Iris Vander Pluym Iris Vander Pluym's Blog, salon

Andrew Sullivan: FREE SPEECH™ of straight white d00ds dooooomed by evil feminists.

Portrait of Andrew Sullivan

by Iris Vander Pluym
oil on canvas, 30 ft. x 50 ft.
$10 million

[TRIGGER WARNING: discussion of sexist, racist and other problematic language.]

Friends, I am sorry to report that FREE SPEECH™ is, for all intents and purposes, dead. And not just in Dawkinsland either, where Richard and his fellow…what's the word?… "rationalists" I believe they call themselves, are at this very moment cowering in abject fear of no exaggeration witch hunts, actual Inquisitions and literal Orwellian Thought Police. As I'm sure we can all imagine, that is exactly what it is like being rebuked for saying factually wrong or long-debunked shit on Twitter—or worse, being informed that you've just said something harmful to people who are not you. Can you even imagine? Thankfully, Dawkins & Co. keep on bravely fighting the good fight for FREE SPEECH™ for all of us, by brilliantly deploying the tried-and-true tactic of repeating rape culture tropes that have plagued sexual assault victims for millennia. THOUGHT EXPERIMENTIN'! BREAKIN' TABOOS! PHILOSOPHIZIN'! 'SPLAININ' LOGIC! If that doesn't make feminists shut the fuck up, surely nothing will. I mean, what is the point of even having FREE SPEECH™ if other people are going to actually criticize things you say?

But this terrifying campaign of violent censorship has now gone far beyond even that. Andrew Sullivan, "conservative-libertarian" columnist, reports with alarm that "The SJWs Now Get To Police Speech On Twitter." For the uninitiated, "SJW" stands for Social Justice Warrior, i.e., a person who advocates for equality and against bigotry and oppression with respect to race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. (Believe it or not, SJW is actually meant as derogatory slur.) So what exactly are these jack-booted thugs doing to end FREE SPEECH™ on Twitter?

Well, a group called WAM! (Women, Action & the Media) has just entered into a pilot program in collaboration with Twitter intended to address the epidemic of gender-based harassment and abuse plaguing the platform. The purpose is to "learn about what kind of gendered harassment is happening on Twitter, how that harassment intersects with other kinds of harassment (racist, transphobic, etc.), and which kinds of cases Twitter is prepared (and less prepared) to respond to." WAM! will work with Twitter to track the data and improve their responses. The way it works is pretty straightforward: if you're being harassed on Twitter, you fill out this form on the WAM! site. Once they verify your information, they escalate it a.s.a.p. directly to Twitter, and try to get you a quick resolution. WAM! makes clear right on the form that they can only advocate: they have neither the authority nor the ability to make decisions or take any action on behalf of Twitter.

Just to be clear: we are not talking here about hurt fee-fees because somebody tweeted something mean at me and now I haz a sad. We are talking about relentless threats of violent rape and gruesome death, some credible enough that recently at least three women have been driven from their own homes. We are talking about violations of federal law under 18 U.S. Code § 875(c), which provides that "Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both." In New York State, we are talking about a class A misdemeanor under § 120.50(3), or depending on the circumstances, possibly a class E or D felony. In a case like Zerlina Maxwell's, we are also talking about a hate crime subject to enhanced sentencing. And more to the point, we are talking about violations of Twitter's own terms of service, which Twitter itself has proven unable to enforce.

This is the FREE SPEECH™ hill that Andrew Sullivan is prepared to die on.

If you think about it, it's actually kind of shitty that a nonprofit like WAM! has to step in and do this work for Twitter (to say nothing of local, state and federal law enforcement). But to Twitter's credit, this certainly represents a step in the right direction, and one with the potential to lead to in-house reforms.

