Helen Lewis is pessimistic about the culture wars.
If today’s tech giants can be said to have an ideology, it is the promotion of unfettered free speech. Social media companies trumpet how pro-democracy protesters use their networks to oppose repressive governments. Celebrities are warned of the “Streisand effect” of trying to suppress unflattering information about them, and creating more publicity in the process. Twitter’s former general counsel once described the company as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party”.
But amid this orgy of self-congratulation, there is one rarely mentioned fact: one person’s free speech can come at the cost of another’s. This is the kernel at the heart of so many harassment cases: the stalker will insist, with an air of honest bafflement, that they are simply exercising their right to free speech. Unfortunately, they are doing it by shouting through the letterbox of their victim, who is now too afraid to leave their house.
Free speech, free shouting, free access to everyone’s letterbox, free access to everyone. Freedom freedom freedom.
There is no neutral position here. In trolling cases, for example, by protecting the abuser, you are discouraging the abused from entering public debates. The effect of this is profoundly conservative, because the cost of speaking out becomes higher for women (who receive a disproportionate amount of the most serious abuse, according to research by the Pew Institute and others) and other visible minorities.
No no no it’s the other way around. Minorities and women are holding everyone in the prison of Political Correctness and it’s all these shouting ranting spitting screeching Superior Young White Men who are subject to more abuse.
This aspect of the free speech debate is often ignored. Consider the backlash to Twitter linking up with a voluntary organisation, Women, Action and The Media, which will investigate and track sexist abuse on the social network. Wam’s power is extremely limited: it in effect has a hotline to Twitter, to escalate complaints that it has verified; it will also compile statistics on how well the service is handling them. The power to suspend and ban users still rests with Twitter.
This wasn’t enough to stop the influential US blogger Andrew Sullivan choking on his morning latte. “Is it simply that Wam believes that women cannot possibly handle the rough-and-tumble of uninhibited online speech?” he thundered. “I suspect the culture wars online just got a little more frayed. Because Twitter has empowered leftist feminists to have a censorship field day.”
It has not, of course. Twitter has empowered feminists to monitor whether its own harassment policies are enforced – and to see whether the “uninhibited online speech” of one group is preventing the uninhibited online speech of another.
But Sullivan is used to a setup in which people like him get to do all the talking (yes, even though he’s gay) and people like us get shouted down, so an attempt to shake that out a little until it’s more even looks to him like leftist feminists having a censorship field day. So on we go, each day a little more hostile than the last.
I spent an hour today reading through Sullivan’s latest series of articles about “illiberal feminists.” He’s getting worse by the day; he is actually now saying that the “goal” of “liberal feminism” is to silence any debate (and especially men) and is approvingly posting one email after another that agrees with him on that point. He makes up strawmen faster than the damn grass can grow.
No wonder some want him off our lawns.
Eh?
PZ Myers has “empowered” me “to have a censorship field day” on his blog.
By which I mean, I can’t actually change anything there. I can’t even actually post there, he banned me. But I can email him and tell him if something there offends me. And he might email me back. Maybe. Probably not. Doesn’t have to. I mean, y’know, he’s a busy man. But I can “monitor” his blog, and tell him when it annoys me.
Yay empowerment! I’m having a field day!
It was funny – that recent Time article soliciting opinions about banning words used a word that’s long annoyed me: curmudgeonly. A quote in one of your posts just prior to that had contained another: laddish. And another post around the same time used a third (I think that was Sullivan, too): provocative. In this context, these terms are generally used as a cover for reactionary or harassing actions, a rhetorical means of trying to excuse, minimize, or deny responsibility for them. And here’s yet another*: rough-and-tumble (with the added benefit of connoting Evo Psych rubbish about males favoring “rough-and-tumble play”).
* Or two: uninhibited is also precious.
Soooo out of curiosity, has Andrew Sullivan compared criticism from feminists with a lynch mob, or witch hunt, or thought police, or any other violent imagery? There’s always that adorable pattern of considering their own speech to be benign, but their critics to be violent attacks. It’s especially disturbing when the same people write off actual rape and death threats, and other real violent imagery as just harmless, or just trolls… You know, just ignore it.
Radioactive Elephant@5:
To my knowledge, he hasn’t gone so far as “lynch mob” or “witch hunt”, but he’s certainly used the rhetoric of “thought police.” To Sullivan, criticism is equivalent to being against “free speech”, which is interesting given that he has no qualms calling mainstream feminism as “illiberal” and has in the past sneered at people as Social Justice Warriors, although the blowback against him on that latter one has caused him to state that he’ll no longer use the term–but you know he still probably inwardly sneers it. Recently he has even gone so far as to say that social justice is less important than completely unfettered speech, while simultaneously and confusingly taking up the mantle of Tone Troll and lecturing his readers on the need to be “gentlemanly” and polite.
Good list, SC. It’s a whole genre, really, the vocabulary of minimization of bullying and/or cruelty.
And Sullivan is damn’ certainly old enough to remember being silenced and harassed as a gay man. Something about being co-opted by right wing outlets? Hirsi Ali, and maybe Ibn Warraq might be further examples?
Sullivan had a brief shining moment when he was very articulately criticizing Bush Jr’s tragicomic wars. Now that Bush Jr is out of the picture, there’s no one left to make Sullivan look intelligent. Oh well, I guess we can still call on him if another Bush nukes Iran…