Post-Election Depression is Coming, So Be Gentle With Yourself

If you’ve noticed yourself feeling more fatigued, sluggish, numb, or even down since the election, you’re not alone.

For some people, it might come as a surprise that a period of time they associate with feelings of relief, hope, or even joy could also be a time when depression symptoms show up. But it actually makes a lot of sense when you consider one compelling theory for why we get depressed in the first place. [1]

Most people will probably experience depression at some point in their lives. It’s pretty much the common cold of mental illnesses. But unlike the common cold, which is caused by a pathogen that enters the body, depression is something the body does to itself. Given how destructive depression can be, and how it can disrupt just about every facet of human functioning, why would our brains be able to do this shitty thing to us?

Continue reading “Post-Election Depression is Coming, So Be Gentle With Yourself”

Post-Election Depression is Coming, So Be Gentle With Yourself
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Seven Meditations for Moving Forward

A path through a forest.
Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash

I.

What are you feeling right now? Name it. Name them all–there are probably more than one or two.

A feeling is any word or phrase that can come after the words “I feel” without needing the words “like” or “that” to make it fit. I feel scared, I feel horrified, I feel jealous, I feel hopeful, I feel alone.

Imagine yourself sitting comfortably in a cozy room. Picture whatever makes a space feel safe and accessible to you. Maybe you’re on a beanbag chair, up against the back wall, and on the other side of the room from you is a door.

Imagine that each of the emotions you’re naming is walking through that door and sitting down in the room with you. They’re not coming to fight you, debate you, or do anything other than sit with you, but they all have something to say.

Continue reading “Seven Meditations for Moving Forward”

Seven Meditations for Moving Forward

Stuff I Read That You Might Like, Vol. 1

An e-reader with a cup of coffee, a notebook, a pen, and a pair of reading glasses.
Photo by Aliis Sinisalu on Unsplash

For a long time I’ve used Tumblr primarily to share quotes from my favorite articles that I read online (and sometimes books, too). Since I’m no longer using Tumblr due to their atrocious, sex-negative decision about adult content, I haven’t been able to find a better way to do this. Most so-called Tumblr “replacements” are pretty barebones and/or nonfunctional.

So, clunky as it is, I’ll be doing it here! Every so often I’ll post some quotes and links to stuff you might like.

Starting off with a very topical one:

Tumblr made sex a community experience.

—Vex Ashley, “Porn on Tumblr — a eulogy / love letter

Now that the full scope of this administration*’s political vandalism and base criminality is largely being copped to in broad daylight in various federal courthouses, a good chunk of the elite political press is moving into the Hoocoodanode? stage of political journalism. This is best exemplified byThursday’s New York Times podcast, the headline of which—“The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, and How We Missed It”—got dragged like Hector’s corpse all over the electric Twitter machine until someone at the Times sharpened up and changed the last half of it to “…and How Law Enforcement Ignored It,” which is a little better, but not much.

To take the simplest argument first, “we,” of course, did no such thing, unless “we” is a very limited—and very white—plural pronoun. The violence on the right certainly made itself obvious in Oklahoma City, and at the Atlanta Olympics, and at various gay bars and women’s health clinics, and in Barrett Slepian’s kitchen, and in the hills of North Carolina, where Eric Rudolph stayed on the lam for five years and in which he had stashed 250 pounds of explosives for future escapades.

—Charles P. Piece, “‘We’ Did Not Miss the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism. You Did.

Inspired by online recipe sites, he’d sit down to dinner and then let me know what rating I earned. “If I give you five out of five, you’ll quit,” he joked. And I laughed because when I was in my 20s, I believed that you were supposed to laugh when someone hurt your feelings. I thought you were constantly supposed to be trying harder.

—Lyz Lenz, “Now That I’m Divorced, I’m Never Cooking for a Man Again

“As you become more acclimated to the cold, your body becomes more effective at delivering warm blood to the extremities, your core temperature goes up, and all that contributes to being more resistant to the cold,” Leonard told me.

That means the only cure for hating winter, unfortunately, is just more winter.

—Olga Kazan, “Why So Many People Hate Winter” (ugh.)

Mattis saw it up close. He bore it as long as he could, in hopes of mitigating the damage. But when Trump broke America’s promise to the Syrian Kurds, he stained Mattis’s honor, too. That, apparently, Mattis could not accept. He leaves and takes his honor with him. And now the question for Congress is: The Klaxon is sounding. The system is failing. What will you do?

—David Frum, “No More Excuses

It’s called Star Wars. Not Star Trek, not Star Peace, not Star Friends, not even Star Tales. This gargantuan fictional universe is labeled with a title that guarantees the ability to travel space… and near-constant warfare.

We can debate the relative okay-ness of this focus from a moral standpoint, sure. But in reality, I think that Star Wars is accidentally teaching us the greatest lesson of all: It’s depicting what a universe looks like when you dedicate all of your research and technological advancements to war and destruction, and unwittingly showing us what an incredibly dark place that universe is. Because the Star Wars universe is a fun fictional playground for sure, a great place to build weird and wonderful stories… but it’s not a good place. Not by a longshot.

—Emily Asher-Perrin, “Star Wars is Really a Cautionary Tale About Devoting All Technological Advancements to Death

It’s no longer socially acceptable to believe that women are somehow less than especially not during a time when feminism is wielding so much cultural power. But arguing that women are just naturally better at caretaking or domestic work has become a clever way to shirk living up to progressive values while claiming you are simply complimenting women on their stellar ironing skills.

One way to combat this line of thinking is to highlight how fully capable men are in the private sphere. It is true that American culture relishes in portraying men as dolts when it comes to parenting and cleaning, and it’s an unfair stereotype.

But for women to make real progress in and out of their homes, men must give something up: the backwards dream of holding onto their feminist bona fides while seeking out female partners willing to limit their own aspirations to the home.

—Jessica Valenti, “The ‘Woke’ Men Who Still Want Housewives

So yes, forced birthers and [Status Quo Warriors], if you’re going to play it like that, I am OK with the idea of a world into which you, personally, were never born. I am equally as OK with the idea of a world where I don’t exist, either. Neither you nor I personally matters that much in a universe so vast and a sea of human experiences so rich. You and I both are accidents in our existence, possibly unhappy ones.

I would’ve rather your mother not have been forced to carry a pregnancy she didn’t want to term. I would’ve rather your father had approached your mother respectfully in an appropriate setting, or not at all. I dare to love your mother as a fellow human being more than you do and to dream of a better world for people like her. It’s rank misogyny and not very humanist at all to think otherwise.

—Heina Dadabhoy, “Why I Don’t Care If You Wouldn’t Have Existed

It is maddening to watch adult men respond to revelations of endemic sexual harassment in the workplace by instituting a series of ludicrous personal codes, rather than by learning the relatively straightforward lesson on offer: Don’t sexually assault or harass anyone.

