There’s an attitude online that, for a while, I became accustomed to, and it’s the practice of “calling people out” - for anything from a social faux-pas to mass murder. You see it in circles that have a loose sense of community, vague enough to provide an in-road for people new to mouthing off, but close-knit enough to provide a weird sense of kinship with people you’ve never met. This phenomenon isn’t restricted to one genre, either - you can find the same characteristics present in the fandom for a contemporary adaptation of Sherlock Holmes that you can on a depressingly chauvinistic men’s rights activism subreddit. The message, to an extent, is irrelevant; here, I want to focus on the attitude.
I tried to come up with a bullet-point list for what that attitude consists of, but it neglected to focus on the fact that they’re all grounded in a lack of perspective. So the men’s rights activists take a few bad encounters with women and spin it into a feminocracy; teenagers send death threats to level-headed types who stumble into their world after meeting their favourite actor in a bar; young girls construct disturbingly detailed character studies of two members of a boy band, desperately asserting that the two are in a homosexual relationship and cobra-spitting at anyone who dares to point out that what they’re doing is - hey - a little insane.
It’s not all obsessive behaviour, which is what I was originally going to call it. Believe it or not, I think you can keep a GIF-blog that focuses on the Joss Whedon show Firefly, fill it with quotes, and even talk about your One True Pairing in an alternative universe in which all of the show’s characters are tweaked to your liking… and still not be utterly mad. But doing something like that does betray a lack of perspective, because there’s a level of tunnel vision-like focus that restructures the world as something that legitimises words and phrases like “GIF-blog”, “OTP”, and - to a lesser extent - “fandom”. There’s a position on language going on here, and the attitude towards that new language is what can end up being a little ugly.
For some reason, we hate relativising linguistics. Maybe it’s because a word with colossal emotional significance for one person might be utterly inconsequential, and - removing ethical and political considerations as much as you can given a conversation of this nature - no-one likes to see people shrug off things that are a Big Fucking Deal from their own perspective.
Even more weird, though, are the isolated incidences of language and verbal attitudes that become normalised and accepted into the subcultural canon. So a man in Louisiana is attacked for not squealing his head off about Benedict Cumberbatch. The name “Larry Stylinson” is used to refer to two of the (presumably straight) members of teen boyband One Direction as partners in a gay relationship, with painstakingly-curated press shots and homosocial interview remarks to supposedly “back up the argument”. The phrase “you know nothing, Jon Snow”, is repeated so often that it burns onto the retinas of anyone who dares to look for material on Game of Thrones on Tumblr. Repetition is a big part of it, too - all conversation between two people speaking different languages starts with the foreign speaker aping the other; eventually, they learn to branch out.
I’m still not capturing the attitude, though, talking about meme obsession - there’s one more element that cements it all, and it’s contempt of people who don’t speak the language. This can range from figurative to painfully literal. There’s a recurring concept within social justice circles that it “isn’t our job to educate others” - that is, words like “cisgender”, “genderqueer”, “heteronormativity”, “patriarchy” and “privilege” as denoting cultural benefits bestowed by one’s state and status become something that a stranger to those words has to work out for themselves.
One individual I remember had a habit of linking to Google search results of the above terms - unfortunately, the vast majority of the first results for terms such as the above either obscured the definition by only using it in context, or - a little recursively - expressed frustration at people not understanding the definition, with the suggestion that they just fucking Google it.
These are the ugly fringes, but that sort of attitude bleeds into everything else. So naïve fourteen-year-olds who take hipsterish photographs of each other wearing Native American headresses get screamed at for culturally appropriating the headgear of a downtrodden people and blatantly disregarding a history of violence and poverty. Feminists - indeed, women in general - become fair game for death and assault threats. And, on the flipside, naïve young boys get lambasted for being pathetic, bloody-minded men’s rights activists when they declare their relative ignorance of the purpose of feminism, when all they likely need is a couple of years of maturity and a few more female friends. And these are the good people - not perfect, but not hateful either. Just people who don’t know the language.
