If I’ve learned anything over the last week, it’s that there are two opposing factions that slaver at the bit to attack us feminists for different kinds of slip-ups — or perceived slip-ups, rather. There’s the “free speech” crowd who think that freethought means you should be free to use whatever racial, sexual or other slurs you want while making your arguments, who will scream and yell and build controversy over your banning them as disingenuous asses. There is, at the same time, another faction who will taunt and misconstrue and manufacture controversy over any perceived instance of being “mean”.
People like me — people who both condemn folks for using sexist slurs repeatedly and with impunity, but at the same time are willing to call people names when I get emotional — are stuck in the middle of both groups. I look like a tasty target to both sets of people because I appear to be a hypocrite. And surely I am! I mean, how could I possibly advocate not using certain insulting words when I’m willing to use other insulting words?
It’s rather easy to sort this out, of course. Though it does take a bit of intellectual honesty. And probably more patience and empathy than a certain class of reader has to hir credit.
I will readily admit that I can be a hothead. I say things that are rather impolitic, too often for my own good. In this way, I will on occasion accidentally incur splash damage to folks I really want to support. I do try to limit these occasions, but they still happen. They will continue to happen. And I will correct and amend as necessary. I am human, after all. I have emotions too. And no matter how new to this game I am, it’s my own job to win people over to my causes, and in that way, I can be my own worst enemy. Of course, there are certain folks who really want to amplify any self-inflicted damage, and who would never be won over to the specific causes I advocate, but at the same time, I’m no saint. So I can’t complain, only attempt to improve.
The concept of splash damage is a term of art both for warfare and for gaming. When you throw a grenade at a target, if your allies are near that grenade when it goes off, they’ll be damaged too, even if they weren’t the intended target. In Dungeons and Dragons, big spells or dragons’ breath will do more damage to more people than just the focal point because the attacks have range to them. People on the outskirts of that range will take less damage — “splash” — than they would if they were at the epicenter. Video games imported the concept pretty heavily, and RPGs like World of Warcraft will often include area of effect attacks that do splash damage to people semi-distant from the centre. A few games make sure that this splash damage was also done to your allies. This is why in debating we refer to accidentally hurting one’s friends instead of one’s enemies as “splash damage”.
When this happens — as it did so recently when, by my rather oblique suggestion that DJ Grothe’s bringing up his homosexuality as a shield might actually be a tell that he thinks he can’t possibly be a bad ally to women, I unintentionally stepped on the meme that “homosexuals are more likely to be misogynist” (the tl;dr of this controversy is right here) — I will readily apologize and refocus my original attack.
The reason that I do this is, while I do not under any circumstances want to retract the original statement — in this case, that DJ really needs to walk back his claim that harassment victims merely “regret” their “sexual exploits” — I likewise don’t want to hurt others (e.g. gays) in general. Homosexuals were absolutely not my target, nor would they ever be under any circumstances. I am neither a homophobe nor a pig-fucker, regardless of what accusations some trolls trump up. My arguments about DJ, and those arguments about the intersection between his treatment of women and his sexuality, are separate and distinct, and I recognized that I only had the appropriate position to make one observation and not the other. That is why I apologized, and what I apologized for.
Trolls latch onto this sort of thing though. It’s all too easy to read “he apologized for one thing, but continued attacking on another” as a not-pology — a way of saying “I’m sorry that you felt that way” rather than “my behaviour was incorrect and I’ll correct it now”. It doesn’t matter if that’s a wild misinterpretation that takes someone already primed to be uncharitable to perceive. So, the trolls attack and mischaracterize, and “big names” who believe the original argument to be incorrect for other reasons (like antipathy toward feminism) amplify — because they see it as proof that there is no actual argument to be had.
These trolls tend to think that because the person making the argument is angry, they have the upper hand in the fight — that one could easily dismiss someone who got passionate about something as being irrational. They think they can derail the situation over and over again. They want us to be talking about ANYTHING but my original point. But as I said in that apology post’s comments, I’m actually okay with their derail strategy. It gives me a chance to repeat my arguments.
But there’s one thing that’s true, no matter how much the trolls go after me. When I advocate for social change, when I advocate that certain behaviours are terribly antisocial and the people engaging in those behaviours despite repeated requests to stop should be excluded from the dialog, and yet I’m willing to use base, non-gendered, non-slur insults like “douchebag” in the course of my arguments, I am actually being entirely consistent. Sure, one set of trolls or another will ebb and flow, either dismissing me for being too mean, or taunting me that this is what I get for my nuanced view of what you should and shouldn’t say.