At best, these “rules” are reflective of employers’ woefully incomplete approach to sexual harassment. Employers have long done the absolute minimum to comply with the law, relying on trite videos focused on what you can and cannot say or do in the workplace (“don’t give back rubs” or “don’t offer promotions in exchange for sex”) and sexual harassment policies designed primarily to protect them from lawsuits. The sweeping scale of the Me Too movement makes it clear that no mere set of rules is sufficient to prevent workplace harassment, especially when those rules fail to speak to all of the various power imbalances that make the critical distinctions between genuinely consensual workplace romances and harassment.

—Tahir Duckett, “Avoiding Women At Work Is A Childish, Cowardly Response To #MeToo

When you are terribly afraid of being held responsible for the emotional well-being of others, it feels very mature and responsible to decide that you should “work on yourself.” It becomes both a way of retroactively absolving yourself (wow, can you believe all of the ways my issues manifested before I decided to work on them) and a rather elegant little trick to exonerate ongoing bad behavior (dang, those pesky issues again! I guess I must keep working on them). This is especially true for those too-clever-by-half motherfuckers who think that nobly warning someone in advance they “are working on their issues” mitigates any way in which they might disappoint or harm. And even with the best of intentions, it obviates the fact that relationships themselves are a process of being made ready, not something you come to static and fully formed.

[…] We need each other desperately, in ways none of us can be ready for.

—Brandy Jensen, “Ask A Fuck-Up: I’m still in therapy. Should I be dating?


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Stuff I Read That You Might Like, Vol. 1

No, Kids Cannot Treat Each Others’ Gunshot Wounds, Either

A person taking a CPR class practices on a mannequin.
You really don’t have to be a healthcare professional to know that this won’t treat a gunshot wound. Photo credit

[Content note: descriptions of injuries and gun violence]

Yesterday[1] I discussed the phenomenon of adults expecting children to become impromptu school counselors for kids who are socially excluded and possibly planning a school shooting. Today I will talk about another job title that some actual people who are old enough to vote and drink alcohol expect children to take on: field medic.

Erstwhile Republican presidential candidate and professional stack-of-rats-in-a-suit Rick Santorum had some comments[2] about the young people organizing against gun violence, which I recommend reading out loud to yourself because that’s the only way I’ve found of making sense of this word salad:

How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that….They took action to ask someone to pass a law. They didn’t take action to say, ‘How do I, as an individual, deal with this problem? How am I going to do something about stopping bullying within my own community? What am I going to do to actually help respond to a shooter?’… Those are the kind of things where you can take it internally, and say, ‘Here’s how I’m going to deal with this. Here’s how I’m going to help the situation,’ instead of going and protesting and saying, ‘Oh, someone else needs to pass a law to protect me.’ …I’m proud of them, but I think everyone should be responsible and deal with the problems that we have to confront in our lives. And ignoring those problems and saying they’re not going to come to me and saying some phony gun law is gonna solve it. Phony gun laws don’t solve these problems.

(You might need to read it a few times, slowly, before it makes any sense. Actually, it may never make sense at all.)

The salient points here are:

  • Children should stop complaining to adults about their petty little problems like being shot with assault weapons in schools, and instead “take action” to “do something” about it.
  • Taking a CPR class is a good response to the problem of school shootings.
  • Laws cannot protect children from violence.
  • Demanding that adults pass laws doesn’t count as “doing something” about a problem.

Although I’m still convinced that Santorum is a stack of rats in a suit–surely no human being could blame children for being insufficiently proactive about surviving gun violence–I’m going to respond to his arguments as if he is a human being. I’ll grant him that, even if he wouldn’t grant it to me, or to my teenage siblings.

To state the very, very obvious, CPR is not an appropriate response to a gunshot wound. I am certified in CPR and first aid. CPR, or cardiopulmonary resuscitation, is an emergency procedure (my god, I can’t believe I’m even having to write these words, what the fucking hell) that is useful in exactly one situation: when someone’s heart has stopped. Applying manual compressions to a person’s chest in this particular way can help blood continue to circulate through their body and reach their brain, increasing the chances that they’ll survive once they get prompt medical attention and reducing the chances of brain damage.

I will never forget the words of the fire department chief who facilitated my most recent CPR refresher training: “You can’t hurt someone by giving them CPR, because if their heart has stopped, they are already dead. You’re not gonna make them more dead.” CPR, while taught along with first aid in many cases, is different from many other first aid techniques in that if someone needs CPR, they are already minutes (or even seconds) away from death. CPR can ultimately fail even if administered perfectly because the body needs oxygen and it’s pretty rare for CPR to actually restart a stopped heart. It’s just a way to keep the person from really dying until the paramedics get there.

So, if you get trained in CPR, you will need to be prepared for the very real possibility that you will watch another human being die with your hands on them. That’s…you know, kind of a big deal.

But all of that is mostly irrelevant here because CPR will not keep someone from bleeding out from a gunshot wound. What will, if they’re lucky enough to have been shot in an arm or a leg, is a tourniquet, a first-aid technique that blocks blood flow to the injured part of the body to limit blood loss before the person can get emergency treatment. It’s not for the faint-hearted, whether you’re making or receiving one.

Getting trained and certified in CPR and first aid[3] is a great idea, including for young people. When I was a teenager, many of my friends worked as pool lifeguards during the summers and it definitely made me feel a bit safer to know that they were all trained in, well, guarding lives.

However, when I think about teenagers learning first aid, I imagine situations like, your friend stepped on a sharp object, or you got into a minor car crash, or someone forgot their EpiPen at marching band practice. I don’t think about mass shootings.

So let’s think about them now. If you found yourself sympathetic to Santorum’s comments, I want you to imagine yourself as a teenager, crouching beneath a tiny classroom desk with your best friend, who is bleeding profusely from a gunshot wound. More gunshots and screams are echoing in the halls. Your best friend is trembling, tears streaming down their face. Their blood is on your hands and clothing. You can’t risk getting up and finding a first aid kit, because then you might get shot too. You have a few minutes to save your best friend’s life with a tourniquet you made with a broken-off chair leg and someone’s belt.

Imagine surviving this. Imagine surviving it, but your best friend dies anyway, underneath that desk with you. Imagine that your best friend survives, but with permanent physical damage (to say nothing of the psychological impact). Imagine that your best friend survives, but the other classmate next to you dies, because you helped your best friend first. Imagine finding out later that you spent five valuable minutes performing CPR on someone who was never going to wake up anyway, while someone else bled out across the room from you.

Imagine that this is our lawmakers’ best answer to the fears of children who tell them they don’t want to die in their schools.

Kids and teens are capable of incredible acts of bravery and selflessness, including saving lives. But even after all this–by which I mean, our general political trajectory of the past decade or so–I can’t quite wrap my mind around how it is that a man with children (young children) could so blithely suggest inflicting such trauma on them rather than reckoning with the $116,000 he has received from pro-gun lobbyists since 1990.

