On Toxicity and Privilege

Recently there was a really good article titled "Just Don't Do It." It's a rebuttal to an earlier article published in Business Insider where Ellen Petry Leanse, a former Google executive, claimed women just use the word "just" too much. If only they changed their speech patterns, they could get equality with men.

Image by AZRainman.com
The rebuttal concentrates on something that the original article does not. The advice is essentially that women should learn to speak more like men. This advice isn't based on studies. There's no actual empirical evidence cited that women use "just" mainly in the ways that the Leanse cites or even that women are actually more permissive in their tone then men. Instead, it feels like it's based more on a stereotype and confirmation bias.

Furthermore, there's no proof that the suggested way to speak is actually better at accomplishing its goals or otherwise good on its own merit. It assumes that since men speak that way (assuming the underlying unsupported argument is true) and we, as a group, tend to value their contributions more, it is therefore the way everyone should be. There's a fundamental misogyny to the argument that gets missed.

Now at some point, I'm sure someone reading this is going to roll their eyes, throw their hands up in the air, and start yelling about how I then must be saying that things men do must therefore be inherently wrong and bad and I'm just one of those man haters, blah, blah, blah. If that's what you want to believe, fine, but don't let that get in the way of my point which is this: We have a lot of unexamined behaviors out there that we assume are the way things should be done mainly because it's the only way we've ever done them. That's a fallacy that's known as "appeal to tradition."

And when we use those appeals to tradition as the basis of our arguments, and I argue that's what Leanse did, we can be blind to the social forces that shaped the tradition to begin with. In this case, a culture that tends to undervalue consensus building and empathy, typically considered feminine traits, and overvalue strength and other typically masculine traits. Furthermore, the constant policing of women's language compared to the language of men reinforces a belief that it is women who are inferior and need to catch up rather than perhaps that men might need to adjust their approach in some situations if they want to get better results.

As others have pointed out, what's really happening in this discussions is that current social hierarchies are being reinforced. It's not just this case either. For instance, recently a young girl had some things to say about an author, John Green. She found his online presence creepy and wrote about it on Tumblr. While she mentioned his name, she didn't tag him into the post. Other people used that post and publicized it in an attempt to get John Green to respond, including at least one person who tagged him into the reblogs.

John Green, being human, decided to respond, in my opinion, quite poorly. Now a bunch of people are talking about how the teenage girl should have known better and the negative attention and bullying is exactly what you deserve if you post something like that about someone.

Let that sink in for a moment.

No really.

We know today that there is an epidemic of underreporting. Look at the Bill Cosby case where women waited decades before saying anything about their experiences. DECADES. What response did a lot of them get when they did come forward? Many were the same as this girl got for her post. How dare you attempt to ruin the career of someone famous? Don't make allegations you can't prove.

Now I want to be clear here, I'm not saying John Green is the sort of person she is concerned he might be. I am saying that I believe she feels this way and that, furthermore, I can understand, given the messages she likely grew up with, why she feels that way. Both The Mary Sue and Huffington Post have good posts about the young girl's point of view in this story, as well as the messaging it sends to others. There's a lot of good stuff there, but most important for this is yet again in one of these discussions, we have decided the most important thing to discuss here is how to police a teenage girl's speech. What made me especially angry were the allegations that she is why abuse victims aren't taken seriously while their own speech (both his and that of his defenders) goes unexamined. Personally, I find their speech much more damaging than hers, especially since she only talks about how she feels about his online presence and her detractors are essentially telling her not to trust her instincts which goes counter to the advice out there from people who try to combat sexual abuse of children.

This policing of language as a means of reinforcing the current social hierarchy isn't just limited to women. We see it with the attempts to silence trans people after the marriage equality ruling in the United States. We see it in the silencing people of color. It's common and it's frustrating because people are often so blind to it. When the people with less privilege attempt to speak their minds about how they see the world, their words are called toxic. But even if we, for the sake of argument, agree with that point, often the things said in response are way more toxic and, more importantly, are allowed to exist with little to no examination or reflection.

Maybe, just maybe, a lot of things called toxic aren't actually toxic; they are just uncomfortable. Maybe, just maybe, it's that reaction, driven by that uncomfortableness, that is the real toxicity. Maybe, just maybe, the people who react that way are the ones who need their behavior policed, who need to change.

UPDATE 7/8/2015:
Since I posted this yesterday, new information came to light. Multiple articles and threads I read all assumed that virjn is the person who posted the original text regarding John Green. However, further research seems to point out that a person writing as peach-pocket wrote it instead. It's hard to verify for certain because all posts from virjn are gone as is the one listed as the source of a number of people's reblogs.

Some people browsed through peach-pocket's account and highlighted posts that showed they are an adult. That's understandable but there are two issues I see. 1) They are also ignoring posts where they talk about suffering from mental illness and also feeling like they have a hard time communicating what they feel with other people and 2) the majority of comments and arguments I saw were made with the assumption that the poster was a teenage girl. That is important context to the comments made.