Content warning: Misogynistic online harassment, including rape threats.
I want to respond to a comment left by Desipis, but to do that, I’ll need to bring in some context.
Clementine Ford is a feminist columnist from Australia. Various misogynists have contacted her to say abusive things, and – if the person contacting her hasn’t covered up their identity – she publicly outs them. For instance, this summer, Ford outed a man who emailed her “I’m going to bash and rape you stupid little sl**. Lesbian scum.” The man apologized, and (ironically) was subjected to strangers sending him horrible messages and threats (which I don’t approve of). Around the same time, three high school boys were suspended after Ford reposted misogynistic and racist messages they’d left on her Facebook page.
According to Ford, “It’s not unusual for me to field abuse like this, although it tends to be more of a constant drip than a deluge.” But this week, it’s a deluge. Because Michael Nolan got fired.
A bit more context. On Ford’s Facebook page, Ford posted a screenshot of someone telling her “You would jibber heaps less with a cock in your mouth.” Michael Nolan left a single-word response to this on Ford’s Facebook page: “Slut.”
In a follow-up post, Ford posted a screenshot of Nolan’s “slut” comment, along with screenshots of him reposting or agreeing with a couple of racist jokes. She linked her post to the Facebook page of Nolan’s employer, Meriton Apartments – meaning that whoever runs Meriton’s facebook page would be notified about her post. Ford wrote:
This was a comment left on the thread of a screenshot of a man publicly saying I would jibber less with a cock in my mouth. Calling me ‘slut’ in response to that is baffling, unless this man genuinely believes that women who speak out against abuse need to be taken down. Why should I put up with that?
There are basically no consequences for men who behave like this, so we have to start making consequences for them.
Five days later, Meriton contacted Ford to let her know they’d fired Norton. Ford wrote:
To anyone who suggests I have caused a man to lose his job, I’d like to say this: No. He is responsible for his actions. He is responsible for the things he writes and the attitudes he holds. It is not my responsibility to hold his hand and coddle him when he behaves in an abusive manner just because it might have consequences for him. Women are often told to stay silent about harassment because it’s not fair to ‘ruin a man’s career’. Why is their behaviour our responsibility? Enough. If you enjoy exercising misogyny online, you only have yourself to blame if the people with power over your life – your bosses, friends, family etc – decide that they don’t want to be associated with you anymore. The targets of your abuse are in no way, shape or form responsible for making sure your actions have no recriminations for you.
In the open thread, referring to how employers can be a threat to free speech, Desipis commented:
On that topic, Clemintine Ford has demonstrated again how many people thing being for social justice is about being as big an arsehole as you can be.
To those that argue freedom of speech isn’t about being protected against consequences, I’ll say it’s not about that, it’s about disproportionate responses.
That guy that takes a swing at you for looking at his girlfriend the “wrong way”? Arsehole.
The woman that calls the cops on a man in the park with a camera, or for being black? Arsehole.
Pushing for someone to be fired because they said a nasty word online? Arsehole.
So, a few thoughts:
1) I want to get to the free speech question, but I can’t not comment on Desipis’ jaw-dropping false equivalency between someone being irrationally harassed for being black, or being assaulted for looking at someone, versus someone being fired because of their own bad behavior. Maybe Michael Nolan shouldn’t have been fired, but he’s certainly not blameless here.
2) It’s good to get the idea of “disproportionate responses” into this discussion.
3) I can’t judge Michael Nolan as an entire person, because I have no idea. Maybe calling someone a slut and sharing two racist jokes is the worst thing that Nolan has ever done. (Who among us has never said or shared anything regrettable online?) Or maybe he’s consistently a hostile, abusive racist misogynist, and his bosses were already on the verge of firing him. Maybe the firing was completely fair. We just don’t know.
4) But if the firing was unfair, then blame should mainly lie with Michael Nolan’s former boss, not Clementine Ford.
5) If we’re going to be casting judgements on Clementine Ford – and that’s where Desipis and many others are taking this – then let’s acknowledge that Ford wasn’t just responding to Michael Nolan’s comment. She’s responding to a seemingly never-ending stream of misogynistic abuse. (For lots of examples, check out the repulsive comments Ford’s received since Nolan’s firing.)
If I think of it as just this one incident, then yes, responding to an online insult by reporting it to Nolan’s employer is disproportionate. But if I think of it as an ongoing problem – people (mostly men) are persistently sending her online abuse because they have no incentive to stop – then Ford’s policy of outing her harassers, when she can, seems like the only tool she has for creating a disincentive for harassers.
In the comments of the Open Thread, Grace asked Desipis a very telling question:
Out of curiosity, what would you rather Ford had done, other than ignore it? She has already tried to use Facebook’s feedback mechanism to address comments far worse than that. Facebook user “Mathew Harris” wrote, “Clementine you are the most annoying feminist slut to have ever walked the earth. Please sit on a butchers [sic] knife so that you may never be able to reproduce.” Facebook’s response: “We reviewed the comment you reported for containing hate speech or symbols and found it doesn’t violate our Community Standards.”
Is Ford supposed to meekly accept being a punching bag for misogynistic comments for the rest of her life? Why expect women, in the face of nonstop abuse, to act like saints, putting their abusers’ well-being before their own? Why would Ford owe Nolan and all her other abusers that level of consideration?
Michael Nolan is literally someone who saw a stranger complaining about misogynistic harassment, and his response was to call her a “slut.” Even if contacting someone’s boss is disproportionate – and I think it is – the root problem here is Nolan’s behavior, not Ford’s.
Now, about free speech….
6) Obviously, if we define “free speech” narrowly as only about government actions, then there’s no free speech issue here. But that’s not how I define it, and I see two free speech issues here.
First, it’s a problem when employers punish employees for what they say in their off-hours. It’s an incredibly bad idea for employers to act as speech police. Being fired for saying something offensive is, in most jobs,1 a disproportionate response. And it’s one that has the potential to chill the speech of anyone who can’t afford to lose their job.
There’s already too much of this sort of thing going on. Anything that normalizes the belief that employers should punish the off-work speech of their employers is harmful – not just to Michael Nolan, but to the free speech of everyone with a boss.
7) Second, online harassment is a huge free speech issue. Constant online abuse shuts people up – and that’s the goal of the harassers. Misogynistic harassment shuts women up – and that’s the goal of the harassers.
I personally know multiple women who avoid discussing controversies online – even controversies that they feel passionately about and have a lot to say about – not because they’re afraid of reasoned disagreement, but because they’ve seen the over-the-top abuse heaped on Clementine Ford, and Anita Sarkeesian, and Zoe Quinn, and Irene Gallo, and Brianna Wu, and Adria Richards, and Kathy Sierra, and so many more, and they’ve made the perfectly rational choice not to take that risk.
Clementine Ford appears to have skin thick as a bank vault, and says she won’t be deterred from speaking. Good for her! But being as resilient as Ford shouldn’t be a requirement for discussing controversial issues online. Free speech only for those with a Ford-like ability to withstand tons of abuse, isn’t free speech.
- I can think of some exceptions – for example, a politician’s campaign manager. But in general. [↩]
Do you know if what you’re saying about union contracts and liability is as true in Australia as it is here?
In general, Australian labor law is more worker-friendly than USian labor law, whether or not a person belongs to a union. I don’t know what the court system is like in Australia, but sexual harassment laws there are very similar to those we have in the US. It stands to reason that employers would develop similar strategies for dealing with it (in fact, it explicitly states such as an employer responsibility in the Australian Sex Discrimination Act). What specific policies and/or disciplinary procedures employers incorporate in order to be in compliance with the Act is up to the employer, based on their own size and resources (again, this language is also in the Act). Whether or not individual labor unions negotiate step-procedures for discipline (on this or any other issue) into their own contracts is again, a matter of priorities*.
* in the US, labor generally considers policies on things like sexual harassment and workplace violence to be the responsibility of employers, and limits involvement to insuring that proper procedures are followed and workers are not wrongfully or arbitrarily disciplined. Labor unions aren’t interested in setting policy for a company on issues that would invariably place them in a position of defending/supporting some union members at the expense of other union members—and with things like sexual harassment or workplace violence, that is exactly what would happen. I would assume the same of Australian labor unions.
We don’t know what workplace policies Meriton has in place, or what documentation Michael Nolan signed as a condition of his employment there. Australian law expects employers to abide by the Sex Discrimination Act, and allows them quite a lot of latitude in developing their own policies to combat sex discrimination and harassment in the workplace. It is possible that Nolan used company time or tech to post “slut”; if his workplace was anything at all like mine, that in and of itself could have been cause for termination (all the sexual harassment/discrimination policies I’ve signed on to for employers specifically address the use of company-issued equipment—ex.: yelling “nice ass!” at someone out the window of a company truck, even off-hours, will get you fired. Same with yelling racial slurs. Accessing porn from a company-issued tablet or cell phone will get you fired. Doing any of those things on company time will get you fired.)
I enjoyed reading that perspective, La Lubu.
My husband had a very different experience at a recent job, but a lot of the details of his work environment were also very different–about the only thing in common was that it was a working class/non-office job. It was a minimum wage, unskilled work job at a clothing distributor’s warehouse. It did employ some uses-violence-to-solve-problems guys, though if they actually did that at work they’d be fired on the spot (would also be fired on the spot for stealing). It also employed gets-high-on-lunch-break guys. One of the few other things they would reliably fire people for (though not on-the-spot) was sexual harassment, if people were willing to make a formal complaint. They really didn’t want the liability for that.
Also, I just came across this today; if Nolan was as toxic at work as his interactions with Ford hint he may be, it could be quite expensive even without actual lawsuits or formal complaints.
Toxic Coworkers Are More Expensive Than Superstar Hires
@Ampersand:
I agree entirely. I don’t, however, think the same thing about how bad it is to try to inflict negative social consequences out of proportion of the original offense. I do think proportionality matters when the question is, “Is it OK to try to get this person fired?”
Yeah, it is. And the the extent we are able to maintain free speech in the US in spite of that, it’s because the legal protections provided by the First Amendment provide a system of appeal that, at least to an extent, provides access to a process that will vindicate victims of free speech violations even when they’re extremely unsympathetic–the Nazis won in court and were able to march in Skokie.
As soon as we start trying to extend free speech from a legal restriction on state action to something that governs individual action, though, we’re talking about using informal social norms in order to enforce this. I simply think that having an informal social norm that actually accomplishes this is basically impossible, and attempts to enforce such a norm and persuade people to act in accordance with it may even be counterproductive, since they (IMO) do a lot to undermine the ability to counter bad speech with more speech.
Consider an alternative reality Skokie Affair, where one of the Holocaust survivors in Skokie learns that one of their employees is a neo-Nazi through hearing or being informed of the Nazi’s off-hours speech, and fires the guy. How many people do you think could have been persuaded that was a violation of that Nazi’s free speech? Without persuading a significant number of people, how could you possibly bring enough social pressure to bear to have the neo-Nazi rehired? And, hell, would you even be willing to participate in such a campaign?
Amp, I’m glad that you think the response was disproportionate, because I think each round of disproportionate responses makes society worse off. I also think it is perfectly fine to choose to focus on why our culture might be such that random men think it is ok to call random women a slut. The reason I was focusing on the underlying justice issue is because quite a few people in the thread stated or alluded to the idea that firing him was a proportionate and in fact laudable response, and that needs some pushback.
Pillsy, you write “Consider an alternative reality Skokie Affair, where one of the Holocaust survivors in Skokie learns that one of their employees is a neo-Nazi through hearing or being informed of the Nazi’s off-hours speech, and fires the guy. How many people do you think could have been persuaded that was a violation of that Nazi’s free speech? Without persuading a significant number of people, how could you possibly bring enough social pressure to bear to have the neo-Nazi rehired?”