See, this is why I’m pretty sure Santorum is a stack of rats in a suit.

But if you’re not buying that theory, I have another one, and it’s more depressing.

What do you think Santorum would’ve said if the Parkland students had, instead of advocating for greater restrictions on gun ownership, marched to their statehouse and to Washington, DC to demand fewer restrictions on gun ownership? What if they’d asked for laws that would provide guns and weapons training for teachers? Laws that would provide grant funding to the NRA so that it can do more of its valuable work? Laws that would increase, in theory, the likelihood that a “good guy with a gun” could take down a school shooter?

Somehow, I don’t think he’d be rebuking them for “asking someone to pass a law.” Those kids would be invited to speak at every GOP rally and fundraising event from Florida to Alaska. We wouldn’t be hearing a peep from conservatives about “coaching” and “taking political advice from kids.”

In other words, it’s just more of the same tribalist bullshit we’ve been pointing out since the election[4] and before, and it doesn’t smell any different.

When traumatized children demand political changes that are associated with Democrats and progressivism, it suddenly becomes okay for Santorum and others to bully them, ridicule their physical appearance, and casually suggest further traumatizing them by forcing them to literally take the problem of gun violence into their own hands. [5]

Memo to Santorum, or the rats which comprise his physical form, or whatever: “asking someone to pass a law” is taking action, especially when that someone is a fucking lawmaker tasked with keeping our schools and communities safe and when the person doing the asking is a fucking child who’s supposed to be able to rely on adults to keep them alive long enough to vote those adults the fuck out of public office.


[1] https://the-orbit.net/brutereason/2018/03/25/please-do-not-walk-up-to-people-you-think-might-murder-you/

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/25/politics/rick-santorum-guns-cnntv/index.html

[3] https://www.redcross.org/take-a-class

[4] https://the-orbit.net/brutereason/2016/12/27/hypocrisy-often-just-tribalism/

[5] Unfortunately, this is often the only option available to children of color living in areas marked by frequent gun violence. For example, in Chicago, a grassroots group called Ujimaa Medics teaches kids and teens to give first aid to gunshot victims. Remember that if we’re saying the Parkland students don’t deserve this kind of trauma, neither do the children of color all over the country who live it every day.


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No, Kids Cannot Treat Each Others’ Gunshot Wounds, Either

Please Do Not “Walk Up” to People You Think Might Murder You

I had a double mastectomy a week ago, which for the context of this article means two things: 1) I was unable to participate in the March For Our Lives yesterday, although I really wanted to; and 2) I’m not in a particularly charitable mood. You might even say, in fact, that I’m feeling extra protective of this fragile corporeal vessel I’m forced to inhabit.

Right before the mastectomy, during the National School Walkout on March 14, most of us were seeing nonsense on social media about “walk up, not out,”[1] meaning: instead of walking out of school to protest the fact that it’s not a safe place for kids and teens, why don’t you walk up to classmates you think might be the next Nikolas Cruz and talk to them in order to…this is where things get fuzzy. But presumably in order to keep them from becoming the next Nikolas Cruz.

I am no longer a child and I do not have children, but what I do have is two teenage siblings, and I will be absolutely, thoroughly god-damned before I instruct them, or allow anyone else to instruct them, to do something so equal-parts patronizing and dangerous.

Since I don’t have much to do these days besides read and monitor my surgical wounds, let me break this down.

Adults are historically terrible at dealing with social exclusion in schools

I’m not surprised that at the heart of this infuriatingly condescending meme lies a fundamental misunderstanding of social dynamics among children and teens, because adults (at least, the ones who don’t study this academically) seem to have always had difficulty grasping what most kids (yes, even the “socially awkward” ones) know intuitively.

When I was little, this manifested itself in ways such as classroom rules (formal or informal) about having to give a Valentine’s Day card to each student in the class, or invite each student in the class to your birthday party, so that nobody feels excluded. Never mind what a creepy message this ultimately sends, or how humiliating and uncomfortable it would be (and was, for me at times) to receive cards and party invitations from kids that you know hate you.

I don’t know if kids still give out Valentines, but I do still see headlines now and then about elementary and middle school students being forced to say “yes” to anyone who asks them to a school dance [2], or being banned from having “best friends” so that nobody feels excluded [3]. To these things I can only say: yikes, you guys. Yikes. Are the adults okay? Who hurt you? (Apparently, the kid in your 6th grade class who said no when you asked them to the dance.)

What kids know, and what many adults apparently quickly forget, is twofold: 1) Social exclusion will be a part of our lives in some way no matter what; and 2) if people want to exclude you, there is nothing—no rule, no requirement, no sugar coating—that will hide that fact from you, or make it sting any less. In fact, one of the most hurtful and memorable forms of bullying a child can experience is having their classmates pretend to like them, care about them, or include them (to the praise of parents and teachers, probably) only to yank that positive regard away. This isn’t a new thing. Hasn’t anyone seen Carrie?

Social exclusion isn’t a childhood phenomenon; it’s a human phenomenon that many adults also experience in their social groups, workplaces, and communities. There’s no simple answer to it, and any effective intervention would probably have to address the prejudices that people use to decide whom to exclude, rather than the exclusionary behavior itself. But that’s for another article, or rather, for another book.

All social exclusion is not made equal

Another mistake adults make when trying to mitigate social exclusion in schools is assuming that it’s all cut from the same cloth. Sure, on the surface, the behaviors can look the same—ignoring or avoiding certain students, laughing at them, refusing to sit with them at lunch. But the motivations behind these behaviors can vary a lot.

That means that on the surface, you can’t really tell if a group of kids is avoiding another kid because they think his hand-me-down clothes are ugly, or because he’s a pompous asshole who makes them feel small and dumb whenever they try to talk to him, or because something about him is just…off in a way they can’t articulate but that reminds them of when their parents told them to avoid that creepy old dude down the block because “we’ve heard stories.”

Kids, especially younger ones, don’t always know how to make sense of their feelings in that last case. So they sometimes act out those feelings by passing mean notes about that classmate or making fun of his dark baggy clothes or the music he listens to. It’s mean. But it’s covering up for something else that they haven’t been taught to name yet.

(I do wonder, though, how true that even is in today’s landscape. I do know that ten years ago when I was a high school student, I could never have even contemplated mounting the sort of campaign the Parkland students have, as have the many young people of color protesting gun violence during the past few years. I just didn’t have the schemas to understand it. Today’s teens are different.)

In any case, in situations where a school shooter was bullied or excluded prior to his acts of violence, it’s possible that the social ostracism was less a cause and more a warning sign. Maybe his classmates knew something was up, but they didn’t know what, and they didn’t know how serious it might turn out to be.

This means that when you encourage students to “walk up, not out,” you’re not just asking them to walk up to the new kid, or the disabled student, the girl who’s been made fun of ever since she got her period in gym class, or the gender-nonconforming young person. You’re also asking them to walk up to the young white man with violent lyrics plastered all over his locker, who nobody ever wants to talk to because all he wants to talk about are his guns and the need to keep the white race pure or whatever.

