The Mary Sue merger was a popular Linkspam topic this week:

• What Happened to The Mary Sue? | The Lobster Dance: “Here’s a hint: if you’re changing jobs to work at a supposedly feminist site about geek women, maybe 1. don’t tweet sexist bullshit, 2. don’t mansplain to commenters, 3. don’t assume the initial criticism was about your status or that it was ad hominem. You chose to write rude comments in response to questions about the new About page. You and the new and old staff members chose to publicly tweet about how you were being “attacked” by scary feminists. You chose to retweet the tweets of others regarding this. “
• Will The Mary Sue Become a Mary Sue? | BlogHer: “The Mary Sue was safe, and they made us believe they cared. They represented our voices and provided a safe place for people to express their opinions. It’s not feeling that way anymore. Is The Mary Sue becoming an idealized version of its former self?”
• The Gary Stu, or Why I’m Not Subscribing to The Mary Sue Anymore — Challenge by Geek: “Since the merger on June 13, the site has gotten worse. While the number of stories covered on a given day has gone up, the quality of the writing and the feminism found in those perspectives has plummeted… What happened? Well, male writers took up the pieces that really should have had women’s voices. “

Allegations of bad behavior in tech:

• Top Portland tech CEO faces sexual assault investigation | OregonLive.com: [CW: Domestic abuse, sexual assault] “Portland police are now three months into an investigation of fresh claims from the woman, who says Kveton assaulted her in 2012 and 2013.”
• Former executive sues dating app Tinder, alleges sexual harassment | Reuters: [CW: Harassment, Gendered slurs] “Former Tinder marketing Vice President Whitney Wolfe is suing the popular dating-app company for sexual harassment and discrimination, making it the latest technology business to face challenges over its treatment of women.”

Model View Culture continues to impress:

• More Than the Message, by Sydette Harry | Model View Culture: “Social media provides an amazing stage for some of the best and worst examples of the dangers of ready-made affinity. A hashtag starts, a particularly sharp tweet is made. It can circle around the world in less than a baseball inning.”
• “Internet Famous”: Visibility As Violence On Social Media , by Shanley Kane | Model View Culture: “In this post, I’m going to talk about my personal experiences with visibility. The act of doing so will be construed as being ‘complicit’ in the abusive visibility aimed at me, as if such a thing were possible. In an industry where the achievement of women is smothered and erased, the above accounts of my career will be viewed as “bragging,” or discredited. “
• Shanley Kane @ Model View Culture | Topical Cream: An interview with Shanley.

Additional linkspams (it’s been a busy week!):

• Mutant & Proud: Understanding The Queerness Of The X-Men: “In the third of three essays examining the parallels between fictional mutants and real life LGBT people, I’ll look at how the mutations themselves — and the identity struggles of many X-Men characters — served to underline the essential queerness of mutants.”
• Anger as a Tool in Social Justice Movements : Life as I Know It: “Here’s an idea: not only is anger not harmful to social justice, it is the reason social justice movements happen in the first place.”
• The Ping-Pong Theory of Tech Sexism — Matter — Medium: A comic about one woman’s experience with sexism in tech.
• Trouble » Def Con, Jeff Moss, and Sexism: “The reason that there aren’t more women and girls in our field is staring at you in the mirror”.
• Astronaut Sally Ride and the Burden of Being the First | The American Prospect: “Many biographers are tempted to characterize history-making Americans as born rebels who knew from the beginning that they wanted to storm the gates. What’s refreshing about Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space is that Lynn Sherr paints an evenhanded portrait of Ride as an iconic American whose accomplishments are inseparable from the second-wave feminist moment in which she reached them.”
• Hearthstone tournament explains why women aren’t allowed to play | PC Gamer: “It’s a bizarre statement, attempting to defend a seemingly indefensible decision. E-sports can be recognised as a “legitimate sport” while still staying true to the differences that exist. Hearthstone is not a game that requires any division by gender—to do so is a completely arbitrary decision that smacks of a desperation to be taken seriously.”
• Abuse by Reddit: Proxy Recruitment in Tech: [CW: Emotional abuse, harassment] “Believing victims, and believing the marginalized, are feminist acts. This is as true for online abuse as it is for domestic abuse. So let’s believe the victims of online abuse. And when their harassers choose to incite further harassment, let’s call that behavior what it is.”
• Facebook: Unethical, untrustworthy, and now downright harmful | ZDNet: “It’s not going to get any better when people take a look at the tool Facebook used to do its experiments — a tool so woefully wrong for the job that no one, including Facebook, will ever know what Facebook actually did to its users’ emotional health.”
• “Why are these people following me?” Leadership for the introverted, uncertain, and astonished | Frances Hocutt: “I was honored to give the final keynote at last week’s Open Source Bridge 2014. My talk was titled “‘Why are these people following me?’: Leadership for the introverted, uncertain, and astonished”. It is the story of how I learned and claimed my leadership skills–because leading and conveying authenticity are both learnable skills.”
• Feigned Shock and Faux Enlightenment | ashe dryden: “The diversity in tech movement is stronger, larger, and louder than I believe it’s ever been. Articles in industry publications as well as global magazines and newspapers, blog posts, conference talks, podcasts, and large-scale twitter discussions continually highlight the rampant abuse, harassment, and bias that marginalized people in tech face. And yet each time these incidents surface, the industry and surrounding publications feign shock.”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs.  If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, Delicious or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.