he was just reciprocating, because of course he's doing that in his defence.And then we have his views on abuse victimsMentzer has said, repeatedly, both contemperaneous with the time Price describes and just recently in appealing to his fans and friends to defend him, that abuse victims or sexual attack victims who 'freeze' need treatment. Not treatment for being abused, but for freezing. He doubles down on it over and over, no matter who has tried to explain, well, reality to him, and has used the example of how he doesn't freeze in a moment of stress, therefore they need treatment.If he didn't keep doubling down it would be a standard 'old man has some weird ideas but learns from esposure to ther world and comes out a better person'. Instead it's 'creepy old man has anachronistic ideas and continues to dismiss and insult victims rather than change their mind.'Mentzer had recently launched a $250k kickstarter for his home brew fantasy setting 'Empyrea'. The kickstarter was not well mnanaged and struggling before a number of staff publicly quit after Jessica Price revealed Mentzer's behaviour. Immediatelly after those resignations, Mentzer said the kickstarter was cancelled.Building up to the kickstarter, Mentzer was banned from the Dragonsfooot forum (old school D&D) and the reason for it, a PM he'd sent to another menmber, was made public. It showed that while he'd felt free to just imply blacklisting to Price, he still believed today that he had the power to blacklist anyone he disagreed with in the industry. It was a very, very aggressive and insulting PM to send to anyone, and would certainly lead to a ban here.This isn't the same as the above, it's not even the same ballpark, but it displays a patern of behaviour that is, well, not great from an 'icon' in the industry.--And then there are some worrying things about Paizo and how they handled Jessica Price's information at the timeShe relates how she was warned about revealing this information about Mentzer, and then thanked when she didn't.Paizo's been getting a lot of negative PR of late on their handling of issues, so we have incidents of harassment in the Pathfinder Society, their oprganised play/playtesting organisation (which has a much closer link to Paizo than most such organisations):And then we have Paizocon, where an industry partner assaulted at least one person, Paizo badly handled the aftermath and haven't done any better since:--SFF conventions have been going through the painful struggle of how to be better at handling abuse and harassment at the con, and of course the revelations of historic harassers in the past, or exposure of creeps/broken stairs who have been getting away with it for years.There are multiple off-hand comments about Gygax being inappropriate at conventions, or hitting on much, much (much) younger women, and much ilike Mentzer, getting away with it.--And then we have the good, we have companies such as Pelgrane with a very robust convention support policy and clear guidelines of what they expect to see in order for them to support a convention.:So the gist of this is that we as a gaming community and/or industry have recently been made aware of a luminary of the industry or old figure of note behaving in a creepy manner, and holding some weird and outmoded views about abuse. We've been made aware of a company that had a great reputation on progressive/social issues, that is now publishing some inappropriate material and nadly handling harassment and assault in their own enviroment as well as pressuring at least one member of staff to keep quiet about harassment.So what do we do?Expose it when we see it, stand up against harassment, provide a safe space here on rpg.net. Contact sompanies who aren't meeting our ideals of how they should behave and tell them this/discuss that on social media.Other ideas?How else do we, should we, support the good and push away harassment, misogyny and abuse (and trust me, there's a lot of misogynistic defence of Mr Mentzer going on out there)