Imagine, too, being the new kid or the disabled student who suddenly has a bunch of kids “walk up” to you right after the National School Walkout, only to realize that they’re doing it because they’re afraid you’ll shoot them.

Bullying does not cause school shootings

The idea that the prototypical school shooter is necessarily a “troubled” young person who is cruelly bullied and excluded by their peers is not necessarily based on reality. Even in the case of Columbine, the typical example, it’s straight-up false. [4]

It is often very difficult to put all the puzzle pieces together after the fact and figure out whether a shooter was mistreated by their peers or not, especially if that shooter has committed suicide and isn’t around to answer questions.

Part of what makes it difficult is that social dynamics among kids and teens are extremely fluid and can change by the day. Very few kids are always the victims, always the bullies, or always the bystanders. If you examine random slices of my K-12 life, you will find times when I was mistreated and left out, times when I had a healthy, supportive group of friends, times when I stood by while my friends bullied others, and probably even times when I was the bully. If you read my teenage diaries, you might find some wildly conflicting evidence in there.

Here are some characteristics that many (possibly even most?) school shooters have in common, that aren’t being bullied or excluded: being white, being male, having a record of violence or harassment against women, having an interest or a record of participation in white supremacist/neo-Nazi/ethno-centrist groups. (Another item that doesn’t belong on this list? Mental illness.)

Really, if you wanted to prevent school shootings without having kids walk out of schools and march to demand action on gun control, it almost seems like the most effective strategy wouldn’t be making sure all the loners feel included, but that we intervene when we see young people developing strong sexist and racist beliefs. Almost.

There’s some value in encouraging kids to include each other

That’s not to say that the underlying message of “walk up, not out” is entirely bad. From a totally basic, uncomplicated point of view, sure, it’s nice to encourage children and teens to consider who might feel left out at their school and try including those people. I would endorse that statement in about the same way that I would endorse statements like “it’s good to eat vegetables” and “we should try to drive within the speed limit whenever possible.” That is, I agree, but I’m not about to put it on a bumper sticker or tattoo it on my body.

The generally uncontradictory nature of that statement is probably why many kids already do that. Most kids who are rejected and excluded by some classmates are accepted and included by other classmates. Most “unpopular” kids do have friends—friends who are often also unpopular and can relate to their experience. When I was getting bullied the most—seventh grade—I had a small group of loyal friends who liked me and hung out with me. They just weren’t necessarily in the same gym class.

Being concerned with including other students and walking out to protest gun violence are not contradictory. In fact, they go together. Our schools should be places where all students feel that they belong—if not in every single social group or with their entire class, then in a club or group of friends where they feel wanted and welcome. However, before our schools can be those places, they need to become places where children do not fear being murdered with a gun. Remember Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. [5] Which of these do you really think we should start with?

An illustration of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, with comments by me to show how it would apply to a school setting.
Here’s a handy visual aid, even.

.Kids and teens can be as biased and prejudiced as their parents, but they also often have very well-developed gut instincts when it comes to unsafe people—unless we shame them into suppressing those instincts. We should challenge the young people in our lives to approach uncomfortable conversations with other young people who are different from them, while drawing a very clear line between that and disregarding one’s own personal safety. We should read The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker [6], discuss it with young people, and then stop demanding that they ignore all the good advice in it.

We should ask ourselves, too, which images pop into our minds when we think about asking kids to “walk up” to someone they’ve excluded. Do we imagine the Mexican immigrant kids, the Black kids, the gender-nonconforming kids, the girls who got labeled “fat” or “slutty,” the boys who wear nail polish, the kids who need IEPs? Or do we imagine the white boys who give Nazi salutes and submit essays about why slavery is morally justifiable?

What labor are we asking young people to perform, here? Which problems are we asking them to solve that we ought to be solving for them? Whose voices are missing from this conversation?

And why are we having this conversation, exactly? Is it because we’re so very worried about social exclusion, or is it because this is easier to talk about than guns?


[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/14/us/ryan-petty-walk-up-walk-out-stoneman-douglas-shooting-trnd/index.html

(Sidenote: I feel quite bad about trashing an idea that seems to have originated from the father of one of the Parkland victims, but unfortunately, losing someone to this type of violence doesn’t necessarily give you the psychological, sociological, or legal expertise to determine how to prevent it.)

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2018/02/13/a-school-made-children-say-yes-to-any-classmate-who-asked-for-a-dance-then-a-parent-spoke-up/?utm_term=.06576c7f05b5

[3] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-met-best-friends-ban-kass-0119-story.html

[4] https://www.facebook.com/rebeccawald/posts/10156114680017429

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

[6] https://www.amazon.com/Gift-Fear-Survival-Signals-Violence/dp/0440226198


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Please Do Not “Walk Up” to People You Think Might Murder You

There’s Nothing “Unfair” About Al Franken’s Resignation

Personal note: I’ve been mostly absent from blogging because I have cancer. Read all about it here.

[Content note: sexual violence]

Before I begin, I’d like to state for the record: it is Okay to have sad/upset/complicated feelings about the allegations against Al Franken and his subsequent decision to step down. That’s not what this is about. In fact, when it comes to me, it is Okay to have any feelings you want about anything. That’s my promise to you.

However, when we step outside of the realm of feelings and into the territory of attributions, ethical claims, moral reasoning, and outward behavior, it’s no longer anything-goes. Even if feelings underlie it.

I particularly disagree with claims that the political consequences Al Franken is now facing are “unfair.” It think this suggests some very skewed ideas about what fairness means, and under what conditions we can be expected to be our best selves.

In general, fairness means treating people and situations equally or equitably. If we would call upon a Republican with multiple credible allegations of sexual assault to resign, we should do the same to an equivalent Democrat. It would be unfair to call upon Roy Moore to resign, but not Al Franken. (Yes, the allegations against them differ in some significant ways, and sometimes this is important, but I don’t find it particularly important here. Assaulting adults is just as wrong as assaulting children.)

In some cases, fairness also means that if we have a contract with someone, spoken or unspoken, it would be unfair for one person to hold up their end of the contract and for the other to get out of having to do the same.

For instance, if it would be unfair to agree to a haircut at a salon and then refuse to pay even though the stylist has delivered the haircut promised. It would be unfair if you and your roommate have devised a chore schedule, but your roommate never does their share of the chores and you do. It would be unfair for a friend to expect me to listen to their problems, but when I have problems, they’re always mysteriously busy. (However, contrary to popular opinion, the way to make this situation fair is not to try to force the friend to listen to your problems. It’s to scale back or end the friendship until the situation feels fair to you. Consent is a thing.)

It’s weird to hear Al Franken’s resignation referred to as “unfair.” That implies that someone out there is not holding up their end of the bargain.