Well there is a significant recent example in US history with a similarly [I’d said similarly not exactly the same] odious historical group–Communists. At the time, Communists were in fact blacklisted out of their jobs. In retrospect that is generally considered to have been a very bad thing, and very bad for the political discourse of the time.
The problems with having employers monitoring and punishing outside behavior are legion. It also isn’t easy to predict who they will be used against next–except insofar as you should realize that they will definitely be more used against minority opinions than majority ones. The monitoring side is underappreciated. If we allow the norm to drift toward the ‘punishing outside behavior side’, the window for forcing employees into off work monitoring opens up. I’m definitely not ok with that. I’ve already seen employers try to force viewing access of facebook accounts.
If you want to have policies about someone who is prosecuted and found guilty of certain things, fine. But otherwise I suspect a norm of employers being hands off about outside conduct that doesn’t directly involve or invoke them would be better. In fact if we wanted to pass a law banning firing someone for their outside political views and their outside legal political acts and associations, I would strongly support that.
I’m just wondering what evidence it would take to convince you he was fired for using “inappropriate” language on Facebook. Clearly, a statement by the people who fired him flat out saying that was what happened isn’t enough. What would be?
Ampersand:
They’re both snarky hyperbolic references to violence intended to both make a point and make the recipient feel uncomfortable. While the contexts are not identical, the fact the ‘man hater’ comment was about Ford not to directly to her, and the fact that social media is typically a many-to-many form of conversation, means that I don’t think the contexts are meaningfully different or that one message was more ‘acceptable’ than the other.
Desipis:
Question not intended as snark: Are you unfamiliar with how Twitter works?
If I say “Charlie Brown is a blockhead,” I’m just talking about Charlie Brown. If I say “@Charliebrown is a blockhead,” I am specifically going out of my way to call Charlie Brown’s attention to my comment.
You might as well claim that Ford wasn’t trying to talk to Meriton Group when she linked to Meriton on her Facebook feed.
Pete:
In real life, it’s common not to know things. Official bland corporate statements are usually intended to give out the minimum possible information, not to give a complete accounting of everything that went into a decision.
But sure, if he sues his former employer, and they take depositions from his supervisors and look at his employee evaluations, and they all show he was considered a good employee up until they found out about him calling Ford a slut, then that would certainly convince me. I wouldn’t even be surprised – that’s seems a plausible possibility to me.
But it’s also plausible that he was a shit employee and this was the final straw, and a well-liked employee in the same situation would have just been given a warning and told to remove the reference to his employer from his FB page. (It’s not as if employers always fire employees in this situation – the person who said he was going to rape Ford wasn’t fired, for example.)
Logically, both are plausible, and we don’t know which is true.
Here’s another high profile Australian example of someone getting fired for “offensive” tweets from earlier in the year. There’s legal action being taken, which should have an interesting outcome. However, there are numerous significant differences from Nolan’s case:
1) Scott McIntyre was a reporter for a government funded broadcaster (SBS).
2) His tweets were criticism aimed at white people and the negative aspects of the history of Australian armed forces on the national holiday set to honour them. The criticisms weren’t completely without merit.
3) Prominent conservatives, including government ministers, felt the remarks were offensive towards those in the military. It wasn’t clear whether the government minister explicitly called for him to be sacked.
4) This all takes place in the context of the conservative federal government openly attacking the main national broadcaster (the ABC, which is supposed to be run independently from the government) for having a supposed left-wing bias.
Ampersand:
I’m not a twitter aficionado, but from the tweets I’ve read it’s very much the norm to refer to people by their twitter handle whether or not you are intending to talk to them.
Desipis:
I’m a frequent Twitter user, and it’s common knowledge that you use someone’s twitter handle with the @ to call their attention to what you’re saying. People refer to other twitter users – especially somewhat public figures like Ford – without the @ sign all the time; there’s even a term for it, “subtweeting.”
There is something that is missing from this conversation, at least something implicit that’s not quite being laid out. It’s about imposition as opposed to expression.
I can create a blog, on which I say the most preposterously awful things. But you don’t have to read my blog. Of course, this is made complicated by social media, where we have re-tweets/re-blogs/etc., along with angry “Twitter storms.” But whatever. If you’re the type of person who listens to the Twitter storms, well then you get what you get.
To be a feminist online means you not only encounter people who disagree, but you encounter people, mostly men, who get in your face about it. In fact, to be a woman online can mean fielding a constant stream of misogynistic nonsense, where just creating a dating profile implies you’re signing up for “dick pics” and crass dudes who ask for nudes. It’s gross.
But whatever. My point, you don’t have to like Ms. Ford, but I’m pretty sure if you leave her alone, she’ll leave you alone. Is the reverse true? What can she do to avoid a constant toxic cloud of angry men who feel entitled to her time, to feel entitled to abuse and degrade her, on and on and on and on.
Sometimes I think guys don’t get it. Misogynists are real, and they really hate us, and they really want to hurt us with whatever tools they have.
And it’s the latter part that matters here. If some bro-dude is a misogynistic shit, but he minds his own business, then fine. I don’t care. He can write a blog or something. I’ll hate him, but if he stays out of my world, then he is just the background noise of terrible people who I ignore.
And yeah, if he’s offensive enough he’ll probably get some shit for it, since we live in the Twitter age. But that’s not what happened in this case. In this case we have an endless stream of terrible men invading Ms. Ford’s life, trying to destroy her freedom of expression — because you can bully people into silence. What do you think attracts men such as Nolan to the FB walls of women such as Ford? They want to dump onto her a tiny bit of their misogynistic rage.
But to get sympathy she has to be a perfect angel 100% of the time, never grow tired, never get pissed, never overreact to even the slightest degree.
I know women who send out segmented hot dog photos. In fact, it’s become something of a popular meme, for women to respond to aggressive terrible men who send them abusive crap.
If you corner me, I’m gonna come out swinging. What do you expect?
So much yes, to this and to Veronica’s entire comment. (Veronica, if you haven’t already, I think you should repost that comment on your tumblr.)
There is a perfectly reasonable and accessible way for Nolan to have avoided having Clementine Ford contact his boss. Which is – don’t go to her Facebook page and call her a slut.
But the ONLY way for Ford to avoid people like Nolan reaching out to her to call her a slut (and much much worse), is for Ford to shut up and isolate herself.
And although the strategy to shut Ford up with misogynistic abuse hasn’t worked on Ford (and I suspect never will), it’s worked on other women who have seen how Ford, and Sarkeesian, and Gallo, etc etc etc, have been treated, and (quite reasonably) decided that if that’s the price of public speaking, they’ll decline to participate. What
FordNolan and a zillion other (mostly) guys just like him are doing, is succeeding in shutting (mostly) women up.Exactly. Look how much of the discussion on this thread has been people arguing that Ford has done bad things too. Yes, she has. So what?
Image a man went to some public space somewhere, say a city square or a university campus, and started loudly proselytising about how modern women are ruining the world and how women need to more to respect men . Now imagine some women passing by found what the man was saying objectionable and they reacted emotionally with slurs such as “misogynist”, “bastard” and hyperbolic statements such as “go jump off a pier”. Is any of what those women did OK? Should they just have left the guy alone and moved on, or are they allowed to express their disapproval of his messages in the public space where he is making them? Does the man have the right to publicly voice his opinions whilst avoiding any negative reaction from others?
When I consider social media platforms, such as twitter and public facebook profiles, I tend to see them as analogous to the public square where the robust nature of debate should be at its most permissive. If people want to have a more restricted form of communication then I think it’s up to those people to set up the space (in the online context that would mean private facebook pages or moderated forums) and not expect the public forums be reformed for their particular sensibilities.
I try to have sympathy for everyone who cops a dog-pile of negativity online, however the majority of my sympathy will go to the people who suffered the most and in this case that’s the guy who lost his job.
Yet, you seem to be arguing that Nolan should have the right to publicly voice his opinions – if calling a woman a “slut” because she posted a screencap of online harassment is an “opinion” – while avoiding any negative reaction.
If you want to take a libertarian rights-based approach to interpreting these events, that cuts both ways. From a libertarian perspective, Ford has no right not to have Nolan come on to her publicly-accessible Facebook page and call her a slut. But by the same light, Nolan has no right to not have the comments he made – especially comments he posted in public – quoted to his employer or anyone else.
That’s a bit like watching a video like this and feeling sorry for the guy in the water, because he suffered more.
(Or watching this one and feeling mainly sorry for the woman.)
@Sebastian H:
I could quibble over the dissimilarities that make the blacklisting worse than it otherwise would have been, but it really would be quibbling. I just tend to think it’s not really a great argument for social norms against firing people for political speech, because I don’t see the kind of informal norms you and Ampersand are advocating being of much use to protect the truly unpopular (whether the disapprobation is deserved or not). Thus, I don’t think it will help where I think it should, but adhering to it means doing things like reducing my ability to avoid associating with Nazis at work while providing me very little protection.
I think this is a legitimate argument, but that I feel like you’re trying to close the barn door after the train has sailed. I spent several years working in a job where I had to submit to annual drug testing, and such things are the norm for large chunks of the population even when there’s really no plausible reason for it. I really resented it at the time (not, mind you, because I was getting high) because of the degree of intrusion.
If you want to argue in favor for stronger general legal protections for people when it comes to being fired for their off-hours behavior, I figuratively am all ears. But as long as we’re talking about informal norms, I don’t believe what you are proposing is anything but unilateral disarmament, and unilateral disarmament that will do zilch to fend off the next wave of blacklisting (and my well hasten its arrival) or some other marcher in the parade of horribles, by making it harder to enforce norms against being, say, a misogynist, racist dickhead.
I think it’s great when people name and shame harassers like this guy, by the way; as far as I can tell most of them are squirrely fuckers who only spew abuse because nobody actually calls on them to justify their behavior to another human being.
I’m less fond of firing people because they talk shit when they’re off the clock. There’s a kind of NIMBYism to doing that. Call me an old softy, but calling a woman a slut shouldn’t be grounds for expulsion from society; somebody is going to have to give this guy a job, and somebody is going to have to find a way to integrate this guy into society in a positive way.
Certainly that’s not the job of people he insults, but I don’t think it helps to just have his employers and everybody else just throw that bag of dog shit into the neighbor’s yard.
Honestly, if I was talking about an ex-con who was struggling to find a job, I think most people here would be agreeing with me and showing off their belief in compassion and rehabilitation over punishment.
Punishing bad guys and then just sort of forgetting about them is not a strategy I believe in.
I also find it bizarre that a lot of people see employer power over workers as something that is impossible to change and probably a good thing, but feel like abusive language on the internet is a solvable problem.
The two seem equally intractable to me, and sort of going “It’s going to be fine, we won’t get fired because our expression is harmless” seems incredibly optimistic.
pillsy
What about an informal norm where you name the person who’s talking shit but don’t directly contact their employer? Is that disarmament?
That actually seems harsher than current norms, where I see people frequently say “Here’s an example of the kind of harassment I get” without actually naming the specific harasser.
desipis:
Except they aren’t and can’t be, because unlike the public square, they’re private property run by publicly traded corporations. They exist primarily or exclusively to make money for their shareholders, and their business model really isn’t, “Let’s make money by being a permissive platform for debate.”
@Christopher:
As long as it’s not broadly agreed to, it is. In certain circumstances (including, plausibly this one) it may be a more measured response, and there’s something to be said for that. Still, the difference between tagging this dude’s employer and not tagging this dude’s employer in a complaint about him doesn’t strike me as being one of great moral consequence. Also, maybe this will serve as a teachable moment for reminding people to at least remove their employer’s names from their public profiles if they’re going to be fuckhats on Facebook.