But not for Andrew Sullivan. Oh, no. He is filled with the foreboding sense that this unholy alliance between WAM! and Twitter portends the end of FREE SPEECH™ as we know it. In his mind, "Twitter has empowered leftist feminists to have a censorship field day." And Sullivan does not like these lefty-feminists one bit, no siree! So much so that he imagines—naturally based on no evidence whatsoever—that WAM!s actual Sooper Seekrit Agenda™ is ultimately enforcing "gender quotas for all media businesses, equal representation for women in, say, video-games, gender parity in employment in journalism and in the stories themselves." Gender quotas! LOL! Also: simply stating the demonstrable fact that straight, white males have overwhelmingly dominated public discourse is disparaging straight white males as a group. And sure, WAM! may say their mission is to advocate for the inclusion of more diverse and historically marginalized voices in media, but Andrew Sullivan ain't buying it: "WAM can get to advance their broader ideas about policing the speech of white straight males by this legitimizing alliance with Twitter." WAM!'s real goal, he knows, "is to police and punish others for their alleged sexism." Never mind that, again, WAM! cannot censor anything, anywhere (except their own web site). Twitter is "handing over the censorship tools to a radical activist group bent on social transformation."

Obviously, if these terrible lefty feminist censors are not stopped pronto, next thing you know straight white men will be the ones fleeing their homes in fear for their lives. Just like Richard Dawkins.

Seriously, though, the whole rant is wildly entertaining. "Instead of seeing the web as opening up vast vistas for all sorts of voices to be heard," he writes with comical cluelessness, "they seem to believe it is rigged against female voices." D00d. In case the fourth paragraph of this very blog post did not adequately demonstrate for you that the web is quite clearly "rigged against female voices," a recent Pew research study found that (a) women overall are disproportionately targeted by the most severe forms of online abuse, (b) 25 percent of young women have been sexually harassed online, and (c) 26 percent have experienced stalking.

And guess what else? Queer women, women of color, trans women and women with other marginalized identities are especially targeted and abused. Sullivan quotes WAM!'s Jaclyn Friedman:

“I see this as a free speech issue,” Friedman said. She said she knew some would see the work WAM does as “censorship,” but that a completely open and unmoderated platform imposes its own form of censorship. It effectively prevents women, especially queer women and women of color, from getting to speak on the service.

Behold, his insightful retort:

How exactly? Does Twitter prevent women of color from using the service? Or is it simply that WAM believes that women cannot possibly handle the rough-and-tumble of uninhibited online speech?

Yes, that must be it: it's feminists who believe women are delicate flowers who cannot possibly handle the "rough-and-tumble of uninhibited online speech." Like routine rape and death threats, doxxing (releasing private information such as home addresses, phone numbers, employer, etc. in order to get people to harass women offline, too), libel, hate speech, revenge porn and all sorts of other "rough-and-tumble," "uninhibited online speech" Sullivan is apparently so invested in protecting. FREE SPEECH™, y'all.

Then he says:

I can find no reason to oppose a stronger effort by Twitter to prevent individual users from stalking or harassing others –

Okay! That's fantastic. We're all on board, then.

but

Uh-oh…

if merely saying nasty things about someone can be seen as harassment,

It can't. Because that's not actually what the word "harassment" means.

then where on earth does this well-intentioned censorship end? Is it designed to censor only misogyny and not racism?

No, dear. It's designed to curtail harassment and abuse. And it's starting with misogynist harassment and abuse, albeit with an intersectional focus (racism, transphobia, etc.). FYI, the group is called Women, Action & Media.

What about blasphemy?

Let's see. I just tweeted this:

"Jeezus fookin' Christ.
That is all."
-@irisvanderpluym

I await the terrifying Feminazi Stormtroopers who will be smashing in my door any minute, and dragging me away to be burned at the stake with all the "rationalists."

Of course no one wants to prevent Andrew Sullivan or anyone else from embarrassing themselves on Twitter. I mean, what would we do around here all day without conservatives providing a steady stream of hilarious blog fodder? Unfortunately, how these nefarious evildoers at WAM! will accomplish all of their evildoing by forwarding misogynist harassment complaints to some people at Twitter is left unstated by Sullivan. But I'll definitely be bringing it up at next week's regular meeting of the White-Straight-Man-Hating Social Justice Warriors For Censorship and World Domination™.

[cross-posted at perry street palace.]

