I held off for a week from commenting on the Santa Barbara shooting,
and with good reason: I was in no place to make any grand, sweeping
pronouncements about anything. I’m glad I did, and I’m also humbled and angry,
as a result. It goes without saying that
the shooting was senseless and horrific, and absolutely could have been
averted, if not avoided. While I applaud that the response time for the
ancillary concerned parties has advanced from “We had no idea he was capable of
this” to “We knew he was troubled, but we never thought he was violent,” to
finally “We were on our way over to stop him when this happened,” it’s still not
much comfort. I think the Onion’s recent stance on the issue, while bitingly satiric, is still very relevant. I’ll just
leave that right there and move on.
Instead, I want to talk about the fallout from the tragedy. The
#YesAllWomen hashtag has been a kind of wake-up call for the rest of the
Internet, and while it’s good to finally have a discussion about this, it’s
been like bricks on my head for five days as I read about all of my friends who
had these horrible experiences, and I never knew about it.
I haven’t seen hardly any of the detractor’s responses,
other than noting from other people that there seems to be a line in the sand
being drawn in the big Internet Sandbox, and again, I have to ask, who would
even want to be on the other side of the line? Mostly, I’ve just been reading,
trying to make some sense of it all. Here’s some of what I have been looking
at, and I’ll tell you what conclusions I’ve come to afterward.
Chris Roberson’s confessional polemic,
while not quite as broad shouldered as John Scalzi’s,
was very refreshing to read for its honesty. I don’t disagree with either of these guys; on the contrary, I admit my culpability in the entrenched hegemony, as well. This is something I’ve been looking at for the past
couple of years, ever since the controversy over Cosplay participants and “fake
fans” reared its head in the Geek Nation. I’ve been very mindful of it and
spoken out against “nerd-misogyny” before. But this was...too much.
 |
| One of the 1980's best worst people. Look at this guy. Now go look at the shooter, with his smirking face and his squinty eyes and his clothes and his hair and if you can't see the resemblance, I'll be very surprised. Of course, the shooter would probably admire this Douche-Nozzle for the way he handles his girlfriend, but that's not the point. |
I mean, there was something about this shooter, aside from
his disturbing resemblance to Nick from the 1985 cult classic movie Tuff Turf (a character who was also a
mentally unstable misogynist, by the way), that felt very “been there, done
that,” and by that I mean, I don’t think there’s an eleven to thirteen year old
male in America who hasn’t gone through a phase that looks something like, “One
day, I’ll be rich/powerful/famous/a porn star/have super powers, and then they’ll
all be sorry they laughed at me!” Depending on your peer group and how
quickly you discovered Dungeons and Dragons and/or masturbation, this phase can
last anywhere from ten minutes to six months.
And then we grow out of it. Most of us, anyway.
Those few guys that don’t tend to skitter backwards into the
darkness wearing their Members Only jackets and then we don’t see them too much after that. I’m not saying they aren’t there (obviously), but they become sort of
"out of sight, out of mind" for the rest of us. I think it’s scary, and sad, for
grown-up people to have those kinds of resentments and anger and rage. That is
the extent of my sympathy with any man who feels mistreated at the hands of
others. We all caught a snowball in the face. All of us. Deal with it and move
on.
What’s even scarier and sadder to me is this idea of “a
Pick-Up Artist” Community forum, wherein all of these guys who want to learn
how to “get with” women go to lick their wounds and build themselves back up
again, followed immediately by another Community Forum wherein the guys who tried this approach failed, and now they hate the Pick-Up Artists, too! Talk about victim-thinking... Amanda Hess wrote a sobering article about their response to the tragedy
and then she followed it up with why it’s so hard for men to see misogyny. Again, I have no argument for this. But as we all started to try and find a
reason for how this became a sub-culture in modern America, there were a couple of
false steps. A film critic went so far as to suggest that the comedies of Judd
Apatow were to blame for the mass murder, prompting a rebuke from both Apatow and frequent collaborator Seth Rogan.
She’s wrong, of course, but I can see that she was picking
at the edge of something. Then I read Your Princess is in Another Castle: Misogyny,Entitlement, and Nerds, by Arthur Chu and the light bulb went on. He’s dancing around the idea, as well, but he’s a
lot closer to the hows and the whys.
Here’s what I think: There is a generation of people for
whom it is difficult to discern reality from fantasy. I first noticed it years
ago, in the mid-90s, when I was watching a show on Cartoon Network and a Barbie
commercial came on that showed the doll water-skiing using the magic of
Stop-motion animation (probably actually CGI, but let’s not quibble; you know
what I mean). Flashed across the screen in the midst of this crass consumerism
was the disclaimer, “DOLL DOES NOT ACTUALLY MOVE.” Wow. I thought we’d gone
round the bend, but we were just getting started.
 |
| This? It was a Male Idyll. A fantasy. A wishful indulgence. And it was fake, and we all knew it. It was never real, and it never will be. |
We all grew up surrounded by stories. Myths. Legends. George
Washington chopped down the cherry tree and said, “I cannot tell a lie.”