@desipis — But this case is not about some guy shouting in the public square. You are shifting goalposts.
You know, whenever I find myself in the Boston Common, there is always some wacky street preacher guys shouting nonsense, usually by Park Street station. I ignore them. In some of the T stations, there will be Evangelical Christian groups with little literature stands. I ignore them. It’s like, whatever. They hate me. I hate them. But I got shit to do. There are all kinds of public protest groups going around the parks and squares shouting about stuff. Sometimes I agree. Sometimes I disagree. Sometimes I don’t know enough to have an opinion. Whatever. I got my own shit.
But there is this one preacher guy, from Nigeria I think, who goes around with a big “Jesus” poster board. He gets on the trains, full captive audience mode, and begins ranting about gay people and women who wear shorts. He’s an asshole who will get in your face and call you “Satan.” You can’t talk to him. All you can do is endure his verbal abuse.
Until you send a message to the transit cops, who will come drag him (once again) off the train.
The differences are obvious.
Second, you are ignoring issues of frequency. I’m sure those evangelicals with their little literature stands get harassed sometimes. It’s a big world, lots of people. But I’ve never seen them get harassed. Most people seem content to ignore them. It’s as if, we just assume they are terribly unpleasant. But they’re quiet. If you don’t bug them, they don’t bug you. The street preacher guys are obnoxious, but they tend to stay outdoors, gathered in areas where people “pass by,” instead of in places where people congregate. They don’t seek out captive audiences.
I get singled out just for existing. The Nigerian Jesus guy notices me. He gets in my face, since I’m obviously queer. Violent, abusive men notice me. They make comments. They get in my face. If I go to a dance club, men notice me and come at me, and it’s a minefield. You either go “bitch mode” until a guy leaves you alone, unless he decides to fuck with you — lotta guys got anger issues. Or maybe he seems nice, so you dance with him, until he sexually assaults me. This was last Saturday. I didn’t get security. Why bother?
This happens a lot. I’ll be riding the T tonight, dressed be dressed for a fun Saturday night. The chance I’ll be harassed is very high, at least as high as ranting-misogny-guy. But I’m just minding my own business.
The point, it’s different for women. Many of my friends basically don’t go out at all. They’ve just given up, given the abuse we face. I refuse to give up. The day I transitioned, I resigned myself to death.
That sounds appallingly dramatic. I know. It’s pretentious, but it’s what I have to say to go out my door.
Be honest, how many men say stuff like this? I mean, maybe guys living in Syria or something. Sure. But ours is supposed to be a civil society.
@Ampersand — That first video is pretty great. The guy had it coming. If he got hurt, too fucking bad. The second looked like it was some consensual horseplay. I laughed, but I hope no one got hurt. (“Stupid human tricks” on Youtube are amusing.)
In terms of analogies, I think of Facebook, blogs and the like are more like a bunch of friends hanging out on the front porch of their own house, or chatting together in a restaurant.
Two metrics which people often use to decide right and wrong in cases like this are:
1) Who started it?
2) Who escalated it, and how, and why, and did they have a reasonable opportunity not to?
But #1 presumes a beginning, and in the context of social media, there is no beginning or end. It’s as though you step out your front door in order to go to work, or hang with friends, and you have to work your way through a riot to get where you’re going and back.
So we’re left with #2.
Ford could have not posted about the abuse she receives online. Is choosing to do so escalation? It doesn’t seem it to me.
Nolan clearly could have chosen not to post “slut” to Ford’s page. That was clearly escalation, and free of any positive outcome. In the broadest sense it was feedback, but it was not feedback which any reasonable person would have thought would lead to less rioting rather than more.
Ford clearly could have chosen not to notify Nolan’s employer of his public behavior. That was clearly escalation. The question is, was it likely to result in a positive outcome? Nolan might lose his job, or be discipline while retaining his job, or receive no feedback at all. He might learn not to post epithets on the Facebook wall of a woman he does not know. The extent to which he is likely to learn to do the latter is pretty strongly correlated with the former, so it quickly becomes a question of whether it’s worth it.
In the “worth it” camp, we have Jake Squid, Ampersand, Jeremy Redlien, Richard, Ben Lehman, Myca, (men, I’m pretty sure), closetpuritan, La Lubu, Harlequin, Kate, ashley, Jane Doh, veronica d, and me (women, as far as I know).
In the “not worth it” camp, we have desipis, Pete Patriot, Sebastian H, and Copyleft. I believe that all have self-identified as men in the past.
Gender unknown to me: Wissig, LTL FTC, pillsy, Mookie, J. C. Salomon, Martial, Tenter, Tamme, Fabi, Erdinger.
Position unclear or unknown: Christopher, Colleen, Phil, Sarah.
So, of those who have taken clear positions and whose gender is known, all of the women say “worth it”.
One might wonder why that is. My theory is this: On the one side, both men and women are routinely fired, for many reasons. On the other side is a life experience with a kind of harassment which the men have never directly experienced, and can reasonably expect never to experience.
Grace
desipis:
If you look at one interaction, this is definitely true: losing your job is worse than a single utterance of the word “slut” in your direction. But there are cumulative effects. If the guy gets a job reasonably soon after this (and that may or may not be a big “if”), when he and Ford are older and looking back on their lives, who do you think suffered more? The guy who lost a job, but got another one? Or the woman who suffered torrents of abuse for years?
I’ll also note that, as far as harm comes in, Nolan was harmed far more by Meriton Apartments than he was by Ford: they’re the ones who chose to fire him. So if suffering is the standard by which you are judging this situation–suffering inflicted regardless of provocation–why do you keep talking about Ford’s bad actions, and not about Meriton’s? I mean, Ford could be said to have pushed them into it (though I don’t agree with that), but if the precipitating action doesn’t matter for Ford, it surely can’t matter for Meriton either.
One might wonder why that is.
As my teenage daughter would say, “Or not. Because duh.” *smile* I really appreciate your comment, Grace. And it’s not just the experience of a kind (or level) of harassment that men seldom experience—-it’s the experience of gaslighting that being harrassed isn’t to be taken seriously, should have no consequences as to how one moves through life, and that if one allows said harassment to impact one’s life, one is sliding down the slippery slope into paranoia….while simultaneously being reminded that one is responsible for one’s own safety, and that if one doesn’t de-escalate in response to being harassed or threatened, one is responsible for continued (and/or escalated) harassment or the making good on threats. Women are expected to abide by a “Cede Your Ground” policy. I call that bullshit.
My experience, which from the looks of things is different from that of many men on this thread: the theoretical racist who rants and raves on the internet and on his own time, yet doesn’t express racist opinions, slurs, “jokes”, passive-aggressive dogwhistle language on the job does not exist. The theoretical misogynist who trolls the internet blasting vile language and threats to random women on social media who don’t abide by what he feels is their “place”, yet treats his female co-workers with respect, never indulging in the type of invective he regularly uses on social media to strangers, does not exist. Period. And trust—those assholes positively thrive on the assumption that if there are no witnesses to their bad behavior, said behavior “never happened”. Also important to remember: obnoxious men of every stripe visit their obnoxiousness more often and with impunity on women—-other men, sometimes, but not at all to the same degree because other men present a potential physical threat in a way that women don’t.
Social media is a game-changer in that it leaves a written trail of evidence. Which means accountability can be brought into play. Ignorance is no longer bliss.
In terms of analogies, I think of Facebook, blogs and the like are more like a bunch of friends hanging out on the front porch of their own house, or chatting together in a restaurant.
Yes. Thank you, Kate. I’ve always felt the same way. I’m really surprised when others claim personal websites as the “public square”. Yes, it’s in public, but only to the same extent as physical public spaces where private parties gather. Being in public (virtual or real) is not an invitation for all boundaries to dissolve.
Harlequinn:
Huh? You’ve just compared the “accumulated” outcome from a lifetime of one thing with the individual outcome from the other. That makes no sense. If Ford (a long with a legion of other morality police) are experiencing torrents of abuse for years and following Ford’s example then people will be losing their jobs a lot, and that will likely include many people losing their jobs multiple times once it’s all scaled up.
That’s true, but Meriton’s motives are profit based which is something that isn’t going to be changing any time soon. What I think can change is the cultural expectations around proportionate responses to such behaviour, which causes firing to be the response resulting from a profit motive.
@Grace
“Gender unknown to me: Wissig, LTL FTC, pillsy, Mookie, J. C. Salomon, Martial, Tenter, Tamme, Fabi, Erdinger.”
Male in my case, FWIW.
“On the other side is a life experience with a kind of harassment which the men have never directly experienced”
You are so, so wrong.
@Ampersand
“You’re like someone saying “look, this battle is lost. Clearly the entire war strategy is a dud!” Maybe it’s a dud, maybe not, but you can’t really conclude that from looking at just one battle.”
Do you seriously think that her strategy will do anything other than make the trolls hide their identities better?
I don’t know? I think that she’s been getting a lot of publicity about the issue, and making people more aware of the problem. (Not just in this particular case with Nolan). I think it’s possible that will help to change social attitudes in the long run.
But in any case, I wasn’t addressing the question of what her strategy will do. I was pointing out that the specific argument you made – “she got a torrent of comments! That proves her strategy doesn’t work!” – doesn’t hold water.
This. is. so. right.
Desipis:
Here’s the thing I’ve been wondering about ever since I started following this thread. Desipis, you seem, generally speaking, to be proceeding from the assumption that there is some kind of level playing field. As if the misogyny directed at Ford is not a thing in itself, with a politics, a history, the weight of an entire culture behind it—something that women have to deal with, that weighs on women in their personal and public and intimate lives, that is, whether we like it or not, woven into the fabric of what we, culturally, understand about what it means to be a woman (an understanding that some of us actively oppose, that some of us support, that some of us are at best ambivalent about, etc.). Something that men simply do not have to deal with.
It’s not that men do not suffer harassment; it’s not that such harassment never rises to levels analogous to what Ford experiences when it comes to misogyny; but men are not generally subject to forms of harassment that attack us by reducing us sexually to objects, that take the frequency of our sexual activity as a measure of our worth, that turn the fact of having a penis and testicles into an opportunity to demonstrate our second-class status, our lack of intelligence, to justify why we don’t need to be taken seriously, by referring to our penis and testicles (and how often we do or not use them sexually). And so on.
It seems to me, desipis, that you should be able to argue that what Ford did was disproportionate, that Nolan should not have been fired for what he put on his Facebook page, without redirecting—though I think misdirecting is a more accurate word—the conversation to whether or not there is some sort of reverse sexual double standard going on here, in which women who behaved in ways analogous to Nolan, and within a similarly pervasive and harmful cultural context, would be given an automatic pass by those of us who think Nolan’s racism and misogyny deserved to be called out publicly for what it was. (Which, I hasten to add, does not mean we all agree that it should have been done in the way Ford did it or that we all agree that Nolan should have been fired.)
That’s true, but Meriton’s motives are profit based which is something that isn’t going to be changing any time soon. What I think can change is the cultural expectations around proportionate responses to such behaviour, which causes firing to be the response resulting from a profit motive.
Drill down a little deeper. Why would Meriton make the profit-based response of firing? Do you think maybe it would have something to do with the response of their tenants, both current and potential? Especially their female tenants? Do you think it is unreasonable for women to not want a supervisor for their apartment complex with clear anger issues towards random women to have the key to their apartment? It was pointed out at the beginning of this thread that most customers (or potential customers) aren’t going to make the proverbial “federal case” out of their choice to not do business with what they regard as a problematic business. They’re just going to quietly cross the proverbial street to the competition instead. They’re going to recommend to the people in their daily circles (friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, etc.) to do the same, and why. And those decisions never make it to the media, let alone the courts. “Benefit of the doubt” can be given for hearsay, but not for actual evidence.
