Our own friend MrFancyPants wrote Andrew Sullivan’s Dissent of the Day for today. There’s glory for you!
I’m also disappointed in the continuing scorn that you heap upon feminism. You don’t seem to understand even the most basic facts about it and the sneering tone that you take is unbecoming and not like you. You seem to lose all ability to understand nuance when you write about it. I’m a “straight white male” and even I realized that, in that video, my demographic “as a group” was not being disparaged. You’re like a walking poster child for the #notallmen hashtag and the enraged, entitled, petulant man-boys who complain on it.
And the strawmen – could you just stop with that? You wrote: “Instead of seeing the web as opening up vast vistas for all sorts of voices to be heard, they seem to believe … that women are not strong or capable enough of forging their own brands”. Um, what? Show me a feminist who thinks that women are “not strong or capable enough.” Go on, show me one, anyone, anywhere. You cannot, because they don’t exist. It’s the anti-feministswho think that. Just look at the words of Phyllis Schlafly, for example, and the immeasurable damage that she has done.
And then there is this: “They want gender quotas for all media businesses, equal representation for women in, say, video-games, gender parity in employment in journalism and in the stories themselves.” Gender quotas, huh? Well, I looked through WAM’s “About us” page, the “What we do” page, and the “Action center” page, and didn’t see a thing about “gender quotas.” In fact, what they seem to want to do is simply to raise awareness of the disparities – there is no call for legal action to implement and enforce some quota. It’s intellectually dishonest, Andrew, to write things like that when you know them to be untrue.
Sullivan responds:
[L]et me address the assumption that I am pouring scorn on feminism. I’m really, really not. I favor the removal of any formal or legal barriers to women’s success.
Just not any of the other kinds of barriers – the informal barriers, the belittling, the patronizing, the interrupting, the overlooking, the underestimating, the sexually harassing. Those all have to stay, because to get rid of them would be tiresome to the people who don’t want to.
But I’m still a conservative-libertarian. I don’t believe in an identity politics that seeks to remove structural oppression by forcing others to say things they may not want to say, or do things they may not want to do, or by ostracizing people for whatever-ism they are found guilty of.
Wow. That’s quite an admission. He doesn’t believe in seeking to remove structural oppression by forcing others to say things they may not want to say, or do things they may not want to do.
Really?
He doesn’t believe in seeking to remove structural oppression by forcing others to say things they may not want to say, or do things they may not want to do?
How about forcing people not to say things they may want to say, or not do things they may want to do? Does he also not believe in that?
So in the workplace, for instance, I guess Sullivan is opposed to policies that forbid employees to harass other employees for being of the wrong gender or race or class? He’s against “forcing” people to talk and act in ways that refrain from treating other people as inferiors and/or subordinates?
Still. He did say he would stop using the epithet “SJW.” He said it voluntarily, I think.
Sullivan (whom I find unreadable on these matters) is being overly legalistic in his analysis. He’s falling back on the old sword/shield analogy of law. That is, classically (and in a very general sense) the law is said to be able to forbid conduct, but not compel it. A classic example is Bowen v. Roy, 476 U.S. 693 (1986). Basically, parents were opposed to their child being numbered per social security, and attempted to say it violated their freedom of religion. The court said that bureaucratic actions did not impede the family’s belief–thus they could not use their 1st Amendment rights as a “sword” to force conduct on others. That’s where I think Sullivan is coming from. That being said, how it has anything to do with the Twitter harassment originally on hand is WAY beyond me. I don’t know of feminism seeking to legally compel behavior from anyone; it seeks to eliminate certain things with the force of law, and seeks to eliminate (or minimize) others with the force of persuasion. That always struck me as legitimate. Thanks for the blog!
So he’s fine with people calling him a fudge packer and won’t ostracize them for doing so.
I swear, libertarians never think through the consequences of their ideology.
I can never tell whether self-described “conservative libertarians” reach the conclusions they want and then work backwards to their preferred ideology, or* if they are truly so rigid in thought that “well, sorry, my ideology obliges me to oppose the Civil Rights Act”** represents sincere if baffling remorse. “Oh sure, I oppose legal discrimination, but actually doing something about societal/structural inequalities? Get me my fainting couch!” What’s even more frustrating is that the “conservative libertarian” position is to oppose government efforts to remove those barriers, which while misguided at best and hypocritical malice at worst is still a consistent position… but none of these recent incidents*** involve the State in any meaningful way; it’s literally private citizens using the Free Marketplace of Ideas to try and influence other private citizens and/or impose social costs to Behaving Badly. There’s no reason to oppose this on “conservative libertarian” grounds unless you support the Bad Behavior.
