Rebecca Solnit has written a wonderful essay that resonates beautifully, especially after wading through the rage of white men in my mailbox (which, as a white man myself, is really weird.)
There has been a lot said this year about college students—meaning female college students, black students, trans students—and how they’re hypersensitive and demanding that others be censored. That’s why The Atlantic, a strange publication that veers from progressive to regressive and back again like a weighty pendulum recently did a piece on “The Coddling of the American Mind.” It tells us that, “Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke,” with the invocation of these two white guys as definitive authorities.
But seriously, you know who can’t take a joke? White guys. Not if it implicates them and their universe, and when you see the rage, the pettiness, the meltdowns and fountains of male tears of fury, you’re seeing people who really expected to get their own way and be told they’re wonderful all through the days. And here, just for the record, let me clarify that I’m not saying that all of them can’t take it. Many white men—among whom I count many friends (and, naturally, family members nearly as pale as I)—have a sense of humor, that talent for seeing the gap between what things are supposed to be and what they are and for seeing beyond the limits of their own position. Some have deep empathy and insight and write as well as the rest of us. Some are champions of human rights.
But there are also those other ones, and they do pop up and demand coddling. A group of black college students doesn’t like something and they ask for something different in a fairly civil way and they’re accused of needing coddling as though it’s needing nuclear arms. A group of white male gamers doesn’t like what a woman cultural critic says about misogyny in gaming and they spend a year or so persecuting her with an unending torrent of rape threats, death threats, bomb threats, doxxing, and eventually a threat of a massacre that cites Marc LePine, the Montreal misogynist who murdered 14 women in 1989, as a role model. I’m speaking, of course, about the case of Anita Sarkeesian and Gamergate. You could call those guys coddled. We should. And seriously, did they feel they were owed a world in which everyone thought everything they did and liked and made was awesome or just remained silent? Maybe, because they had it for a long time.
Exactly.
Just saying ‘oh yeah? Well this other group overreacted too, so there’ is not much of a rebuttal. The lesson has always been that some groups over-react, period.
Yes.
@marcoli, 1
Sure… but that’s not really what’s said there, is it? The point is that the people calling for change, for the most part, are not overreacting, and yet they are treated like a baying mob of simultaneously life-threatening, and absolutely pathetic monsterbabies. Yes, there are progressives who do overreact to things on occasion, but the point here is that we’re supposed to believe that a baying mob of cis/white/dudes are simply registering a criticism, while trans/non-white/women commenting on social issues and asking for solutions to them are treated like a baying mob.
This is not, “but your side does it too!” This is, “you have it utterly backwards.”
Athywren @ 3:
One side is prone to committed, prolonged harassment, the goal being to silence anyone even pointing out change is necessary. One side is prone to serious hyperbole, referring to the mildest of statements as witch hunts and / or lynchings. One side considers any and all criticism to be hounding. The notion of “hey, fair and balanced, both sides” does not work here.
And, I have to say, when I receive communications which accuse me of abusing children, or telling me I really, really need to be raped again, or that I should simply “please die” and so on, I’m not terribly interested in spending time representing those people in the best possible light.
Marcoli@#1
Just saying ‘oh yeah? Well this other group overreacted too, so there’ is not much of a rebuttal.
It also implicitly accepts that they overreacted.
It’s a rhetorical move similar to the true believer accusing scientists of having more faith than they do… Because, uh, faith is a bad thing now? Own goal!
Of course, some dudes can’t refrain from explaining Lolita to Solnit in the comment section of an article entitled Men Explain Lolita to Me. Of course.
You made me read the comments. You are a very bad person.
Jerry Seinfeld has admitted to being “mildly autistic” [even then parents of autistic kids got angry at him with the way he said it]. As a fellow autistic, we often have trouble groking people and situations. Then after realizing our mistakes, we have trouble communicating our response. I was lucky because the first person that really helped me understand autism [Rachel Cohen Rottenberg] was studying in the social justice fields and slowly introduced me to the reasoning behind each subtopic and people in each sub topic. Autistics with the bighead-syndrome [technical term] can think they don’t need to keep an open mind because ego-based strategies seemed to always work for them in the past, I guess. Anyone can be affected with bighead syndrome, but autistics with it are likely to misunderstand social situations. The other bigheads involved in these articles need to grok subtopics too. [The cause of their jerk-ery is not apparent to me.]
None of these syndromes are excuses not “get out of jail free” cards for their purposeful or inadvertent assholery, however. All sorts of cognitive biases and pretty common human emotional self-protection strategies can be fought and won even if by baby-steps.
Lydia Brown is also a good person to read if you are coming from an autistic POV: http://autistichoya.net/ . No one has an excuse anymore with the advent of the internet. Learning resources are everywhere nowadays. Just correct one-self, real-apologize and be mindful from this point on. Anonymity is the jerks’ enabler for both paths.
*evil laugh*
This is a specific instance of the more general white male conservative mindset: “Everyone secretly knows I’m right, so anyone opposing me must be doing so solely out of spite.”
RobR #10:
Reminds me a lot of another mindset: “Everyone secretly knows BibleGodJesus is Real/True, so anyone saying otherwise must be doing so solely out of evilness.”
whirlwitch @ 11
Otherwise known as the old, “you’re just angry with God” gambit…