As I said a little earlier, firing doesn’t have to be the go-to-response. But it often is, because things like anger-management and sexual harassment classes cost a lot of money, and putting employees through them means paying them to attend those classes as well. Companies are not going to do that unless (a) the specific employee would be very difficult to replace, or (b) the company is large enough it is cost-effective for them to put all employees through such training at the moment of hiring, and perhaps have additional seminars at regular intervals.
Here’s a concept: boundaries. For some strange, unknown (to me) reason, boundaries that would be respected in physical spaces are not respected in virtual spaces. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that people can’t hit back in cyberspace, or because of the nature of certain cyber-spaces, there are fewer neutral (or hostile) witnesses, or because the police don’t arrest people in cyberspace. Treating cyberspace as if it is a physical space would work better.
As an example: suppose Michael Nolan was seated at a public park where Ford was having a conversation with a friend. Let’s say her conversation was frankly misandrist and loud enough to be heard by passers-by. Do you think Nolan would have interrupted that private conversation (albeit in public space), by loudly proclaiming that Ford was a slut? Or do you think he would have just rolled his eyes and thought to himself, “wow, what an ate-up bitch”? (or whatever the equivalent in Australian slang would be). I’m betting on the latter. It’s a red flag when people invade others’ conversations, even when they happen in public.
I’d have a great deal of sympathy for Nolan if the circumstances were different—if he was having a private conversation (albeit in virtual public space) with a friend and mentioned oh, something about a woman he’d seen that had a “nice ass”…..only to have Ford show up on his page calling him a misogynistic bastard who ought to sit on a landmine…and then continually escalate the insults, and when various forms of “go away, I don’t even know you, this is none of your business” don’t work, he responded with “fuck you, you slut”. And got fired for use of the word “slut”. But that’s not what happened. (and again, we don’t know it he called her a “slut” on company time, and/or with company tech).
What I want to know is: why is it unreasonable to expect Nolan to have exercised some restraint, the way—-and I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt here—he would have in physical space?
To me, that’s the key factor in the difference experience men and women have with obnoxious, boorish assholes in public. We all deal with it from time to time, but women not only deal with it more often, men with anger issues regularly target women because they don’t fear repercussions by doing so they way they fear repercussions from fellow men. Women are expected to “cede our ground” when faced with an angry man—whether in physical space or cyberspace. Men are granted the choice to either cede or stand their ground. Frankly, Ford sound like a real asshole to me. I wouldn’t want to know her in real life. But all appearances indicate that a great deal of the hostility directed towards her is due to the fact she isn’t ceding her ground.
On what Mr. Newman said — One way to understand the world is to see things as a string of isolated incidents, each unrelated to the others, where context is irrelevant, identity issues are irrelevant, and if racism and sexism exist, we’ll ignore them, as we will never draw a connection between any action and any other action, nor with the identities of those involved. Another way is to see everything as token examples of identity-based social theory, with no consideration given to individual cases or the particulars of each event.
Obviously these are both wrong. To get a true picture of our social world, you need both tools. We are each individual. Each person follows their own path. Each action is governed by the particulars of those involved. At the same time, we live in a broadly racist and sexist society, and who you are governs how others perceive you. Those who believe themselves immune to this are probably wrong. Few people resist entirely our social matrix.
Those who deny this latter point are, in my experience, the most deluded. It’s unfortunate.
On what La Lubu said — Indeed. When women stand up for ourselves, it drives some men batshit. It’s like, we veer from the social script and they cannot handle it.
It seems as if, for most people, these social scripts go unexamined. The men feel the pressures. They also feel the “rightness” of the scripts, when they proceed as normal, and thus an intense “wrongness” when they do not. So you get otherwise well-meaning men who turn to angry little shits the moment a woman stands her ground. It’s actually pretty weird to watch it happen.
Women feel these pressures also. However, I think we have an ongoing sense of lingering “wrongness.” It’s subtle, hard to describe. But it’s there.
Tenter:
It’s not at all obvious that it will, no. Trolls aren’t necessarily very smart (I mean, whatever else you can say about Mr Nolan, he acted like a complete bonehead), and taking steps to hide one’s identity are a barrier to entry that could well deter people who are just kinda casually into the trolling shit.
So far, Ampersand and others have presented a number of reasons why Ms Ford’s approach could plausibly work. You continue to refuse to explain what alternative course of action you think would be superior. How do you think Ms Ford should have behaved in this instance?
desipis:
That’s a strong likelihood, but it isn’t the own likelihood. Maybe Mr Nolan’s manager at Meriton was a woman or a member of one of the racial minorities he disparaged, and decided they just weren’t comfortable working with him anymore–especially if, per La Lubu’s post, this just gave them hard evidence about something that they’d suspected about Mr Nolan for quite some time. Maybe when they went to investigate the charge, and asked him about it, he responded in a counterproductive fashion–truly hard to believe given the level of judgement and impulse control Mr Nolan had demonstrated in his interactions on FB, I know. Maybe they feared getting a torrent of messages about the guy and just decided that it wasn’t worth the aggravation.
Managers are, you know, people, not just profit-maximizing robots who approach every decision around employee discipline in a cool, calculating manner.
“So far, Ampersand and others have presented a number of reasons why Ms Ford’s approach could plausibly work. ”
All sorts of disproportionate responses plausibly work to modify outcomes. It literally happens all the time. An abuser beats his wife for not finishing the laundry in time. Most of the time she will be really careful to get it done. China takes physical control of Tibetan monasteries, forces population transfers, and installs their own Lamas to cow the population. Its been decades and the Chinese control of the Tibetan population has just increased every year. Sending people to gulags shut up a lot of other people. Torture is very effective at getting you to say almost anything. We can modify behavior all the way to evil outcomes with enough pressure, so of course we can probably modify behavior to good outcomes with enough pressure.
Fear of getting fired from your job is a powerful motivator. It kept millions of gay people in the closet for decades. Even though your aim of getting people to call women sluts outside of work is laudable, the means of getting them fired from their job could be strongly unjust. Further the letting corporations police your outside behavior on a regular basis seems like something that could backfire horribly, and we would be better off minimizing it to the extent possible–up to legislating workplace protections.
@Sebastian H, who almost surely forgot a word:
Fine, I’ll stipulate that it’s unjust. What do you propose people in Ms Ford’s position do instead?
Also, I have to say that it’s weird, if the issue is one of justice, that Ms Ford is coming in for vastly more criticism than the management of Meriton Apartments. Surely the responsibility for upholding the principle that employees should not be fired for off-hours activity should fall primarily on the people who can actually do the firing? It needn’t be said that the one defense offered of them along these lines–desipis’ suggestion that of course Meriton would do this because of their profit motive–is comically weak, and would justify virtually every sort of imaginable corporate malfeasance outside of Captain Planet villainy.
@Pillsy
“It’s not at all obvious that it will, no. Trolls aren’t necessarily very smart”
So your theory is that the trolls are to stupid to figure out how to cover their tracks. Let’s test that. Of the latest crop of trolls, the ones specifically responding to her getting Michael fired, how many has she been able to out?
“So far, Ampersand and others have presented a number of reasons why Ms Ford’s approach could plausibly work. You continue to refuse to explain what alternative course of action you think would be superior. How do you think Ms Ford should have behaved in this instance?”
I don’t agree that it could plausibly work, and maintain that it will make the problem worse for her. So the superior course of action would be not outing them or complaining to their employees.
Of course, effectiveness might not be the only criterion by which Clementine judges the situation. It might be just plain satisfying to give one of her tormenters a whack, every now and again, in which case I say, go for it! So long as the troll in question is being more abusive than she routinely is. I’m not in the “it’s wrong to get anyone fired” camp. I just think that Clementine, by her own abuse to others, has set the ethical bar higher than what Michael did.
Trigger warning for enough sarcasm to brine your ass.
Tenter—-Ford’s “abuse of others”?
This, right here, is a major red flag. It happens over and over again whenever people discuss the way women respond to harassment by men.
The same path gets followed every time.
1. Woman has an opinion about something. She expresses this opinion.
2. Men get bugfuck outraged. They scream with rage, threaten to rape her, kill her, whatever.
3. Woman responds. Sometimes there is sarcasm.
4. Sometimes woman shows bugfuck freakout to the offenders’ moms, bosses, etc., etc.,
5. Men respond with EVEN WORSE bugfuck freakout. How dare THIS BITCH……um, quote them verbatim? Use their names? Which they openly used?
6. The “She asked for it” stage arrives. People attack her all over again. As if by prior arrangement, everyone agrees that Number 2 never happened, and really, Numbers 1, 3, and 4 are totally to blame, while Number 5 is just the response of poor, abused men. They didn’t do anything wrong at all till she provoked them in 3, physically assaulted them in 4, and 5 is just boys being boys.
7. All the guys agree that the woman is a total bitch who totally asked for it and probably likes it besides.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
I should mention that criticizing Ford is a way of denying Number 2 ever happened. She did NOT abuse others. I think a woman who gets threatened with rape by a guy, or get told to do various vulgar and injurious things by said guy is not only NOT under any obligation whatsoever to act like the fucking Queen of England, the very expectation is about as grotesque an example of the double standard as you can imagine.
Anybody who calls Ford abusive is erasing the assholes who attacked her. I have to demand why they do this, and why they act like men calling a woman a slut and a whore is a totally acceptible response to a woman having an opinion.
Grace, “One might wonder why that is. My theory is this: On the one side, both men and women are routinely fired, for many reasons. On the other side is a life experience with a kind of harassment which the men have never directly experienced, and can reasonably expect never to experience.”
My theory is selection bias. Women on this website are very likely to be feminists. Ford is a feminist fighting for things you are broadly in agreement with. If you were to ask non-feminist women the same questions you might have different answers. (I tried it on my mother, who has suffered very nasty sexual harassment and she thought that trying to get him fired was a horrible response. Now she is a fundamentalist Christian who isn’t happy about me being gay either, so my point isn’t that we should trust her on everything, but that the pro-going-after-the-job response isn’t necessarily a gender coded thing). I would also tend to say that I, as someone who drew the ‘faggot’ label early and often, have at least some similar experience but I wouldn’t think it was appropriate to go after the job of someone who called me a faggot on my webpage or to my face outside the workplace. Perhaps the difference reflects our privilege: for most of us, finding a job isn’t a big deal. We are smarter than average people and better educated. We have better social skills. But for much of the population, losing a job is just about the most devastating thing possible short of serious physical harm–and this is gender coded, it is even worse for men. In fact I’m tempted to say that for the middle class and below, strong risks of physical harm over your job is considered a plausible tradeoff compared to not having one.
For me, threatening someone’s job is probably the last possible escalating step short of physically attacking them, and some men might be willing to take a beating over taking their job. A lot of this thread has treated serious threats to a job fairly lightly, but I don’t see it that way at all.
“Also, I have to say that it’s weird, if the issue is one of justice, that Ms Ford is coming in for vastly more criticism than the management of Meriton Apartments. Surely the responsibility for upholding the principle that employees should not be fired for off-hours activity should fall primarily on the people who can actually do the firing?”
I’m not offering any defense of them whatsoever. Meriton Apartments shouldn’t fire someone for calling someone a slut outside of the office. I believe we should have legislation to severely limit the ability of companies to fire people over outside behavior. I’ve already outlined that repeatedly in the comments and in detail in comment #104. But I don’t see that as offering any defense to Ford either. When a rich person throws a fit in a service industry and gets someone fired in a disproportionate reaction to some not-normally-fireable slight, the fact that the company shouldn’t have given into the rich person doesn’t let the rich person off the hook at all in my mind.