*Not an either/or situation. More of a both/and
**No, Sully has, AFAIK, never stated this, but it is a common position held by conservative libertarians, extending to the Libertarian Party’s official platform IIRC
***Terrible word for the sheer level of… UGH that’s been going on, but I’m not an English major, me no speek gud!
I’ve been following Sullivan’s comments on feminism for some time now. As uninformed and ignorant as I am about the issues (I haven’t seriously studied any of this, but rather just picked up what little I know from listening to what women tell me, and thinking about those things), he’s like someone who heard from a friend of a friend that “feminists are man-hating shrews” or something similar. Part of the problem may be that the people he’s friendly with go out of their way to promote that kind of message, like Christina Hoff Sommers (whom Sullivan has gushed approvingly about in the past), and the writer Cathy Young whom he cites in his response. I don’t think that he’s inherently a bad person or means badly, but I do think that he’s just so astonishingly ignorant of the very depths of his own ignorance that he cannot begin to understand–a sort of classic example of Dunning Kruger in action. His basic message is okay–“Free Speech Good”–until you scratch the surface of that belief and reveal the kind of harassment that people like Ophelia, Stephanie Szvan, Rebecca Watson et al. have been experiencing for years. Not all “speech” is meant constructively or is good, and especially when the destructive speech is coming from hundreds or thousands of people piling on in order to torment someone, it is BAD. I’m certain that Sullivan would not accept the actions of a pack of schoolyard bullies, taunting someone to the point of suicide through social media (as has repeatedly happened to kids–mostly girls–in high schools, recently), but yet he accepts that kind of behavior from adults. It is a weird kind of cognitive dissonance.
“Look, I hate that you got your arm ripped off and I fully support you getting a rag or something to cover up the bloody stump. However, I don’t believe in any of this ‘staunching the blood loss’ or ‘cauterizing the wound’ stuff.”
At least, that’s what I hear when someone says something similar to Sullivan above. I mean, yeah, they’re all for the band-aid solution but actually trying to fix the problem is just going too far. So long as it looks like the problem is being addressed it’s all cool; they get to pat themselves on the back for a job well done (and, gee, ain’t they swell for it too) and can dismiss all the “whiners” pointing out that things didn’t actually get fixed.
Isn’t “ostracizing people for whatever-isms” precisely the remedy libertarians suggest in place of “forcing people to do things they may not want to do”? Don’t require restaurants to serve black people, just boycott them and let them know you won’t deal with racists! Don’t require Christians to serve gays, just boycott them and let them know you won’t deal with homophobes! Free market will work it’s invisible-hand magic and all the bigots will be gone!
.
What does he suggest in place of both force and ostracism? Does he think calm rational dialogue is going to make sexist jerks realize they shouldn’t harass women on the street or grope them on the subway? Does he think a friendly intervention is going to make frat boys realize they shouldn’t try to liquor up women so they can have their way with them? Does he think a polite tweet is going to make gamergaters realize they shouldn’t threaten to rape and murder women they disagree with? He says he doesn’t scorn feminism, but also seems to not want feminists to do anything that would actually change the status quo. Standard “conservative libertarian” indeed; only supporting equal rights as long as it doesn’t rock the boat. Fuck that noise. The boat is full of assholes. Dumping them out is a fine solution.
So he doesn’t think people should be ostracized for their beliefs or prevented from doing things they want to do. Okay, so why not complain about all the misogynistic types ostracizing feminists and preventing women walking down the street unharrassed? That seems to fall into the group of things he’d have to be against. And, further, if he is against it, what is he going to do to stop it? Oh, you mean the only recourse you have within your stated philosophy is to object politely? Well, then. Sounds like you’re basically the most useless person, ever.
Shorter Sully the Pooh: “Sure, I’m technically in favour of equality, I just don’t think we should actually do anything to achieve it.”
Wait – so he doesn’t deny the existence of structural oppression, but then does he have a better idea as to how to remove it; does he think remedies like banning legal discrimination, etc., will be sufficient (when they clearly haven’t been yet); or does he just think everything permissible has already been done and any problems still remaining are just what we’re stuck with?
Say no more. It was an easy inference to the rest of his ignorant, childish position once that sentence was read.
It is odd to me, however, that this group of glibertarians, people ready to believe that there’s a massive international conspiracy designed to lie about inflation, are perfectly satisfied with the moronic “equality under the law” position. They seem to believe VERY STRONGLY that reality isn’t directly represented in official documents, yet they simultaneously believe that the writing of a law will settle all relevant gender issues.
And, of course, Plessy v. Furgeson. That was equality under the law…
Shorter Sullivan: It’s okay to have a law against punching people in the face, but not wanting to hang out with the “I’m not touching you I’m not touching you” kid is a bridge too far.