What people usually mean when they say this is that it’s unfair for Franken to “have” to resign when similar Republican politicians don’t. But rather than laying the blame for this unfairness solely onto Republicans and their constituents, they lay it much more directly onto the Democrats calling for Franken’s resignation even though his counterparts don’t “have” to resign.

To me, this is a backwards and morally bankrupt way of looking at things. It presumes that if Republicans had to resign when facing similar allegations, only then would it be fair for Democrats to have to do the same. Or, on the other hand, it would be fair if Franken’s resignation caused an equivalent Republican to resign as well.

But if you have used your position of power to take advantage of others, you deserve to lose that position—not in order to get anyone else to lose theirs too, and not as a goodwill concession towards those who already have, but because you have committed a crime, and you are not a fit or safe person to serve in this position. Sexual assault is a crime. Workplace sexual harassment is a crime. These things are also morally wrong. That’s why Franken should go. Republicans have nothing to do with it.

Sure, it admittedly does suck that Republicans rarely face consequences (or face them as seriously) as Democrats do in these situations. But that’s not “unfair.” There’s no “double standard.” The reason this pattern happens is because most Democratic voters don’t want to vote for confirmed sexual predators, whereas most Republicans are quite okay with this as long as he’s anti-choice and whatnot. That’s how you get Roy Moore.

I’ve heard folks say that they wouldn’t vote for Al Franken again because it would feel too icky, but they don’t want to see him “ousted.” But the fact that you wouldn’t vote for him again is exactly why he’s leaving.

So no, this isn’t a case of “they go low, we go high.” It’s not a double standard. It’s not “being better” than the Republicans. It’s not “eating our own.” It’s simply reading the fucking room, including the writing on the wall.

And if this is unfair, the only way for us as Democratic voters to make it fair is to commit to voting for candidates whose stance we support even if they are admitted/confirmed sexual predators. Then it would be “equal.”

So there’s no “unfairness” here, but there is an injustice—the injustice of conservative indifference to sexual violence and to human suffering in general. It’s the injustice of the just world fallacy, the injustice of harmful gendered thinking, the injustice of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and everything else in that deplorable bucket.

And while I’m on this topic, I also disagree that Al Franken handled this any differently/better than your average powerful man accused of something terrible. Aside from his decision to resign (presumably for the reasons I discussed above), his response is typical. His resignation announcement comes with no apology, and it comes only after numerous credible accusations (including photographs) have been made. It wasn’t proactive. I don’t sense any genuine regret, remorse, or understanding from him. And I wouldn’t expect it—these men know that what they’re doing is wrong. A child knows it’s wrong.

I believe it’s utterly wrong for us to heap praise on people who have kept their intentional acts of harm towards those less powerful than them hidden for years or decades, continually deny them, deny the first accusations, and finally relent when “proof” appears and everyone clamors for resignation. This isn’t remorse, it’s not “learning and growing,” and it’s not accountability. It is, again, reading the room.

And when you consider the immense risk and labor that the accusers have to take on every single time one of these powerful men is brought down (and especially when they’re not), it’s even more unfair. Aside from surviving multiple incidents of sexual harassment and/or assault, these accusers risk their careers, relationships, privacy, and whatever healing they’ve managed to do every time they speak out. Many of them face serious consequences, much more severe than Al Franken or any other powerful sexual predator. Job loss, death threats, lost friends, reliving what happened to them.

I have yet to see a powerful predator “apologize” or oh-so-graciously decide to step down before detailed accounts of their behavior are posted all over the internet and in major media outlets; before the people whose opinions and bodies they actually respect start to get uncomfortable; before the petitions circulate. That’s because they don’t want to. Al Franken didn’t want to. He doesn’t want to be accountable. He has to, because his base demands it.

I refuse to call this pathetic attempt at faking empathy “remorse.” I do not respect Al Franken. I do not thank him for his “apology.”

Call me when a predator removes himself from a powerful position without dozens of survivors having to cut themselves open and bleed for our satisfaction first. Until then, frankly, I don’t give a damn.


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There’s Nothing “Unfair” About Al Franken’s Resignation

We Are Pretty Confident There is No Longer a Threat

I keep coming back to something Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said yesterday morning, after Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old white man, opened fire on a music festival in Las Vegas from a hotel room where he’d stashed at least 20 legally purchased rifles, killing 59 people and wounding at least 500.

He said: “Right now we believe it’s a solo act, a lone wolf attacker. We are pretty confident there is no longer a threat.”

Even if you take that first sentence in the most literal way–that Paddock was not part of any organized group and did not have any accomplices in this terrible crime–the second simply does not follow. Because the “threat” did not end with him killing himself in his hotel room, just as it didn’t begin with him arriving there in the first place.

Although quite a number of people have already called me a “cunt” on the internet since yesterday because I referred to this act as terrorism, I will continue to do so, and I’ll explain why. (By the way, you’re not going to get very far condescendingly suggesting that an Israeli citizen doesn’t know the definition of terrorism. I’ve lived the definition of terrorism.)

People who blame these shootings on mental illness are correct in one way, and that’s when they say that “no normal person would do this.” Although they’re wrong in their conclusions, it’s true that in a normal, healthy human society, individuals don’t suddenly commit mass acts of violence, stunning all of their loved ones and the world at large.

But the situation of men in our society is not normal, and the addition of easily available semi-automatic firearms is the spark to that particular tinder.

Toxic masculinity isn’t a mental illness, but it isn’t healthy or “normal,” either, except in the statistical sense. We raise men to ignore and suppress any emotion besides anger until they’re no longer even able to identify any other emotion. We encourage them in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways to act out that anger as violence. We teach them that if the world doesn’t provide them with what they want–despair, and then anger, and then even violence, is a reasonable response. We teach them that emotional attachment, remorse, and self-criticism are feminine, and that if you’re a man who is feminine, you’re better off dead.

And then we give them easy access to guns–and not only that, but we tell them that they deserve those guns. That they deserve them in the literal same way as they deserve the right to criticize their government or to practice their religion.

By “we,” I obviously don’t mean you and me, except that I do mean you and me. Nobody did this to men; we all did it to ourselves. Non-male people perpetuate toxic masculinity all the time. I did it when I turned away in discomfort from male partners who were crying; male friends of mine do it every time they bury their feelings rather than acknowledging them.

But women and trans folks aren’t going to be able to fix masculinity. Men, especially cis men, are going to have to either reclaim it or toss it aside.

Terrorism is the use of violence and intimidation against civilians for political aims. I suppose this is where people are going to disagree. We relegate these men’s issues, or whatever they are, into the private sphere. But toxic masculinity is a political issue, and the violence it sparks certainly has the effect of terrorizing large groups of people, especially women, queer/trans people, and people of color.

When white men go on shooting sprees, many of us feel like hostages. Whatever it is these men want–sex, love, respect, attention, a demographic majority–we’re being held at gunpoint until they get it.