” I think a woman who gets threatened with rape by a guy, or get told to do various vulgar and injurious things by said guy is not only NOT under any obligation whatsoever to act like the fucking Queen of England, the very expectation is about as grotesque an example of the double standard as you can imagine. ”
She didn’t get the guy who threatened her with rape fired. She also didn’t get the guy who said she should sit on a knife fired. She got the guy who called her a slut fired.
And your point would be? You’re okay with “slut”? How nice for you, because “slut” is not a big deal for a guy. Because we’re not talking about civil disagreement here. We’re talking about a guy who joined a mob, and once again, we’re criticizing the woman, not the guy.
If it’s one guy you call him an asshole and move on. That’s kind of the point. This guy saw a mob of men viciously attacking a woman—-something I was going to stress and forgot to—and tried to assist them in intimidating her. He knew EXACTLY what he was doing.
The act of doing this under his real name just adds to the intimidation factor. He felt completely at ease harassing her. Maybe he has lots of practice.
Women like Ford get blamed for provocation. Guys like this are the ones who are actually trying to do that, becsuse they know other men will never criticize them.
veronica d:
My position is not about believing people are immune to social influences, it’s about seeing racism and sexism as minor threads in the complex weave that make up the whole fabric of society; minor threads that are given such exaggerated emphasis by moral crusaders that it drives disproportionate and ultimately unjust responses.
pillsy:
In terms of the messages she received herself:
1) If minimising the amount of negative messages she receives is a priority, she should do nothing. Don’t even acknowledge the messages. Any response will increase the amount of negative messages she gets sent.
2) Responding with equally harsh language is understandable, although not particularly constructive.
3) She evidently could use her popularity and media position to be the bigger bully and try to cause those people more significant harm. But I don’t see morality as a competition to see who can be the bigger arsehole, so I’m criticising her for doing so.
In terms of addressing the problem more generally:
1) Campaign for social media platforms to provide better functions for users to control and filter the messages that will get through to them.
2) Try to raise the lowest common denominator in terms of education, social awareness and social well being such that everyone is willing and capable of discussing social issues in a calm and rational manner. (I don’t think she’s likely to succeed at this one).
losing a job is just about the most devastating thing possible short of serious physical harm–and this is gender coded, it is even worse for men.
Horseshit. It is not “even worse for men”, especially if you’re talking about women without a college education who experience even more of a pay gap (relative to men with similar qualifications/work experience) than educated women. Women without a college education have less savings and fewer assets than similarly-situated men (due to the lower pay/fewer benefits in “pink collar” jobs)—less of a safety net. So no, losing a job is not “worse for men”. You are deluding yourself if you think most women—and especially most working class or poor women—are being financially supported by men.
You are making the assumption that Nolan was fired because a single screenshot (of his “slut” remark and a racist joke) got publicized to Meriton, and they preemptively fired him before the company’s reputation was damaged by association with him. My assumption is that there were other complaints about him, and the screenshot was the icing on the cake. Racism and sexism aren’t part-time avocations. People who indulge those pursuits do it on the job, too. You’re painting this as Meriton acting as Big Brother defending against thoughtcrime. What about the other workers at Meriton? Wonder what experiences any women, or men of color, had with him? Especially those he supervised. And again—do you consider it unreasonable for female tenants to not want a person with anger issues towards women and a sketchy sense of boundaries to have access to their apartment keys?
If you are a person of color, racism is not a “minor thread”. If you are a woman, sexism is not a “minor thread”. Those are major factors that literally color every social interaction you have, despite your best efforts to escape them. That’s not an exaggeration; that’s a fact. We place the emphasis we do because of the wildly disproportionate response our very being provokes in those with racist and/or sexist attitudes. We don’t have the luxury of starting from a neutral place. We have injustice imposed upon us from the beginning. Yet we’re the problem for not being more understanding, more accommodating?
Are you fucking kidding me?!
La Lubu (quoting Sebastian H):
Ahem:
Something, something, privilege?
*blink*. So…you’ve never heard the term “feminization of poverty”? Aren’t aware of how unemployment makes women more likely to be victims of crime? (From the article: “female unemployment but not male unemployment showed ‘significant opportunity effects for aggregate violent crime, aggregate property crime and components of violent crime” because “high levels of female unemployment translate into high numbers of women without the means to escape situations where they are likely to experience crime”).
Or perhaps you aren’t thinking about the long term effects of women’s unemployment, specifically the impact on retirement benefits (an area where there is already significant gap between men and women).
Not to completely dismiss how unemployment affects a person’s mental health, just that being able to actually make ends meet takes priority. (Also important: working class women are more likely than working class men to be the sole financial support for others (children, elders, a partner).
But please! do tell me more about this supposed privilege women have! I’ll pop some popcorn.
So, sit down and shut up.
These are two of the things Ford is being criticised for doing already, not things that she SHOULD do instead. Fail.
She reported to Facebook. The abusive posts she cites did not violate their policies.
You have got to be f**king kidding me.
Sorry – you’ve got nothing.
La Lubu:
I don’t know about elsewhere in the world, but here it’s men who are more likely to be so poor they have to sleep rough.
That’s looking at large scale sociological effects of unemployment. The contention in this thread is the effect on firing an individual, not talking about the wholesale firing of women. When the issue is examined at the individual level there’s not actually much difference:
Sebastian H:
Presumably, so are the men. It’s an explicitly feminist website.
Do you have a theory to account for why a small majority of the men on this website are feminists while all but a tiny fraction of the women are?
I didn’t say it was necessarily a gender coded thing. I noted that of the people participating in the conversation, the women were unanimous. It’s a small survey with sampling problems, to be sure. But the unanimity (or, if we include your mother, the near-unanimity) is suggestive. It’s not impossible that it’s totally random, but that degree of difference makes it unlikely. So I wonder why.
I don’t think it’s gender. I think it’s sympathy. The women largely have sympathy because we’ve been there or can easily see ourselves being there. Many of the men have sympathy because they’ve seen the patterns the women are describing and don’t discount them. And then there’s the rest of the men, who don’t apparently conceive of the pervasive sort of abuse we’re describing, who just can’t see themselves in our shoes, but who can very easily, apparently, see themselves in the shoes of a hotel manager who posted “slut” on someone’s Facebook page.
Since Ford’s action was apparently a bad, bad, no-good, awful course of action, and we are desperately searching for any course of action which might produce a short- or medium-term positive outcome — with “lie back and take it” clearly unacceptable, and “change society” being a bit too multigenerational — I’m perfectly willing to entertain ideas from someone who has experienced very nasty sexual harassment. What does your mother suggest that someone in Ford’s position should do?
Sebastian H:
Me, too. When I was growing up, none of us kids had any idea about trans people, but my schoolmates were confident that they knew a faggot when they saw one.
Sebastian H:
So now Ford is to blame for the inconsistency of response from other people’s employers? Or for the fact that Nolan was dumb enough to act out in public while flying his employer’s flag?
This thread is abundantly illustrative. Probably not in the way you intend. It is crystal clear that Ford has no options which would satisfy you and those arguing alongside you… except to lie back and think of Australia.
You will never be in the no-win situation she is in, because you’re not a woman speaking publicly. I am a woman who sometimes speaks publicly, and who chooses my venues and topics very carefully because I have seen situations like this play out against the speaker many times.
This question which we keep asking is not a hypothetical piece of argumentation designed to back you off. We would like to know how it is that we can participate in public and semi-public conversation without getting inundated by a pile-on of gendered insults which are intended to debase us, to demoralize us, and to shut us down. Irrespective of what Meriton did, you don’t like what Ford did. Fine. Tell us how to experience equality in public discourse.
What is she supposed to do?
Grace
Desipis:
The fundamental lack of empathy in that position (or perhaps I should say “the selective empathy implicit in that position”)—cf. what LaLubu said about racism and sexism being anything but “minor threads” for women and people of color—explains a whole lot about why you have taken the positions here on Alas that you have taken. This lack of empathy for women is also, I think, evident in the suggestions you put forth for what Ford could/should do in response to the misogynists who target her on line, none of which actually take into account the actual experience of being made a target simply for being a woman—not a person in general, but a woman—with an opinion.
So, as Kate points out, desipis talks about things Ford could do, but had no suggestions for something which would be productive in the short-term or medium-term… other than stop participating. And yet, he maintains steadfastly that she’s doing it wrong.
I’m reminded of something William Penn said:
desipis:
This is perhaps the most profound example of not understanding privilege that I have ever seen, where a member of a privileged group uses it to smirkingly suggest that a member of a less privileged group is getting above herself, on a topic, employment, where the inequities are widespread, comprehensive, and widely documented.
desipis, whatever you think privilege is, that’s not it.
desipis:
Translation: “The status quo is basically okay. It just needs a little tweaking.”
Now THAT’S a good example of privilege.
desipis:
So it’s okay for Sebastian H to bring up large-scale generalizations (“losing a job is just about the most devastating thing possible short of serious physical harm–and this is gender coded, it is even worse for men”), and it’s okay for YOU (“Ahem”) but it’s not okay for La Lubu? desipis, you give the strong impression of someone who wants to find an argument to win, rather than someone who wants to thrash something out in order to understand it better.
I’m willing to argue, but it’s a means, not an end; I don’t do it for the sake of argument. Frankly, I’m starting to feel like I’m near the limit of what I can stomach, on this. So, at some point I may bow out and spend my energy on other things, and you can talk to whoever will listen.
Grace
Desipis, that your response to “what should she have done” is essentially “shut up and take it” is the reason that people are acting like you have zero credibility, knowledge, or authority on this.
You are the person telling the victim of bullying to ignore it rather than reporting it or fighting back. When we were children, we could all tell that this was the advice someone gave you when didn’t give a shit whether you were bullied or not and just wanted you to stop complaining. The advice hasn’t improved with time.
Edited to add: And, of course, that there have been no other answers to this important question. I mean, I agree with Sebastian H’s suggestion that employers ought not be allowed to fire employees for their legal out-of-work speech, but that still doesn’t address it.
—Myca
RJN:
I don’t lack empathy for women, I just don’t go out of my way to exaggerate my empathy for women. I also don’t share the same pathological lack of empathy for men as many others.
Grace:
I also don’t have any practical suggestions for Palestinians to do about Israeli occupation or what middle east Muslims in general should do about western interference in their countries, but I still maintain that suicide bombing and terrorism is wrong. The existence of human problems and suffering in this world doesn’t necessitate the existence of quick-and-easy moral solutions. I don’t see being a victim as being carte blanche moral authority for any response.
You seem to completely fail to understand the point I was making.
[emphasis mine]
I see what you did there. Not subtle.
This isn’t about the right to post one-word misogynistic comments on articles. It’s not even about whether it’s right (or even effective) to try and “pick off” bad people one by one in a scattershot attacks on what are, in fact, truly nasty people.
It’s about a failure of imagination. The failure to imagine that you or someone you identify with will find themselves on the other side of the narrowing window of acceptable discourse that both left and right seem to be sorting themselves into. The failure to consider that you might want to say something that can be construed as “anti police,” “anti military” or “anti Israel” while working in hostile political territory and not have your employer cowed by the public into firing you for what you say off the job.
But that reciprocity depends on norms more than laws. The interpretation of constitutional law that protects Nazis in Skokie protects demonstrators of all stripes, but there is no Supreme Court injunction for social media norms. Allowing the other guy to go unpunished doesn’t really protect you at all should you find yourself in an similar situation.