Well done, Mr. Fancy Pants!
@3 man1086
I’m pretty sure everyone does this, and it’s one of those things that’s close to impossible to avoid. There’s no real way to prevent yourself from doing it and you never really know if you’re not doing it yourself.
Honestly, this is bafflingly self-aware. It makes me think that he’s possibly going to change his mind soon. I mean, he’s openly admitting that he doesn’t want to remove structural oppression. He’s totally cool with the whole structural oppression thing? How does one admit this to themselves without thinking that they themselves might be a bad person?
Doublethink and dishonesty shouldn’t really come as a surprise for a gay Catholic.
Besides, what kind of “conservative-libertarian” admits to there being nonlegal structural oppression?
Congratulation’s MrFancyPants on your dissent of the day.
And Congratulations Mr. Sullivan on your clueless git of the day.
May you both enjoy your rewards appropriately.
Which is a bald faced lie from Andrew. He was quite happy to play identity politics when it came to calling for MSNBC to fire Alec Baldwin (after he was caught on camera using a homo-bigoted slur). The difference being two-fold. The Alec Baldwin situation nominally affected Andrew, as a gay man. And secondly Alec Baldwin is nominally a liberal (who was on the “liberal” news channel even) and Andrew Sullivan, who is a cowardly spineless hypocrite, has a massive double standard when it comes to dealing with liberals as opposed to conservatives.
To paraphrase the Nation’s Eric Alterman (from an old Nation story that my Google Fu can’t recover for me), Andrew Sullivan is neither a reporter nor a particularly informed insider. The only thing he has to sell us is his judgement. And even a cursory examination of his career as a public intellectual shows that Andrew Sullivan’s judgement is HORRIBLE. He’s managed to be on the wrong side of almost every major American public policy issue of the past 30 years, with the glaring exception of the one issue that affects him personally, gay marriage.
Lou, is this the article you’re referring to? http://www.thenation.com/article/172393/sully-ing-american-journalism
This!!! It’s funny how Libertarians and Conservatives (but I repeat myself) are always claiming they favor social forms of market-of-ideas/free speech remedies for fighting whatever __ism you can actually get them to admit is bad, but then reject out of hand any of the real world attempt to do so because it might hurt the fee fees of the ___ist.
Kudos to Mr Fancypants on both the OP and the great follow-up comment.
@Weegee- I don’t have the desire to go back and research it, but if I’m not mistaken, I believe that Sully was pretty late to the party on SSM and he’s been pretty wishy-washy even on gay rights issues. Thanks for bringing up Alterman. He used to be a daily read and for whatever reason I’ve fallen out of the habit. Though I believe Alterman has some sexist/misogynist blindspots as well, though nowhere near the level of Sullivan.
Thank you for that, Craig @ 20 – it clearly is the piece Lou had in mind (and Lou has quite a memory), and it’s a doozy of a piece besides. I didn’t know quite how horrible Sullivan is.
I think the way it’s supposed to work is that the bigots will be free, welcome, encouraged even(!), to only serve the clientele they deem acceptable, and, all commentary to the contrary, the rest of us are actually supposed to accept this in the spirit of “tolerance”. We who are not bigoted should be willing to be noble examples for our perspective, extending kindly tolerance and acceptance to the asshats and dickheads – in that way, WE would be free, welcome, and encouraged to live lives consistent with our own beliefs, too. Because the most important thing is that people’s beliefs be respected and indulged, never challenged or (heaven forfend) criticized or (le gasp) condemned. Because belief! “I don’t care what you believe in so long as you believe in SOMETHING!” Hooray for the all-important belief and for defending idiots’ rights to behave like cretins and imbeciles!! Because free market!!! Yay!!
Sorry if anyone said that further up – in a rush…
@20 I don’t really want to defend Sullivan much, because he’s really obnoxious a lot of the time. However, he was among the earliest proponents of same sex marriage. On the other hand, he twists himself into awful knots to say that he doesn’t think it should be forced on people through the courts. In other words, he thinks allowing gays to marry is the right thing to do, but states should have the right to continue to treat gays as second class citizens… because reasons.
(He also hated don’t ask, don’t tell, but it’s just as likely that it was due to his Clinton Derangement Syndrome as it was any real moral objection.)
@22 The way I’ve always seen him is as a professional tone troll. He thinks you should try to try to convince people that they’re wrong when they want to deny your basic human rights, but it would be terribly rude to suggest that it makes them a bigot. You should have civil discussions about whether black people are intellectually inferior, or whether women should be treated like people instead of walking baby incubators.