Marc Lepine, who murdered 14 women in Montreal in 1989, wanted a spot in a university and a job, and he thought women had taken those things from him.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who murdered 13 people at Columbine High School in 1999, left copious written notes about their anger at specific people at school and at society in general.

James Eagan Holmes, who murdered 12 people at a movie theater in Colorado in 2012, was reportedly dissatisfied with his life and inability to find a job.

Elliot Rodger, who murdered six people in Isla Vista, California in 2014, felt that he was denied the sex and attention that he deserved.

Dylann Roof, who murdered nine African American churchgoers in Charleston in 2015, thought that African Americans are taking his country from him, and stated that “I have no choice” but to do something about it.

There are dozens more examples easily found. The common thread here isn’t mental illness, or illegally obtained firearms (many of them were legally purchased), or poverty. It’s white men who are angry, think the world owes them something, and have access to guns.

And even if all of these mass shooters were mentally ill, and even if their mental illness contributed to their actions, that’s still not a good explanation. A quarter of American adults experience mental illness at some point. Most don’t shoot anyone. Something else has to make the difference.

So, sure, I could Wait And See before calling this latest shooting an act of terrorism. And maybe we’ll learn something that makes me change my mind. Changing one’s mind is fine. But at this point, I’m going to go with the overwhelmingly most likely explanation, which is that Stephen Paddock is yet another white men who was angry about being denied something he thought he deserved, and decided to make that point with mass violence. (Imagine my immense shock when I read that local Starbucks employees recall Paddock constantly being a piece of shit to his girlfriend.)

Many terrorist acts contain a grain of validity in that they’re the desperate acts of people or groups of people who no longer know how else to get what they want–which, in some cases, is a valid aim. (In other cases, it isn’t.) The terrorism of white American men is unique in that they don’t see themselves as part of a political group. But, of course, they are–it’s just not an organized one.

What they’re seeking is relief from their anger and misery, and mass shootings are only the most extreme of their attempts to get it. You see the less dramatic, less immediately deadly of those attempts all the time: the bitter online trolls, the men who expect their girlfriends to fix all of their problems, the Trump voters, the hacky comedians with their tired sexist jokes, the corporate workaholics.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, toxic masculinity teaches men to see the causes of their problems as always outside of themselves, which is why talking to angry men about “toxic masculinity” goes over about as well as talking to them about about Andrea Dworkin.

There’s a reason bell hooks named her excellent book on this topic The Will to Change. We can’t force men to change or make these changes for them. Until they do that for themselves, we’re all hostages to toxic masculinity. And until then, Sheriff Lombardo is very much wrong, because there is very much still a threat.


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We Are Pretty Confident There is No Longer a Threat

Antonin Scalia and the Ethics of "Celebrating Death"

[CN: Irreverent opinions about death]

With the sudden passing of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia this weekend, the Internet has filled up with sentiments about his death. Some people are cheering it, some are mourning it, and some are chastising the people who are cheering it because they find it inappropriate to be happy that someone is dead, regardless of who that person was or what they did.

Obviously, this is causing a lot of conflict, because the women, queer people, and other marginalized folks who are glad that Scalia’s no longer around to deny them civil rights don’t exactly appreciate being told they shouldn’t feel that way, and people who find it really inappropriate to “celebrate death” feel very uncomfortable.

Just to put this out there: I don’t feel any particular way about Scalia’s death. I think that it’ll have some interesting implications for the upcoming election, and I hope that this means that the Supreme Court will soon have a new justice who is liberal or at least moderate, but I don’t really feel anything. I didn’t celebrate his death. I didn’t mourn his death. I don’t have a lot of strong feelings about things that don’t impact me very very personally, and often I don’t even have any feelings about those things, and generally my writing and my activism is shaped by other processes besides my emotions. So. This is not an article about me and my feelings, and I’m not defending myself or my feelings here. I’m making an argument concerning ethics and I’m defending a broad group of people that I’m seeing get unfairly put down right now.

Death is never an easy subject to talk about no matter whose it is, and I think part of the problem is clashing social norms about responding to death. Some people are in the “never speak ill of the dead” camp; others are in the “you can criticize the actions of someone who has passed away but you shouldn’t be glad they’re gone” camp. The most controversial camp is the “I get to feel however the fuck I want about someone’s death and I get to say so on my Facebook page” camp.

I’m not much for relativism in general, but I think it’s worth noting that these different social norms exist and that they are not inevitable or universal. There is no intrinsic reason why saying mean things about someone who has died is wrong. You can claim that it’s bad because it hurts their surviving loved ones, but what if there’s no chance of them hearing those mean things? You can claim that it’s bad because saying mean things about people is just always bad, but then every single one of us is bad and there’s no point in calling the kettle black. You can claim that it’s bad because death itself is intrinsically bad, but the problem is that not everyone sees it that way either.

Personally, I think that life and death are both morally neutral. I think that human life in general does a lot of good and a lot of bad. I think that individual lives can cause a lot of good in the world and a lot of bad, too. I think that individual lives can cause a lot of good for the other lives they touch, but they can also cause a lot of bad. For each person whose death is terribly mourned, there’s probably a person whose death brings relief to those they have abused or otherwise hurt.

As uncomfortable as it is for some people to acknowledge that some deaths come as a relief to those who knew the deceased, there is no one better than that person’s victims to judge the moral value of their lives. Even more uncomfortable to acknowledge is the fact that some deaths bring comfort to the dying themselves. Life is morally neutral; some lives are so full of pain and suffering that death feels like a net good and as horrible as that is for me to contemplate, who am I to invalidate that?

No one in the broad “do not rejoice at death” camp has yet given me a good argument for why rejoicing at death is ethically wrong. They say it makes them look down on the rejoicers, but if you look down on people for their feelings about their oppression, that says more about you than about them. They say it “brings out the worst in people,” with no specifics about what “the worst” is. (Really? Being happy that someone is dead is worse than systematically denying civil rights to millions of people?) They say that death is intrinsically bad so it’s intrinsically wrong to be happy about it, but again, these are not universal values. If you view death as intrinsically bad, that’s a good argument for you to do your best to avoid death and celebrate life. It’s not a good argument for other people to have different feelings.

My own ethical orientation makes it difficult for me to view an action that doesn’t do harm to anyone as unethical, and making someone annoyed or uncomfortable or even a little upset isn’t necessarily the same as doing harm to them. (If it were, it would be unethical for gay couples to hold hands in public places.) The “don’t rejoice at death” camp ends up making a circular argument: rejoicing at death is wrong because it upsets people and it upsets people because rejoicing at death is wrong.

Here someone often argues that Scalia’s family is in mourning and would be very upset at the things that some people are saying. That’s quite possible, although it seems highly unlikely that any of Scalia’s family members are spending this time browsing the social media feeds of random unknowns like my friends and me. (Also, many of us keep our feeds private.) The likelihood of Scalia’s loved ones stumbling on my friends’ Facebook pages seems so low that expecting them to tailor their feeds with this possibility in mind is pretty unreasonable.