So maybe the only choice is picking off bad actors one by one and hoping they somehow disappear as a result. Further sort by geography and profession so more people are ideologically aligned with their bosses as a practical matter of self-preservation. Maybe it has to be this way. I’m certainly not signing up for the project of teaching basic manners to sexist douchebags and I can’t come up with a principled line that the no-platformers and fire-this-dude movements shouldn’t cross. So … despair.
desipis:
I didn’t ask for quick-and-easy. I asked for anything between “lie back and take it” and “fix society”.
Lotta that going around.
Grace
The link about mental health is a less convincing when applied to this particular case, since Nolan is childless and single. According to the linked study, there was basically no difference in health outcomes between fired women and men, if the sample is limited to single people. The difference emerges among people with families (children, spouses, or both).
I’m not sure there’s any need to get into “who has it worse when fired, men or women?” I think we all agree that being fired is bad and sometimes comes with bad long-term consequences for people of any sex.
Are you saying Meriton was cowed by the public into firing Nolan? Or are you referring to another situation?
Desipis:
First, I did not realize that empathy was quantifiable, such that it can be “exaggerated.” (There is a huge difference between empathizing with someone and over-identifying with them, for example.) So I will say this again: It seems to me one ought to be able to argue about the proportionality, or whatever, of what Ford did and of what Nolan’s employer did without either minimizing the seriousness of the misogyny with which Ford is, apparently frequently, targeted or invalidating the notion that holding someone publicly accountable for not just merely offensive, but hateful, discriminatory, bullying, etc. public statements they have in their own name made is an appropriate response to those statements—not only, but perhaps especially when they are part of a pile on, as Nolan’s was.
Second, I don’t see how your comment about empathy for men—which is, frankly, self-serving at best—has any relevance to this discussion.
It’s impossible to know whether the attention a nationally known newspaper columnist and her readers cowed Meriton into firing Nolan or whether they did so out of their own concern for what the comment said about Nolan. When I say “failure of imagination,” it’s about the general idea that employers should be responsible for policing (with the bluntest tool they have) the off-hours speech of employees and whether that may backfire.
The question of whether people ought to hurl gendered abuse at people they disagree with seems like a bit more of a slam dunk than the follow-up. Does doing bad thing X justify consequence Y if enough people (or one person with an audience) says so? Do you think a bitterly divided society can come up with an agreed-upon standard for an off-hours speech offense? Do we want to entrust employers with enforcing these norms?
Most importantly for this discussion, does retreating to the easy question of whether people ought to hurl gendered abuse does you any favors for reaching good answers those other questions?
@Sebastian H:
They aretn’t primary target of criticism, which is weird. If say, Ms Ford had tried to get Mr Nolan jailed for calling her a “slut”[1], and some cop arrested him or some DA charged him, Ms Ford (whose hypothetical conduct is vastly worse than her real conduct, IMO) would barely rate a mention in the face of the officials abusing their power and ignoring the First Amendment.
@Sebastian H:
…In response to a complaint about a guy who threatened to sexually assault her (at least that strikes me as what was meant by the vile “jabber less” message) in a place where she would be sure to see it. In isolation Mr Nolan’s posts would just prove he’s sexist, racist and boorish; in context I think they’re considerably worse.
@LTL FTC:
I’m not failing to imagine any such thing. I just think wishing that there a social norm against getting people fired for online speech is useless, and I think that if someone tried to get me fired for, say, “anti-police” comments, I could rely my actual comments to convince my employer that firing me over them would be stupid. I also could publicly complain about my treatment and bring public pressure to bear.
These things are plausible defenses against social consequences, but really provide very weak protection against state action. That’s why I’m glad that the ACLU won the Skokie case, but unperturbed by Meriton Apartments firing Mr Nolan.
[1] I know this happened in Australia, but I’m pretending it’s in America to be able to tap into the free speech vocabulary and principles I’m familiar with.
pillsy:
I think we’re in agreement that norms are gone and there may be no way to get them back. However, I don’t think that you should put your trust in the ability to round up your own social mob if and when it should become necessary.
Though I’m crying no tears for this particular a**hole, I’m perturbed by the firing because I don’t want public norms to be enforced by private corporations and I don’t see a logical stopping point, nor can I see how this tactic won’t be used by the right. FWIW, I’m also wary of mandatory drug testing in all but a very small set of jobs.
And to say, as Grace does, that I probably think the way I do because I can see myself in the shoes of someone yelling “slut” at a newspaper columnist is an evasive ad homenem.
@LTL FTC:
The alternative seems to be assuming that my behavior is so outside the bounds of social acceptability that I wouldn’t be able to find such a mob. Mr Nolan seems to have scared up quite a mob of his own and he acted like a complete nincompoop, so I think my chances would be pretty good.
Oh, it’s already being used by the right all over the place. The most memorable recent instance is their attempts to get Stephen Salaita fired for vitriolic anti-Israel (and borderline anti-semitic, IMO) tweets from his job at UIUC, which worked out OK for them and not nearly so well for the UIUC administrators. Since Salaita was an employee of a state institution and a tenured academic, UIUC came in for a ton of deserved criticism and an equally deserved humiliating and costly legal settlement, but the mob that pushed UIUC to take action against him was barely noticed.
In another thread here, I linked to a story about a professor at the University of Houston (IIRC) who wrote an editorial about how some police treated her in a racist fashion after stopping her. Quite a few people disagreed with her characterization of the incident after watching the tape, and some thousands of them signed a petition to get her fired. The university did what UIUC should have done and told them to buzz off (again, due to academic freedom and the fact that it’s a state institution).
This leaves aside the dozens of stories that have come down the pike over the years of employees fired for getting gay married, or pregnant while unmarried, or performing burlesque shows or whatever. Stuff like that, by the way, has been going on pretty much forever so far as I can tell. Well, except for the gay marriage thing, for obvious reasons.
I don’t much like it overall, but it’s baked into our society at a pretty deep level, and I can’t find much room to fault people who try to turn it to their advantage when I think they’re in the right. Yeah, of course I object to people trying to inflict social consequences on others when they’re the ones in the wrong–doing things to further bad ends sucks even if the means are otherwise acceptable.
Pillsy:
Heckuva lot of good it did him.
I think we do agree on the basic points. The norms are dead. The right does it too. Unilateral disarmament isn’t a strategy.
You focus more on the “turnabout is fair play” angle than countering the “any worry about the consequences of a punishment is an endorsement of or sympathetic to the behavior that caused the punishment” angle I’ve seen upthread.
RJN:
I should be able to, yes. The problem is that others are arguing that the seriousness of misogyny is a major factor in the proportionality, and that people ought to be free from the predictable and disproportionate consequences from their actions because they were just “holding someone publicly accountable”.
That was a reaction to other’s arguments like La Lubu’s comments at #127 and #151.
Desipis:
Then I’d like to see you do it. Make an argument against what Ford did that does not minimize misogyny, that accepts women’s account(s) of what it’s like to be the target of online misogynist harassment as accurately representing what it’s like.
Seems to me that Nolan’s employer’s response is only “predictable” in hindsight. If they had taken any one of the other actions that several people in this thread have pointed out that they could have taken–and that they and they alone are responsible for not having taken–we might never even have heard of this situation.
RJN:
I did. In my original comment:
I didn’t even mention misogyny or women’s experiences.
1.) We don’t know whether Nolan was fired just for this one comment. As La Lubu noted:
Also, Ford was only informed of Nolan’s firing five days after she posted and linked to Meriton. That says to me that they took some time to look into it, and think about what they were doing.
2.) People seem to be talking about this as if the standards for all employers and all jobs are or should be the same. They are not, nor should they be. To take two groups, on opposite ends of the spectrum – Tenured professors at public universities have very robust protections, even of their work-related speech. This is as it should be, because it is important for us to have a community of people with a great deal of intellectual freedom who can discuss issues without fear. At the other end of the spectrum (and, I’d argue, with similar social status), people in pastoral roles at religious institutions have no protections, even for things that are rank discrimination (so, they can fire people for being gay, even if it is against the law for most employers). This is as it should be, because freedom of religion would be impossible if religious institutions could be forced to keep people in pastoral roles when they disagreed with doctrine.
As La Lubu observed above, Nolan arguably had a job for which less robust protections are reasonable:
It’s true that we don’t know exactly why his employer fired Nolan, but what is it that makes us so hesitant about assuming? I mean we can never know exactly why an employer fires an employee without somehow gaining access to their internal communications, which is rare. To say that this uncertainty, which is very much the default, should prevent us from trying to judge the morality of somebody’s dismissal is to give employers a very wide freedom of action that I don’t think they warrant.
Many of us are skeptical that one can be supportive of such a vile comment – writing “slut” in response to a complaint that she was told “You would jibber heaps less with a cock in your mouth.” – and not have those poisonous attitudes spill over into other areas of one’s life. I do not believe it is possible for him to leave this hatred of women at home when he goes to work. It doubtless takes less overt forms, but he’s still carrying it with him and it is influencing the way he treats the woman around him. And, to add to La Lubu’s observation – I sure would not want this man to have the keys to my apartment.
Tamme:
Years of experience in HR lead me to believe that this was an excuse his employer had been waiting for. Probably because he was a problem employee in any of a variety of ways. He could’ve been disruptive or been chronically tardy or absent just up to their line of fireability. He could’ve been roundly disliked by all other employees. It could be days or weeks or months or even years before that excuse comes along and when it does, you don’t let it go by. Otoh, if this was an employee who showed up every day, on schedule and did his work without causing disruption or complaints from employees & customers on a regular basis, they most likely would have told him to remove their company name from his profile or his job could be in jeopardy with any future complaints.
Is my HR experience typical? I have no idea, but I know we’d be loathe to fire a good employee over a one time incident that seemed out of character.
LTL FTC:
But has anyone retreated to that? I have the impression that we all agree that Nolan should not have done what he did, and probably pretty much all of us would agree that Ford is abrasive and often crosses the line between possibly productive and probably unproductive.
I pretty much agree with all of this. (Just pointing out some common ground, since this discussion has become increasingly acrimonious and frustrated/frustrating.)
For instance, reference one of pillsy’s examples…
pillsy:
…I think that the officers acted completely properly, and the professor behaved poorly and at the same time, I understand exactly why the professor thought their behavior was improper. That disconnect is probably one of the most powerful things working against agreement (and therefore solutions) on issues like that. The push to get her fired was asinine, and correctly rejected.
LTL FTC:
Meh. It’s a theory. I’m willing to consider other theories. Also, I explicitly excluded you from it. What exactly was I evading?
If we’re talking about whether the response was proportionate or not, clearly it matters what weight we give to the impact of various actions. It’s suggestive that all the women present give considerably more weight to the meaning and impact of Nolan’s action than do those I named and, apparently, you.
Tamme:
Yes, but, equally, we should not assume that Meriton acted completely and solely on the one known complaint. Because, frankly, it does seem a little weird that on the basis of that one act (however you characterize it) he lost his job. It does make me wonder why.
If we assume that it was the only incident, I’m inclined to think that Nolan should not have been fired, if for no other reason then because absent a compelling reason I think progressive training and discipline is generally good practice, for a variety of reasons, one of which is proportionality. But I also don’t think the incident should have been ignored by Meriton, for the reasons articulated by La Lubu and Kate and others. He’s in a position of power over the people living in his building, and I wouldn’t want someone like that to have a key to my living space, either. Also, the other people employed by the business have a legitimate interest in his public behavior when it has an impact on their own livelihoods.
All that said, it was Meriton’s call, not Ford’s. Expanding on the info available, I could construct a scenario in which no one involved behaved well. I would still like to know what it is that all the people excoriating Ford would suggest that she do in response to actions like Nolan’s, except that it has become clear that no one has an answer. Which means we’re left with the situation as it exists: Ford must choose, in each case, between doing nothing and taking an action which her critics say amounts to ruining Nolan’s life.