Iris Vander Pluym Iris Vander Pluym's Blog, salon

Operation Hand Sanitizer

As a lifelong student of the deadly scourge known as “conservatism,” I read with great interest a recent piece by Ezra Klein in Vox entitled Standing near hand sanitizer makes Americans more conservative. So what will Ebola do?. Klein reports on a growing mass of evidence that human social and political cultures are emergent properties of our responses to infectious disease threats—or “pathogen stress,” as the fancy lib’rul eeleet perfessers like to call it. The gist of the theory is this: through all of human history, infectious diseases have been the single greatest threat to human populations—killing more people than wars, natural disasters and noninfectious diseases combined—such that humans (like other animals) have evolved behavioral responses to avoid them. Just as our biological immune system is triggered by the presence of diseases, so too is our “behavioral immune system” activated by (perceived) disease threats in our environment. Klein gives the examples of our fear and aversion upon encountering a rat, and feeling disgusted when you get a whiff of rotten meat. It works at a surprisingly granular level, too: humans react with disgust to yellowish liquids that resemble pus, yet we remain unfazed by blueish substances of the same texture.

 

It turns out that the reaction of disgust in particular has profound moral and political implications, not just for individuals but for culture writ large. There is a well-demonstrated link between moral notions of “purity” and social conservatism, and conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals. Where this gets very, very interesting is the finding that even subtle reminders of cleanliness (or its opposite, impurity) can trigger more conservative attitudes—in anyone. In a clever set of experiments, Cornell University psychologists Erik Helzer and David Pizarro approached every ninth college student entering a campus hallway and asked them to take a quick survey about their demographics and political beliefs. Half the students were asked to “step over to the hand-sanitizer dispenser to complete the questionnaire,” and the other half were asked to “step over to the wall to complete the questionnaire” where the hand sanitizer had been removed. The researchers reported:

Participants who reported their political attitudes in the presence of the hand-sanitizer dispenser reported a less liberal political orientation than did participants in the control condition. Despite the noisy nature of the public hallway in which we collected the data, it appears as if a simple reminder of physical purity was able to shift participants’ responses toward the conservative end of the political spectrum.

The conservative effect held for fiscal, social and moral positions. Helzer and Pizarro then ran a second experiment in the lab, where half the participants were offered a hand sanitizer wipe before using the lab computers to answer a questionnaire about their moral values. Again, the researchers found that those exposed to the cleanliness cue reported significantly more conservative political attitudes than subjects who were not.

 

In other words we are pretty much meat robots, subconsciously programmed by cues in our environments. Even our most cherished and fiercely held moral and political beliefs can be profoundly affected by the circumstances in which we find ourselves. It is worth remembering that we are talking about tendencies here; these are modern manifestations of ancient survival mechanisms in a much more complex world. It’s probably a safe bet that it would require a whole lot more hand sanitizer to get some of us to vote for some berserker theocrat than it would our fellow citizens who are already well on their way to Hitlerville. Still, as research in the field has been expanding, the ramifications of the behavioral immune system are turning up everywhere. Mark Schaller  & Co. found that subjects primed to think about disease were much more prejudiced and fearful toward immigrants; in light of this, it is hardly surprising to discover that wherever there is a higher risk of infectious disease, societies tend to be more xenophobic. And it gets weirder. Randy Thornhill and Corey Fincher have found not only that societies in which pathogen-avoidant behaviors flourish are likely to coalesce into repressive and autocratic government systems, but that pathogen stress is positively correlated with "high levels of civil and ethnic warfare, increased rates of homicide and child maltreatment, patriarchal family structures, and social restrictions regarding women’s sexual behavior." [Emphasis added.]

 

That's right: patriarchy flourishes with the perceived threat of contagious diseases.

 

WHAT.

 

Naturally, this really got my beanie a-spinning. I wondered whether, in much the same way that the biological immune system can be tricked into positive action by vaccines, perhaps the behavioral immune system can be recruited to virtually eradicate the conservative pestilence infecting our nation (<—see what I did there? Hahaha.). And then it came to me in a flash: clearly what is needed here is a massive operation to get all of the hand sanitizer out of the halls of Congress and state houses across the country! After that, we can go after the hand sanitizer in the homes and offices of MRAs, Baptist clergy and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

 

Who's with me?

 

[A version of this post appeared at perry street palace.]