I’ve also been hearing a lot of sentiments like, “Well, you get to feel however you feel about his death, but remember that he was also a human being who had people who loved him.” That’s certainly a nice thought; I always try to remember that people I strongly dislike or disagree with are human beings, and maybe that’s why I don’t actually feel happy about his death. (Again, I don’t feel sad about it either.) In general, I agree with the idea that it’s good to humanize people.

But it’s just another one of those vaguely positive and obvious statements that nobody seriously disagrees with. Of course it’s nice to remember that people are human beings, just as it’s generally nice to say “please” and “thank you” and to hold doors for people carrying large objects and to learn about the views of people who disagree with you and to stop and let a car out even when you have right of way because otherwise they’d be waiting to make their turn forever and that would suck for them. It’s just that these things are not always the most important thing for you to do in that moment, and they’re not always accessible for everyone to do, and (I would argue) they’re not ethical imperatives, just nice things to try to do as much as you can.

Notably, Scalia belongs to a category of human being that is least in need of humanizing, because people like Scalia are the least dehumanized people. Unlike those most impacted by his jurisprudence, Scalia has never been dehumanized on the basis of his race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, or other category of privilege or oppression. So, sure, humanize Scalia, but all these condescending exhortations for others to do so sound a little #AllLivesMatter-y to me, especially when directed at those most directly harmed by Scalia himself.

Whenever I keep seeing something described as “crass,” “in poor taste,” “inappropriate,” and so on, I always get curious about what’s really going on, because these phrases actually say very little except “a critical mass of people disapproves of this; it’s not just me.” But what do they actually disapprove of, and why?

Most of the types of people who would appear in my social media feeds don’t actually believe that it’s wrong to have certain emotions, but many of them think it’s wrong to express those emotions at certain times (or ever). In this case, a private glee at Scalia’s death might seem petty to them, but it’s expressing the glee publicly (or semi-publicly, as Facebook often is) that’s really “crass” and “in poor taste.”

Unable to produce an argument for why being glad that someone who did terrible, terrible harm has died is actually harmful, they resort to phrases like “celebrating death” that are intended to make the targets of their ire look either like callous, spiteful children or else some sort of Satanic cult. But one person’s “celebrating death” is another person’s “feeling relieved or ecstatic that someone who has done them terrible harm can no longer do so.” And sure, if I got to choose, I’d have chosen for Scalia to retire rather than die, but nobody asked me.

I’m sure there’s a lot of personal satisfaction in taking the perceived high road and deciding that, even though you belong to a group of people harmed by Antonin Scalia, you personally will not celebrate his death and will mourn it (or be neutral towards it) instead. But I’m uncomfortable with any ethical system that’s based on having or not having–or expressing or not expressing–certain emotions. The only place I see that leading is lots of shaming yourself and policing others for automatic brain things that are mostly outside of our immediate control (and for wanting to share some of those automatic brain things with other people).

I also wish that rather than rushing to condemn perceived “crassness” or “poor taste,” folks would cultivate some curiosity about where these strong emotions are coming from.

~~~

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Antonin Scalia and the Ethics of "Celebrating Death"

Should We Publicly Shame Cheaters?

This past week has seen two shameful episodes in the Creepy People Getting Into Others’ Private Affairs And Shaming Them Online category.

First, Gawker published (for no apparent reason) a story about a married “C-Suite” Condé Nast executive who arranged to spend a weekend with a male porn star who then attempted to blackmail him–and, with Gawker’s capable help, succeeded*. Max Read, the now-former editor-in-chief of Gawker, justified the story thus: “given the chance gawker will always report on married c-suite executives of major media companies fucking around on their wives.”

Second, hackers are threatening to leak the user data (including credit card numbers, addresses, and listed sexual fantasies) of 37 million individuals using the website Ashley Madison, which helps people find partners to have extramarital affairs with. The hacker group claims that the reason for the attack is because Ashley Madison charges money for user account deletion and then doesn’t fully delete the information, but their demand isn’t a change in the policy–their demand is that the site goes offline altogether.

As I noted in my recent piece on the subject of Creepy People Getting Into Others’ Private Affairs And Shaming Them Online, nobody is safe when this sort of behavior is socially acceptable. Nobody. Because we all do immoral things at some point in our lives, and while some will claim that cheating is its own special category of immorality and therefore deserves naming and shaming online, that doesn’t really seem to follow from any reasonable premise. Cheating is (generally**) wrong because it’s wrong to break an agreement with someone without first letting them know that you are unable to stick with the agreement. (And being unable to stick with an agreement obviously kind of sucks for everyone involved, but I’m uncomfortable with classifying it as immoral.) It’s not wrong because sex is bad, or because wanting sex with more than one person is bad. The reason cheating gets placed in its own special category is because it pertains to sex and relationships, not because it’s inherently worse than other immoral acts. (It may be worse than some immoral acts, to some people, in some circumstances, but that’s not an inherent property of cheating.)

And I am entirely unconvinced that homophobia did not play a role in Gawker’s story, or in the (presumed or actual) interest of its audience in that story. Stories about men cheating on their wives with other men get attention in a way that stories about men cheating on their wives with other women just do not. Charitably, one could claim that this is just a man-bites-dog effect–these stories are so much more rare. But the fact that we place them in an entirely separate category from other “Men Cheating On Wives” stories suggests that same-sex attraction is, well, an entirely separate category. Who cares which gender someone sleeps with? We still do, apparently.

By far the most disturbing claim I’ve seen about these incidents is that outing cheaters is for the good of their “victims” (that is, the people they are cheating on). This is the claim that Max Read so flippantly made, and also a claim I’ve seen about potential benefits of the Ashley Madison hack.

First of all, consider that when you out someone as a cheater, you are also outing someone as a “victim” of cheating (or a “cuckold,” or whichever term you wish to use). This may not seem like a big deal, but being cheated on is also quite stigmatized to some extent–maybe not quite as much as cheating, but still. A woman who gets cheated on may be accused of being “frigid” and “failing to keep her man happy”; a man who gets cheated on may be ridiculed and considered less of a man. (That’s in the context of heterosexual relationships, but I don’t doubt that same-sex relationships are subject to some of the same gendered societal crap.) For some people, the pity may be even more difficult to deal with than the blame. And while nobody’s posting the cheated-on spouses’ names online, all their friends and family will know! Now their private pain has become quite public.

Further, put yourself in their shoes. If you’re going to find out that your spouse is cheating on you, how would you like to find out? By having thousands of people retweet an article about it? By having all your friends text you and ask if you’ve seen that Gawker piece? By having your coworker stop by your office and say, “Wow, I’m so sorry, I can’t believe your partner was using that cheating site!”

I wouldn’t be surprised if many people would rather not know at all.

In fact, some people would rather not know at all in any case. It’s a common assumption that if someone is cheating on you, naturally you would want to find out ASAP so you can dump them. But for some people, peace of mind is more important. They may suspect their spouse is cheating, but as long as things are basically fine and there’s someone around to help support the children, they’d rather just not deal with finding out. That’s valid. It’s not my place to tell someone what they ought to want to know and how they ought to respond to a suspicion that they’re being cheated on. It’s not what I’d want for myself, but everyone doesn’t have to want what I want.

I think there are some cultural components to this as well. While I haven’t conducted (or read) a comparative study, it seems that a lot of Russian couples approach extramarital affairs in this “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” sort of way. I can’t imagine they’d be pleased if someone came tattling on their spouse for their supposed good. I really wish Americans–and people in general–would remember that their norms and standards are not universal or inevitable. In some other cultures, by the way, it’s also considered extremely messed-up to meddle in people’s private lives this way.

Finally, when you out someone as a cheater, you may be actually outing them as polyamorous. Anecdotally, I’ve found that there are many more people practicing consensual nonmonogamy without publicly coming out as poly than there are people who are out as poly. In fact, being accused of cheating is one of the dangers of not coming out as poly, but for many people it’s still safer than coming out, which could cause them to lose jobs, child custody, and so on.

A poly person who gets “outed” for cheating (or whose primary partner does) faces a really uncomfortable dilemma: they have to either come out (which also means outing at least one of their partners), or they have to perform the role of either remorseful cheater (with all the public groveling that entails) or jilted spouse (with all the public pity that entails).

A poly person who does choose to come out at a moment like this is likely to face a lot of backlash. People are in some ways even more suspicious of polyamory than they are of cheating–at least the latter fits into their understanding of relationships to some extent. On the flip side, people may claim that they’re lying about being poly so that they don’t have to face judgment for cheating. You can’t win.

In fact, when you put people’s private sexual lives on trial, nobody wins.

That’s because we all sometimes act immorally, and we all sometimes fail to live up to our own ideals. That is not some special sort of failure reserved for Bad People; we all do it. There are times to speak up and stop people from hurting others, and there are gray areas where no one (certainly not me) can really say whether or not something should be publicized. This is neither.

If you want to prevent cheating–if that’s really such a hot issue for you–then encourage people to consider and explore alternatives to monogamy. Not all people who would cheat in a monogamous relationship would behave ethically in a nonmonogamous relationship, sure. Some people suck. Other people are trying to do their best with what they have, and they don’t realize that they have a lot more options than they thought.

So, what now? some will ask. Gawker’s gonna Gawk and hackers gonna hack. True, we can’t undo the damage that has been done and we can’t necessarily prevent creepy people from ever creeping on others and putting their personal business online.

What we can do is refuse to learn the information or act on it. I still don’t even know the name of the executive who hired the porn star, and I don’t intend to learn it. I will not look at the list of Ashley Madison users, just like I chose not to look at the nude celebrity photos that got leaked last year. You shouldn’t either. If more people agree not to look, this type of information loses its power, and those who collect it and leak it lose the power to judge and ruin others’ lives for the fun of it–or for whatever twisted moral justification they manage to invent.