Grace
Jake,
Just to throw in my two cents, I agree with your assessment re: Nolan’s firing. In my experience, it costs a company a lot of money to fire and rehire someone, based on lost productivity. I don’t know what your company is like, but at my firm it’s typical for new hires to need about one to three months with lots of hand holding before they’re really up to speed. My bias is to think that Nolan’s employer wouldn’t have cut him loose unless he was already fairly marginal. I don’t see star employees – or heck, even average ones – fired for a single screw up, unless it’s completely egregious. But I’ve seen plenty of occasions where an employee with a dismal track record was let go over a relatively minor mistake; it wasn’t a hair-trigger firing, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
I don’t know whether my experience is typical either.
Desipis:
And you don’t see how not mentioning women’s experience of monogamy is the same thing as minimizing/trivializing/dismissing? That right there is a large part of the problem.
Grace, “I don’t think it’s gender. I think it’s sympathy. The women largely have sympathy because we’ve been there or can easily see ourselves being there. Many of the men have sympathy because they’ve seen the patterns the women are describing and don’t discount them. And then there’s the rest of the men, who don’t apparently conceive of the pervasive sort of abuse we’re describing, who just can’t see themselves in our shoes, but who can very easily, apparently, see themselves in the shoes of a hotel manager who posted “slut” on someone’s Facebook page.”
I don’t think it is just sympathy. It seems to me to have a large dose of self-protective vindictiveness. That vindictiveness is seen in the quick trivializations about how serious losing a job is and the willingness to speculate wildly about other horrible things that Mr. Nolan ‘must have done’ because apparently no one can imagine having a bad day where you say too much. It is seen by the how strongly and indiscriminately people here conflate what he actually did with the many other men who did worse to Ms. Ford. It seems to me this is mixed in with a lack of sympathy of the possibility of being an embarrassment to your employer such that it firing you is the easy way out. This lack of sympathy is especially evident in such comments as pillsy’s “I think that if someone tried to get me fired for, say, “anti-police” comments, I could rely my actual comments to convince my employer that firing me over them would be stupid.”
You also may be underestimating the strength of self-selection. To take an example away from the current topic–about 75% of people (both men and women) think that 3rd trimester abortions should be strictly outlawed unless the mother will be gravely injured by carrying the fetus to term. What do you think the chances are that even 25% of the people here would agree? And even if you could get 10% to agree that it was morally wrong, would they agree to make it illegal? I suspect at least half of those here who think it was wrong would say that the government can’t be trusted with the decision even then.
This board isn’t representative of common thinking on a lot of issues. And that is a great thing. We can find support for minority opinions. We can talk about them in a relatively safe way. We can find nuance in areas that would be difficult to discuss with someone who wants to vote for Ben Carson or with someone who wants to violently destroy all our cities in the hopes for a post capitalist world. But you can’t automatically assume that a shared insight here, is a broadly representative insight.
You ask, what should we do? Broadly, a lot of what Ms. Ford is doing is exactly right. The idea of “would your mother be proud of you saying this” is useful. The idea of avoiding shame about unearned labels is great. The idea of exposing the amount of crap that women have to go through on a daily basis is good. Even naming the worst of the harassers is fine–though going after mere targets of opportunity smacks of collective punishment.
“Vindictiveness”—about women, reams of words about women, —-and still not ONE word about the men who do this. Not one.
Somebody’s vindictive, all right, but it ain’t the women.
Setting aside the fact that some of us here actually are representative of “common thinking” primarily because we fit the demographic average and thus have the life experiences of the demographic average…..I find it less productive to speak of “common thinking” and more productive to speak about common behavior. At any given moment, unless a person goes to some trouble to make clear what his or her thinking is, we can’t assume a person’s thoughts—we can observe his or her behavior.
And across racial, ethnic, religious, social class, sexual orientation, political views, and many other vectors—-women avoid doing business with institutions and persons whom we identify as sexist when possible. Not “sexist” according to the lingo du jour in elite university environments; “sexist” according to the common experience of everyday sexism. We can’t avoid this shit most of the time. We really can’t. We live our entire lives “sucking it up and dealing” because there isn’t an alternative. So those opportunities when we can? We take them.
So my question to you is: how much business and damage to its reputation does a company have to experience before firing someone who ought to have more common sense given his or her (in this case, his) position? I worked for a company that fired a guy (actually, laid off—the company didn’t attempt to deny him unemployment benefits) because he made a comment in a crowded elevator to a random woman about how the cold day made her nipples hard when returning from lunch (so, technically not done on “company time”). She and other women complained, and he had his layoff check within two hours. The job in question was a publicly-funded project in a public building; the women were public employees.
Now, I suppose this guy could have filed a grievance regarding when he made the comment. Having been a steward (but not on that job), I suspect he would have lost based on the company policy he signed at the time of hire on sexual harassment and other discriminatory language.
Question: do you think the contractor was wrong in this instance? That they should have stood for the principle of “free speech” of that of their employee, who was merely making a political statement about the condition of
the worldher nipples, even at the cost of other future lucrative contracts? Mind you, had he not been removed from the job, this would have went up the chain at the public institution, which is also legally obligated to prevent sexual harassment to their employees, including from contracted employees.Grace:
When people criticise the death-penalty, is it because they lack sympathy for murder victims and their family? Or that they lack sympathy for the suffering of drug addicts and their families in countries were drug possession can lead to the death penalty?
When people criticise three-strike laws, is it because they lack sympathy for victims of violent crimes?
When people think its barbaric to cut off someone’s hand as a punishment for theft, is it because they lack sympathy for people who’ve had their property stolen?
RJN:
The particular flavour of online insult wasn’t significant to my argument, so no, I don’t see not explicitly focusing on the characteristics of that flavour as somehow minimizing/trivializing/dismissing the problem of obnoxious comments that share such characteristics.
desipis, you’re talking about “people”. I’m pointing out a stark difference in response between two different classes of people.
I seem to have touched a nerve, here. I don’t know what to do to salve your hurt without lying; to me, your posts strongly suggest a lack of sympathy for what many women, and certainly Ford, experience online. We mention it, you discount it. Richard points out its relevance, you declare its insignificance.
Over and over again, we point out a difference in women’s experience, and you elide it as though it doesn’t exist.
I’ll concede that it’s possible that you’re very sympathetic to women and wish we weren’t treated the way we generally are, online. But I’m not seeing it in what you’re posting. At best, it seems to take a back seat to every other consideration. Which, you know, fine. You are free to prioritize your opinions as you see fit. But you will probably find that you don’t get much credit for the things which end up near the bottom of the list.
Grace
Two things:
It wasn’t that long ago that “free speech” was invoked as the reason sexual harassment laws should not be passed; that argument stated that the burden of finding another place of employment rightfully belongs to those receiving harassment, not giving it.
Further, heavily implied in the assertion that Meriton was wrong to make the business decision to fire Nolan, is the idea that individual customers, business associates, and/or other employees should have to suck it up and deal with verbal harassment for the greater principle of free speech. That anyone who makes a personal decision to cease doing business with a company that tolerates racist and/or sexist behavior that is implicitly associated with that company, is somehow an enemy of free speech for doing so.
People losing their job for holding opinions their boss doesn’t agree with is not common. People losing their jobs (or not getting hired, or not getting equal pay or opportunities, etc) because of race or gender is—even with existing civil rights laws in place, fairly common. Yet the people experiencing this uneven playing field are the ones expected to take one for the team? Because our humanity is not the greater principle? Bah.
Companies only perform discipline in these instances because of the costs associated with not doing so. Period. They are not enforcing ideological purity, they are responding to customers who reject the actual or potential-but-likely experience of being grossly disrespected and paying for that ‘privilege’.
La Lubu said:
This is 100% true. Meriton’s worst case scenario here is a bunch of people quietly removing their patronage and recommending the same to their family/friends causing a loss in profit. It is NOT a media storm. There is nothing they can really do about the first scenario, and they may not even be aware of it until some time in the future when the precipitating event is forgotten. If someone in my apartment’s management company thinks it is A-OK to publicly jump into a verbal misogynistic dogpile, I would be uncomfortable with them holding my keys. Sexism aside, it shows really poor judgement and impulse control. Not something I want for a position that requires a level of trust.
I think it is telling that Meriton did the firing, while Ford is taking the heat. As far as I am aware, all she did was point out Nolan’s behavior to Meriton and then express her happiness about his job loss. Whatever chilling of free speech is occurring is being done by Meriton.
The analogy used previously of sitting on the porch to Facebook works reasonably well. If a man calls a woman a slut on his own porch, few people would care enough to comment to anyone else if they overheard while passing by. When a man walks up to someone else’s porch after overhearing a conversation and then calls her a slut, that is something else. When you barge in on a stranger’s porch (or social media site) and do something really stupid, you don’t get to whine about what your stupidity has wrought. Free speech doesn’t mean you get to impose your speech on others without consequence.
I think firing Nolan was a bit over the top for Meriton, but I am not too worked up about it. I find it highly unlikely that this was the only incident on a sparkling employee record, but even if it was, I don’t think Ford is to blame here. I have no problem with how Ford handled the incident, even if I wouldn’t necessarily do it myself.
Grace:
Perhaps that’s because you’re part of a subculture that expects the ritualistic proclamation of sympathy for women (e.g. RJN’s comment @ 178), while I’m not.
Desipis:
And so I guess I don’t have very much more to say to you about this.
What subculture would that be, desipis? Cops? (IIRC, Grace is a police officer.)
desipis:
But, in reality… no.
That men and women are treated differently online is of central importance to this discussion. You don’t want it to be, but it is. It’s not ritual, it’s not genuflection, it’s not proclamation; it is an essential understanding which you must have before you can come to grips with the totality of the events we’re talking about, or not alienate people you want to talk to. Until you get that, people are going to start deciding to walk away from discussion with you, the way it sounds like Richard just did, because they have better things to do with their time.
Grace
La Lubu:
Gynocentric feminism and/or chivalric conservatives. It’s a classic case of horseshoe theory in action.
Grace:
Different? Yes. Society telegraphs quite loudly that women are sexually vulnerable, so when arseholes are, well, arseholes to people who they see as women, they will exploit that vulnerability.
But when I look at the evidence and listen to the stories from a diverse range of people, I see that online harassment, insults, threats and obnoxious comments are a pattern of behaviour that everyone is at risk of becoming victim to on the internet, regardless of the gender. It’s not something that has an overwhelming gender bias. Men are attacked as well and men are harmed as well; it just happens in a different ways.
If you want to convince me (or others) otherwise, you’re going to have to do better than making moralistic assertions or just walking away from the conversation. But I guess it’s up to you if you want to spend time doing so, or whether you are interested in having conversations with people who don’t pre-emptively agree with your view of the world.
No, we offer the alternative of life in prison.
Yes, I’d say that is about lack of sympathy for drug addicts and their families. I would suggest that treatment or 24-7 sobriety programs are a better alternative.
No, we criticize them because they apply to all felonies, including things as minor as writing a bad check. But, no one is proposing ending punishment at all for violent crimes. We still support alternatives, like shorter sentences.
No, we just think that compensating the person for their loss and sending the person to jail for some time is a better alternative.
[edited to add – the key word in each of my responses is “alternative”, which I tried to bold, but it doesn’t look like that worked}
From the article you linked to:
Do these forms of harassment sound equivalent to you?
This is unfair – it’s hardly likely Grace would be here on this blog, contributing frequently, if she wasn’t interested in conversations with people who don’t share her view of the world.
Also, even if she does decide she’s not interested in further conversation with you, it’s illogical to conclude that she’s not interested in conversations with [people who disagree with Grace]. It’s possible to decide that a particular conversation with a particular person is fruitless, even if in general one is open to discussions with people one disagrees with.
desipis:
Yup.
