Is Your House Missing a Stair?

Say you were visiting a friend’s house for the first time and went to use the upstairs bathroom, only to find one entire stair missing. You’d probably be rather confused. Why is that stair missing? Why didn’t your friend warn you? How do they manage to use the stairs in their own house? However, your friend seems relatively unbothered by that missing stair. They tell you that the house just came that way, and they and their other friends have gotten used to jumping over that missing stair.

Now imagine that house is the geek community, and that missing stair is someone who is a known problem for other community members. Essentially, everyone has gotten used to finding ways to maneuver around this person, without actually addressing the underlying problem of their behavior. This type of person is called a missing stair, which was first mentioned in the blog The Pervocracy [CW: Blog is for the BDSM/kink communities]. The term is useful shorthand for describing an ongoing problem within the geek community and the failure to properly address it. So how do we fix this?

Directly addressing the missing stair 

The most obvious solution is to directly tell a missing-stair person that they are not welcome in your circle unless they change their behavior. It can be hard to blacklist someone from the community. We still remember being mocked in school for liking geeky stuff. However, this does not mean we should overlook behavior that poses a threat to the geek community as a whole. If anything, we should directly address the missing-stair person to protect others in the way we wanted protection from our childhood bullies.

Warning others

The other solution to fixing missing stairs is publicly warning the community. Don’t rely on a backdoor networks or whisper campaigns, as these will invariably miss newcomers. Yes, it will feel as though you are a broken record, telling people again and again about that missing stair. However, if you don’t do so, your entire community may be seen as unsafe. A house isn’t structurally safe if there are gaps in the stairs. Neither is the geek community.