~~~

*As Parker Molloy pointed out, the Gawker story may actually have been in violation of the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics. If Gawker wants to keep positioning itself as a source of Important Journalism For Our Day And Age, they should take note. Can’t have it both ways.

**Also really important to note, as Dan Savage and Esther Perel both have, that cheating doesn’t always happen in a simple context where one person is a “victim” and the other is the “bad terrible cheater.” Sometimes people cheat because they are stuck in awful, possibly abusive relationships, and cheating is a way they preserve their sanity. Is this rare? Maybe. I don’t know. You don’t know either, though.

~~~

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Should We Publicly Shame Cheaters?

Why is Rolling Stone Still Blaming Jackie?

[Content note: sexual assault]

Now that the report on Rolling Stone and its coverage of rape at UVA has come out, I’ve written a Daily Dot piece about how the magazine still isn’t taking full responsibility for its mistakes.

On Sunday, the Columbia Journalism Review released its report on Rolling Stone’s infamous article, “A Rape on Campus,” about the alleged gang rape of “Jackie,” a student at the University of Virginia. Published in November 2014, the article quickly provoked critics who claimed that some of the details about the incident just didn’t line up.

The Columbia report extensively details the journalistic “failure” of the now-retracted piece, and many are assuming, as usual, that this means that the survivor lied. Meanwhile, the leadership of Rolling Stone is still blaming Jackie for their failure in ways both subtle and not. According to the New York Times, the magazine’s publisher, Jann S. Wenner, was quite clear about where the blame should go:

The problems with the article started with its source, Mr. Wenner said. He described her as “a really expert fabulist storyteller” who managed to manipulate the magazine’s journalism process. When asked to clarify, he said that he was not trying to blame Jackie, “but obviously there is something here that is untruthful, and something sits at her doorstep.”

Although it is possible that Jackie lied, it is unlikely for reasons that I discussedback when the original article was first being put through the online wringer. The errors she made in telling her story are completely consistent with the neurobiology of trauma. There is no evidence that Jackie is an “expert fabulist storyteller,” and you’d think this whole scandal would have taught Wenner not to make public statements without evidence.

But not everyone sees Jackie as the scapegoat. Steve Coll, Dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, said in a press conference, “We do disagree with any suggestion that this was Jackie’s fault. As a matter of journalism, this was a failure of methodology.”

Why is Rolling Stone still blaming Jackie, even though the Columbia report documents the magazine’s errors in 13,000 meticulous words? Probably because it’s easy to do. Much of the public already seems to believe that Jackie lied, and many of them seem to believe that she lied intentionally. The thought process is that, sure, the writer and editor could’ve been more careful (and to their credit,Rolling Stone has acknowledged that), but lying is bad and it’s the liar’s fault, so that’s where the blame should really go.

Despite acknowledging their missteps, the Rolling Stone staff doesn’t seem to be planning on making any changes in the wake of this massive journalistic failure. Will Dana, the editor of the retracted article, says in the Columbia report, “It’s not like I think we need to overhaul our process, and I don’t think we need to necessarily institute a lot of new ways of doing things. We just have to do what we’ve always done and just make sure we don’t make this mistake again.” But the report claims that “better and clearer policies about reporting practices, pseudonyms and attribution might well have prevented the magazine’s errors.”

Especially controversial is the fact that Rolling Stone won’t be firing anyone involved in the debacle. In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, Jill Geisner says that Rolling Stone’s mistakes were very serious and that firing the staff involved might be a good idea: “Firings send a message that certain behavior is unacceptable. I don’t advocate them for public relations purposes, but rather to rebuild a team and restore trust.”

Whether or not anyone at Rolling Stone is fired over this, though, it’s crucial that journalists and editors understand that it is their responsibility, not that of their sources, to ensure accuracy and fairness in reporting.

Read the rest here.

Why is Rolling Stone Still Blaming Jackie?