Because if I walk away from the conversation after 190 comments, there’s the proof! There it is! It’s proven that I am not interested in having conversations with people with different views. Because you are the stand-in for ALL THE PEOPLE. It’s you, forever, or no one and nuthin’.
Grace
desipis:
Huh. I can’t imagine why you’re not having a more productive conversation here.
To be fair, you did surprise me. I expected “SJW”.
Grace:
If you had said that this particular conversation wasn’t going anywhere and had ceased being worthwhile, I probably would have agreed with you. But you didn’t. You made a generalised comment about how a particular understanding needed to be accepted or else people would walk away from discussions.
Ugh depsipis you aren’t making it easy to be [broadly speaking] on your side when you deny the obvious–that women on average experience a different level and character of harassment than men. Gay people on average experience a different level and character of harassment than straight people. Black people than white people. Your argument doesn’t depend on denying obvious truths, so when you deny obvious truths you weaken everything.
I’m going to take a step back in terms of focus, not because I believe we are out of things to say about the case, but because we may be out of listening.
A big part of this discussion seems to touch on but never directly address the approaches of demonizing vs. humanizing when it comes to trying to change societal ills. Nearly all of the concern about women responding in these situations seems to be that demonizing the oppressor is the only solution, while in my experience humanizing the oppressed ends up being much more effective.
2 examples:
Gay people. Purely eyeballing it through my experience I would say that humanizing gay people has done more for gay rights than demonizing fag-bashers ever has. Coming out as regular people is what won gay acceptance. Ellen on TV is that strategy. And in even in cases where there were bad people involved (Matthew Shepherd comes to mind) the most wide spread productive impulses from non-gay people seem to have come from sympathy. And to that extent, I understand the calls for “ritualistic proclamations of sympathy”. The problem is that they seem ritualistic, which isn’t at all the same as humanizing.
Muslims. This is an interesting case because there really are some demons worth demonizing, but they are a very small percentage of the total Muslim population. The accepted approach here is to demonize the very small percentage of deeply radicalized jihadists, but to humanize the rest of the Muslim population so that we and they can learn to live together better. So generally we try to demonize the true jihadists and punish them severely, while trying to de-radicalize other Muslims by making it clear they can be accepted in some ways (though some changes in behavior may be necessary).
In this thread, it seems to me like there is an actual harm (women’s treatment in internet forums) for which true demonization of very bad actors is appropriate. If you threaten a woman with rape, or stalk her and tell her to sit on knife so she can’t have sex or children, demonization and punishment seems like it will make sense as part of a balanced strategy to get that to change. But for the more run of the mill man who makes throw away comments humanization is probably a better part of the strategy.
Grace, when you ask “what should women do” you are asking a question similar to “what should we do about Muslims and terrorism”. The answer is similar. We should severely punish and demonize the very bad offenders while reaching out to and humanizing the more moderate people who might not be currently or very firmly on our side.
Now of course the analogy is imprecise. Jihadist terrorism is much less frequent than mid-grade internet harassment. But the fact that misogyny is more prevalent makes it even more important to use humanizing tactics–you will be trying to hit too many people with demonization tactics for it to be effective. Terrorism is real, and finding the hard core jihadists to punish them is hard. But that doesn’t mean that when you have an unpleasant confrontation with a Muslim man who says “Allahu Akbar” at the end of your argument that it is appropriate to try to follow him home and give the police his address to investigate him for terrorism. That’s true even if it is also true that the police should independently decide not to listen to you. (Especially because they know the fallout for wrongly fail to investigate an actual terrorist is huge, so they are more likely to overreact to minor hints).
Internet bullying is real. When you find some of the really bad offenders you should demonize them and punish them. With the vast majority however, humanization techniques work better. If you try to demonize too many people you end up increasing radicalizing parts of the middle rather than ostracizing the extreme.
The reason why this case is troubling to me from the “what do we do about harassment” point of view, is that it looks like you are hitting the wrong target with the wrong approach. The discussion on Alas made it worse because a large number of people seem to be ok with transitioning the punishment for truly awful behavior from one person onto merely bad behavior on another merely because the cumulative effect of the really bad people was so awful that someone needed to be punished even if you couldn’t find the really bad people.
From this way of looking at things there still may be disagreement about issues:
1. Is harassment of women a real thing? [Everyone agrees yes]
2. Is it different and worse than for men? [Everyone but desipsis agrees yes]
3. Should women just put up with it? [I think everyone agrees no]
4. Are there truly evil harassers who need to be demonized and severely punished? [Everyone agrees yes]
5. Are they always easy to find? [Everyone agrees no]
6. Is losing your job a very severe punishment for something? [Surprisingly to me there seems a lot of disagreement].
6a. Is losing your job an appropriate response for calling someone a slut off the job? [Contested and weirdly not as related to 6 as I would have thought].
7. Is calling someone a slut off the job likely to mean that you are one of the truly evil harassers who needs to be demonized and severely punished? [Strongly contested].
8. Is calling someone a slut off the job likely to mean that you harass women enough that we should assume without further evidence that you do it on your job? [Many on this thread seem willing to make that assumption].
9. Is a company likely to fire an otherwise good employee over a high profile shitstorm about them calling someone a slut off the job especially if it is directly linked to their facebook page? [Contested, but I’m surprised. The answer seems so clearly Yes that I suspect ‘unusually good job’ privilege from people who don’t agree].
10. Is it ok to over-punish someone for a lesser offense if he is part of a group which makes more serious offenses in order to try to send a message to that group? [Contested].
I went on too long. Short version, on the topic of “what should people do” I tend to think that demonization techniques should be reserved for the true demons.
[random thought–maybe effective demonization/humanization techniques don’t translate easily onto the internet. I don’t know what that would mean if true.]
Jane Doh:
I think it is telling that Meriton did the firing, while Ford is taking the heat.
The other thing about this is, if you REALLY want there to be a norm that we don’t fire people over out-of-work speech, making the outcry TO MERITON about firing this employee just as bad as the outcry over the employee making a sexist remark will change Meriton’s self-interested calculation so that there’s no benefit to them for firing Nolan (IF that is the only reason they’re firing him. If they were waiting for an excuse, the outcry would have to be worse, not just as bad.) Focusing your criticism on Ford and not Meriton means that Ford absorbs the consequences and Meriton does not, giving them no incentive to be less hasty about firing people.
Sebastian:
the willingness to speculate wildly about other horrible things that Mr. Nolan ‘must have done’ because apparently no one can imagine having a bad day where you say too much.
If it were just a case of Nolan writing “slut” in reaction to her initial opinion rather than getting that particular screenshot, then going on her page to tell her “slut” with that screenshot, maybe. The way it played out, and the fact that Nolan wasn’t worried about it being under his real name with his real employer connected to it, makes me think he’s probably having some of those “bad days” at work, too, since he’s not even being prudent about how he chooses to express his bad behavior. I don’t KNOW that he’s done so, but it certainly seems more likely than not. If you think it’s “speculating wildly” to think that someone who is imprudently expressing misogynistic opinions online has probably not safely kept his sentiments in an online bubble… well, that seems a bit naive.
10. Is it ok to over-punish someone for a lesser offense if he is part of a group which makes more serious offenses in order to try to send a message to that group? [Contested].
The relevant part to me is more “if the alternative is no consequences at all”. I’m not even sure that that’s definitely what I would do, but I don’t think I can judge someone for making that choice.
Sebastian H, thanks for a thoughtful and interesting comment. I agree with you that in the long run, humanization of the oppressed group works better than demonization of the oppressors. This is what non-violent political demonstration seeks to achieve. But the benefit is very much in the aggregate, while the cost is paid very individually. That’s why non-violent political organization seeks numbers; everyone still benefits in the aggregate, but the costs are shared, and other benefits accrue — for instance, individuals within the community experience lateral support from other members of the community.
Certainly the progress that LGB rights have made in my memory have come precisely because more and more people came to understand that they knew an LGB person, and that they were people, just like everyone else. Bi equality is lagging a bit because of bi erasure. Trans equality still lags behind in part because we are a smaller population, and so, fewer people know us. A lot of what I do to try to achieve equal rights for trans people is simply visibility. I participate in panel discussions. I talk to medical staff at local hospitals. And what I say is important and worthwhile, but it’s not as important as showing up and having any conversation at all, so that they know that I’m trans and that I don’t match the boogeyman which our society attached to that word, in their heads.
That’s part of what the Trans Day of Remembrance does. A lot of trans people aren’t comfortable with it, don’t like the focus on death, but what it does really effectively is bring a bunch of people together, many of them trans, so that people can see us, mourning peacefully, naming the people who have been murdered for the sake of gender conformity. It’s a way of asserting to the broader culture that we are here, that we come in all shapes and sizes and classes and professions and colors and what-have-you, and we are not what people fear, and that fear matters because sometimes when people feel it they kill us.
But that visibility takes time and physical energy and emotional energy. It takes work and energy to stay positive in the face of someone in my church community who hasn’t thought it through saying that people should use the bathrooms which match their genitals. It takes work to stay positive when an old drunk guy looks you up and down, smirks, and says comfortably, “Faggot.” (These examples are not hypothetical.) And those costs are largely paid individually.
I have sometimes said that it’s like carving sandstone with your bare hands. You can wear it away, and work it with your fingernails, but after awhile your hands will get raw and your fingernails will get worn, and you’ll have to stop, or you’ll end up bleeding. So, you can do a lot over time, but in any given short span, you can only do so much without injury. And maybe calluses build up over time, if you do it right, and your body responds that way. It’s idiosyncratic.
So effective humanization is very much grass-roots and hard to do. Over the Internet, I think it’s much harder to do, for the same reason that it’s so much easier to be rude to someone over the Internet. Our ape brains, optimized for in-person communication, are free to dismiss the person on the Internet as not real. We have no immediate feedback, no induced discomfort from having caused another human being discomfort.
I disagree with your “find the terrorist” analogy. I don’t think that works. Terrorists happen on the rough order of one-in-a-million. People willing to rape are orders of magnitude more common than that, and people willing to say something like the “sit on a knife” comment are probably more common still. We have the rapist prevalence from the Lisak studies and the other studies which followed it, and it works out to about 1 in 20.
I’ve worked at a place where upper-level management took an “eliminate the bad apples” approach. Clearly you have to hunt and take down terrorists, and you can be pretty focused about it, but that approach works a lot less well, and has more collateral damage, when “terrorist” is a sizeable minority of the group.
I’m reminded of this:
Based on this discussion, there appears to be no moderate course of action. Ford could either do nothing, or do something which might get Nolan fired. A similar-but-worse thing happens in societies where law enforcement is nonexistent or uncaring; people take matters into their own hands and there are generational blood feuds. I think our societies definitely need some way to make peaceful revolution possible. Certainly Facebook is falling down on the job, by telling Ford that someone telling her to sit on a knife so she can’t have children is not a violation of their community standards.
I’m not demonizing Nolan. I think he acted like an ass, but decent people can act like asses once in awhile and still be basically decent. The old background check adage is “the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior”. On that basis, and knowing nothing else about him, I’m not inclined to think well of him, but I don’t think he’s evil.
Do asses deserve to lose their jobs? Sometimes, yeah. Which is why I’m not losing sleep about Nolan losing his. It sucks. I’ve been laid off before and had to work five part-time jobs to make ends meet and move a long distance on my own dime to take a temp position which got dissolved two months later. On that level, I sympathize with him. It sucks.
So does the position Ford’s in. It’s a lousy situation all around. Sure would be nice if there were a positive way out of it.
Grace