One of the reasons I think it would be irresponsible to speculate on the nature of the second job that got her sacked is that I have a feeling—backed by zero evidence; just a hunch—that if we knew what it was, this decision would look pretty cut and dried. Both Alison and Nintendo seem to wish to keep it quiet, and we should respect that. This is someone who has spoken in the past about vulnerability to depression and other mental issues, as is commonplace among the social justice set, and I just don't think that perpetuating this media frenzy to satiate our own sense of certitude and justice is really in her or anyone's best interests.
On the matter of professionalism and marks like tattoos, something that we should keep in mind here is that Alison Rapp comes from countercultural activist circles where white-collar norms of presentability are seen as a hindrance to class mobility. She's very outspoken in favour of removing stigmas against sex workers, for instance, in concordance with a common (and not unreasonable) line of reasoning from the progressive left that if backgrounds in sex work or stereotypical class markers like piercings/tattoos hinder your employment prospects, that disproportionately keeps people from working-class backgrounds out of upward mobility in the job market. We can argue about that all day, but I don't think I'm misrepresenting the standard argument in her style of politics. To survive in an environment like Nintendo's, for her, was a point of pride.
In her last set of Twitter posts, she draws attention to how her public presence was initially met with resistance from management. But the key to this is that she prevailed. She didn't budge when management asked her to stop talking about rape. She didn't budge when management said they didn't want her to stream. And the fact that she continued to be herself on social media, and that management gave her the latitude to do so, is why she cultivated the profile she did. She was very open about wishing to use her place in the industry to push it towards progressive-left ideals, and that's what endeared her to her admirers and marked her as a target for her enemies.
Management didn't just find out about Alison Rapp's Twitter feed from an onslaught of harassers last week. Trolls have been after her for years, as she knows well from cataloguing their attacks herself. Ignoramuses blamed her for localization choices in which she had no involvement at all because she was literally the only person they could name who fit the bill of "known social justice activist who works for Nintendo and professes an intention to use her job for progressive purposes", fulfilling every lurid fantasy of what it was they were campaigning against. Filing frivolous complaints against her was nothing new and nothing recent. NoA might have shuffled her around or put a ceiling on her prospects of advancement, which is not nice, but the crucial thing is that they—and her—had weathered this sort of thing before. When they first hired her they clearly perceived her as a risk, but reached a working compromise where she didn't have to back down on her activist principles.
*
What is new, if we are to believe that the latest wave of harassers dug up the smoking gun, is that they finally found something that stuck.
Let me put it this way. (This is an imperfect analogy, but bear with me.) Suppose the Westboro Baptist Church, a known hate group that everyone knows not to take seriously because their entire reputation is built on picketing funerals with "God Hates Fags", wants to get an employee of yours removed. They stir up negative press, they complain, they bully your support lines, they waste everyone's time. Nobody takes them seriously; nobody in an official capacity even wants to dignify them by name. One day they, or somebody aligned with their beliefs, dig up evidence that your employee is up to something that, according to your corporate standards, is really not okay; not just because it would make for bad PR (like that insipid CP red herring), but because it's actually, concretely unbecoming of someone in your employ.
Do you: (a) take no action because of the atrocious optics of kowtowing to a widely reviled hate group, or (b) treat the evidence independently as a disciplinary/contractual matter?
Alison could very well have crossed a line into what is, by corporate policy, an unambiguously terminable offence—neither you nor I are in a position to know, though both her statements and Nintendo's seem to point to this as the case. And while she and her supporters may resent a corporate culture where whatever she did is terminable, and while all of us may resent the kind of unabated mob hysteria that led to someone informing on her (especially if its adherents are now emboldened to claim another scalp), we should allow for the possibility that the decision was necessary even if the optics were predictably godawful—and you can bet the inevitable backlash would have figured into the cost/benefit balance somehow.
I, for one, appreciate Nintendo's explicit statement against harassment, even if PR will be PR and even if it comes so late. It looks quite bad that they didn't support their employee and stand against harassment promptly. It would have looked even worse if they publicly defended her while a disciplinary process was ongoing, then sacked her anyway the next week.
Fairly put. I'm displeased with the chilling effect that Outraged Internet Detectives of any gang, faction, or political stripe have created to smother individual expression outside of one's employment, and one of the problems with this industry is that its customer base is a demographic that is disproportionately plugged in to the uses and abuses of social media. Most of the combatants in factional online disputes are not very principled about opposing thug tactics, only interested in sniping at their opponents. Frankly, I would find it just as dismaying if people were routinely targeted for expressing opposition to identity-progressive axioms of collective social harms and thrown out of their jobs for perceived allegiance to GG—and I don't doubt there are people who try to make this happen, but with much less traction, organization, and success because the relevant targets are more securely placed and harder to dislodge than the depression-prone twenty-something indie types trying to get their foot in the door to pay off their student loans, which is the core of the progressive demographic that GG types like to move against.
Meanwhile, there is probably a worthwhile discussion to be had on whether it is right and just for a private citizen's highly visible activism (particularly of the sort where outspoken visibility in itself is held to be a virtue) to be treated as a risk factor in a professional context on the same order as, well, tattoos. I'm uncomfortable with the chilling factor, but it must be said that this form of activism necessarily involves drawing attention to oneself as a target, for the express purpose of protesting social norms of sitting down and shutting up. How much of an encumbrance is it if the norm that big, risk-averse corporate outfits ultimately settle on, for their own protection, is to firmly put the boot down on their employees' online presence—the way that NoA specifically didn't with Alison Rapp?