One thing I’m learning as I get older is that educational genres and linguistics go hand in hand. You can’t learn a subject without learning the necessary vocabulary. The reverse isn’t true, which is where you get intellectual slip-ups; people jumping the gun without having the capacity to consider their statements. Not the will - a lot of these people think long and hard about their next words - but the capacity - the necessary knowledge to say the right thing.
I’m going to talk about Todd Akin now, the Republican Senate candidate who caused a media shitstorm for saying female victims of sexual assault had the instinctive physical ability to prevent pregnancy (false), and that this was an adequate reason to outlaw abortion (also false regardless of the conditional) at a federal level.
Let’s get this straight: that was a stupid, stupid thing to say.
And what’s worse, he said it from a relative position of power. Akin has and has had the ability to have a direct say in the running of the US government and, hence, the lives of anyone living in the United States. As much as any elected official has power, he has it, and that makes his stupidity dangerous. What it doesn’t make him, though, is evil.
I think this is the greatest flaw of clever people - in fact, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, and substitute that with reasonable people instead. They overestimate the knowledge of their adversaries. Let’s remove power from the equation. If someone less informed than you says something stupid, and says it with conviction, you don’t yell at them that they’re an idiot. You don’t call them a misogynist, woman-hating piece of shit. You don’t tell them to shut their fucking mouth and never open it again, or construct unrelated ad hominem attacks on their family. Put simply - you don’t bully them. They’re there to be privately pitied, and publicly nurtured into someone who can take the same confidence and do some good with it.
Power complicates things, but the USA is a democracy, not a totalitarian dictatorship - people like Todd Akin do not rise to power without the support of others. Really, those hundreds, thousands or millions depending on the level of importance are the real concern - Todd Akin is just the ruling mouthpiece. But focusing one’s attentions on an individual simplifies two things: it makes that position of physical authority delude others into thinking that the man has a claim to objective intellectual or moral authority (and hence can be picked apart ruthlessly if he slips up) and suggests that his position of power isn’t ultimately thanks to a much bigger crowd of morons who are harder to hate because they’re essentially faceless. Both are easy to forget, especially in a country like the USA where politicians have celebrity status. But they’re important. The education of an individual in power is nearly impossible, but the education of a group with very little power is possible with the right approach.
But educating others isn’t something that we’re interested in. When things like gender parity, the right to terminate the life of a fetus and the non-existence of God are obvious, it can be hard work to go back to square one and explain, calmly and without condescension, why they’re a better answer. That goes double in the case of audiences who aren’t receptive to your message. But consider this - John McCain, a man whose opinions are largely based on shoddy reasoning, was the only Republican candidate to speak out against waterboarding during the 2008 primary campaign, staying resolute in his conviction that it was torture - likely because he spent six years as a prisoner of war, and hence presumably has a good working knowledge of what torture is. Bill Maher is a fucking asshole who doesn’t believe that vaccinations work, but he was also one of the first public figures to warn against the re-emergence of the hardcore religious right. Tony Blair, a man who waged war against Iraq despite massive public opposition and next to no intelligence, essentially authorising the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians, also did more for LGBT rights than any previous prime minister. And Todd Akin, even if we scour his voting record and find nothing positive, is a man with a wife and kids, all of whom he presumably loves.
On the internet, you are what you say, so it’s easy to put people into a strange binary existence. Someone I know stumbled across a clip of the otherwise absurdly lovely Stephen Fry using the pejorative word “ladyboy” to describe male-to-female transsexuals; faced with this, they saw a sudden dilemma - was Fry suddenly a colossal asshole and someone to write off because of this unfortunate slip?
The answer - pretty obviously - is no, on this front. One transphobic remark - more likely motivated by a lack of direct experience and the closest reference point being a touring cabaret act called the Ladyboys of Bangkok - does not erase a lifetime of promoting mental health understanding, gay rights and environmentalism. There isn’t room for that, though, in a social justice movement that defines its “allies” in increasingly narrow terms and creates a dichotomy where every non-ally is the enemy.