The thing is, it’s never been about “being nice”. My refusal to put up with people who make sexist slurs or gay slurs or racist slurs as a matter of course in “adult discussion” about topics does not undercut my ability and my right to get really angry about topics that matter — it was never a milquetoast demand that we all just get along. When I need to rhetorically slap someone in the face whom I think is normally reasonable but has a terrible blind spot, as I feel with DJ Grothe and his treatment of women working to make the movement less safe for harassment, and his terrible inability to communicate (yes, despite his use of only polite words), I will absolutely use non-oppressive terms like “douchebag”. No group of people is undercut by it save those I’m actually targeting, and the term does have a specific meaning: a douche is a device intended for use for “cleaning” vaginas, despite the fact that no such cleaning is necessary, and we have good evidence that it actually hurts the owners of said vaginas. As a commenter pointed out, it’s not even limited to those folks who have vaginas, as an anal douche, meaning it applies across all sexes, genders, and cis or trans status. My use of the term “douchebag” is only oppressive to people who think they’re doing certain underprivileged classes — like women — a favour, but are in actuality hurting them. It is widely used in feminist discourse in this manner. It is, also, a very apt descriptive for what DJ is doing.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think DJ is intentionally misogynistic — I don’t think he fits the dictionary definition of “hates women”. I believe he has a personal bete noir in feminism, which is why he so readily threw feminist bloggers under the bus as provoking fights and being intentionally controversialist and trying to tear the skeptical movement apart (as though no one but feminists were required for that). I believe he is absolutely terrible at communication, in that he cannot simply answer specific points made by specific people but instead has to ramble on and on, turning comments into essays worthy of top-level blog posting and doing all sorts of splash damage himself. I believe that DJ has a huge blind spot to the fact that his one axis of underprivilege does not inform him on other axes of privilege, considering how dismissive he’s been of women’s concerns and how intractable he’s been on this point. And I especially believe that nuanced argumentation has its place in discourse.
I also believe that when someone over a very long time frame refuses to engage those nuanced arguments, the use of non-oppressive insults is fully warranted.
I believe all this because I understand that the revolution will not be polite, so I have no misapprehension that I need to be polite to do damage where it needs to be done. I will not “be nice” when people are douchebags to women in general, no matter how good of people they might be otherwise. I will be furious. I will mix my argumentation with exactly the amount of vitriol I feel. It is part of my honest reaction. I wouldn’t ever argue so long and so hard about something if I wasn’t passionate. One must NOT always be nice. One must take care not to do damage to people that are not your targets, but one must not try to civilly and cooly debate the issue that a whole class of people have been dealt an attack.
To that end, I reiterate: DJ Grothe, you’ve acted like a douchebag to women.
You asked why they weren’t coming to TAM, and speculated that it was because of all those terrible nasty female bloggers scaring people away. You went on to call the women reporting harassment engaging in “locker room talk” and “regretful” of “sexual exploits”. These are actively damaging, bullying and diminishing sentiments. They have no place in this discourse and absolutely merit the label of “acted like a douchebag to women”.
If you are insulted by my assessment of these actions, perhaps you could consider the fact that I and many others would desperately love to see you apologize to all the women bloggers and all the harassment victims that you expressly did NOT apologize to for those remarks. Yes, I’m aware that you apologized to Rebecca Watson, but you doubled down on all the rest by maintaining that there are people expressly trying to foment controversy.
Here I am, then. I’m fomenting controversy.
If that’s what it takes to get your attention, here’s the controversy right here. DJ, apologize for being a douchebag to women. You’ve apologized to Rebecca, surely you can apologize to others. That action would do very much to build bridges and repair the fallout from this situation.
Here’s what an apology looks like, for reference. State what you did wrong, why it was wrong, and apologize for those actions. If you want to refocus your attack, that’s fine. Just don’t refocus it on these people who do not deserve it. Refocus it instead on those people who are driving this war against the very idea of having a harassment policy.
I, and others, have at great lengths told you what you did wrong, and how you failed miserably at apologizing for those wrongdoings. If you have any intention of building bridges, of being the better person, apologize for those transgressions.
The moment you do, I’ll apologize for not being nice.