Back to the title. I wanted to document the spread of this type of thinking, and there was something recently that surprised me. It was a Guardian article about a One Direction fanzine - a tangible, popular print publication sold in a number of newsagents - that had published a savage takedown of Caroline Flack, a woman who had been dating one of the band members. (You can read the article highlighting it here.) It’s ugly stuff, and unprovoked too - while we might entertain thoughts about the propriety of a relationship between two consenting people living a decade apart, the fact that it’s speculation on a private relationship should mean that we keep those thoughts to ourselves. If we accept the attitude that this group of young men belong to the fans, however, then it starts to make sense - this woman threatens the fantasies of millions of adolescent girls by making one member (perish the thought) human and open to relationships with other people, and that alone deserves punishment of the worst kind. It’s fine.
You have to be careful with this sort of stuff. As a 22-year-old man with no interest in boy bands, I’m never going to take an interest in the language of the One Direction fandom - any criticism that I level against it is necessarily going to be from the outside. But this seems straightforward - there’s a mode of thinking here that takes mean-spiritedness for granted and doesn’t think twice about it. Here’s the flipside of the call to moderation above - sometimes, rather than raging against moral wrongs, those within a certain subculture can be the ones creating those wrongs in the first place. When that happens, it’s hard to create accountability, because a rabid One Direction fan already sees a character assassination of a figure like Flack as some sort of warped moral justice - to get past it, you have to start talking about objective morality, which is awkward enough without bizarre extremes.
The best I can do is reduce it down to my opinion, however unimportant it might be: I join everyone else in saying this sort of behaviour’s unpleasant, and pathetic, and fucked up on a number of levels, but I think it’s part of a larger overall trend that says that this sort of behaviour - polarisation of attitudes, an unwillingness to communicate and compromise with the other side, no desire to learn a new language - is okay. And I don’t think it is.
No-one I know fully grasps this simple idea - that compromise and moderation should be your first instinct when you’re faced with something that you disagree with. It’s funny that The Newsroom - a show that started with a rousing call to rational behaviour - ended with the same fictional news anchor who definitely wasn’t based on Keith Olbermann yelling that the GOP had turned into the “American Taliban”.
The phrase “chill the fuck out” doesn’t really cover this sort of behaviour. An isolated period of anger is something you regret; this is more of an institutional idea, that screaming at the opposition is always okay, and that “the opposition” is a group that gets wider and wider the more your views narrow. It’s weird. I don’t like it.
One little postscript, however: all of the above ignores that it’s possible to shut yourself off from this sort of behaviour. As it happens, a lot of people with this sort of mindset - regardless of whether or not they had the confidence to act upon it - used to follow me around on the internet, and I used to engage with them on a regular basis. I don’t do that anymore. I now expose myself to certain types - mostly twenty-somethings, and mostly people who use the internet to engage in their passions and little else. I accidentally stumbled across a post about sexism in Doctor Who the other day, and for the first time it seemed (if you’ll pardon the quasi-pun) alien - talking about wanting to punch a writer in the face for bad writing was something I wouldn’t blink at in the past, but now it strikes me as a tangible and worrying threat.
And maybe that’s the thing to draw from this: we can talk about trends, and ideologies, and social change, but a lot of this comes down to exposure. I’m still aware that this sort of behaviour exists because it’s inescapable, but I used to be on the inside, just as angry and polemical as everyone else; now I feel like an outsider looking in. The internet has a stunning capacity to inform, but it’s exactly that: stunning. There’s no handy guide when it comes to filtering the things you experience when you’re staring at a screen, but that doesn’t make it impossible. And maybe, if I’m going to try and spin a positive message at the end of this hopelessly rambling piece, that’s the thing to take away - avoiding this sort of behaviour is just a case of clearing out an increasingly busy virtual back garden.