Legend. Any American who works hard can pull themselves up by their boot straps
and become millionaires. Myth. “They lived happily ever after.” Stories. We are
inundated by fantasy at an early age, whether it’s that “all girls are
princesses and deserve to marry a prince,” or “Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.”
You get it as soon as they start reading stories to you. You get it as soon as
they plop you down in front of the television. You get told things, over and over
again, repeating endlessly over and over again. And it sticks, or at least, it
stays until another story takes its place. And stories that get told over and
over stop becoming stories and start to become beliefs. Truths. They become how
you see the world, instead of a way to look at the world differently. And that’s what I think is happening here.
Let’s take a benign example. We were all told that Santa
Claus is real; we all got that story. And we believed it, earnestly,
diligently, and without question, until we were, what? Six? Seven? Eight? Do
you remember how you found out? For most of us, it was the other kids. There
was always some kid who figured it out, or whose parents didn’t practice
Christmas, and they spilled the beans about Santa. Despite your mother and
father’s efforts, when you saw that enough people didn’t believe it, either,
you had to come to the conclusion that yeah, Santa wasn’t real.
So, why is there a generation that seems to have trouble
discerning fact from fantasy? How is it that there’s more people who believe in
conspiracy theories than ever? How is it that even with hundreds of thousands
of women sharing their stories, there’s people who fervently believe it’s some
sort of “feminazi plot?”
I think we can lay the blame right at the Internet’s feet.
See, when you were eight years old, your peers taught you that Santa wasn’t
real. When you were a teenager, you learned from the people around you that
life wasn’t fair, and that we all had the same kinds of problems (Okay, you might
have learned that from The Breakfast Club,
but still). We used to all watch the same news programs and have something to
discuss around the water cooler the next day. Sixty Minutes used to be a going concern. So was 20/20.
We don’t have that, now. Now we have the Internet. And while
it’s true that it brought people together and formed new friendships and
relationships and has been a major impact on art, commerce, and society, it’s
true that it also united every lone freakshow, socially retarded troglodyte,
sociopathic misogynist, and backwards-thinking assbug in the country. See the
above “Pick Up artist forums” for examples of this. Now, you’re not the only
guy in high school with no sex life. You can get online and connect with every
other trenchoated loaner in America,
where the stories they tell themselves are very different from the stories in
the real world. Or even, the real world itself.
Now, anyone with a grievance can simply unplug from society,
the real world, and their personal environment and go into whatever nurturing
cybercave they choose to visit, where everyone agrees with what they say,
because they all think and feel the exact same way. The internet has become the
mysterious cave in the story of our lives. Sometimes, there’s treasure, or
magic, or knowledge in the cave. But most of the time, there’s also monsters in
the cave.
I know a great many of you around my age and older had a
childhood had an adolescence similar to mine. I was told that the music I
listened to would turn me into a devil-worshipper. That the cartoons I watched
would make me a sociopath. That the role-playing games I played would turn me
into a paranoid schizophrenic. None of that actually happened. We all had
parents who either grounded us in reality, or anchored us in place. We had
peers with similar experiences. We were all still somewhat connected to one
another, even if it was only through the umbilical cord of shared popular
culture. After all, weren’t you a little leery of the kids who didn’t like Star Wars? I sure was.
All of that’s changed. I don’t want to whole-cloth write-off
the Special Snowflakes of the world for their helicopter parents and their
overly-developed sense of entitlement, but we’re not doing Generation Y any
favors, not at all. The Santa Barbara Shooter felt he was owed beautiful women,
that he was entitled to them. Says who? What on Earth gave him that idea? Well,
a lot of things, apparently. Look, I think any crazy person can get a crazy
idea from anyplace, and there’s no telling what they will latch onto—movies,
video games, a Pick-Up Artist website’s bullshit, you name it—but I’m just
wondering if that idea would have stuck in his head so firmly if there was a
group of real people around this little monster who shouted him down every time
he tried to bring up the “bitches be tripping” rhetoric? Or parents who took
him aside and said, “Yeah, son, you’re being a douche right now.” Something,
anything, other than The Internet.
Granted, it sounds like I’m picking on Generation Y, but to
be sure, there are members of Generation X that have fallen into this pit trap, as well.
Again, I don’t see them very often, because they aren’t engaging with regular
people in the real world. And that’s the
problem, isn’t it? I’ll wager there are
very few of us who have studied the actual psychological effects of long-term
online communication, and how it’s different from actual live person social
interaction. I sure don’t know very much about it. I don’t know anything. But I
do know this: talking to people online, even on FaceBook, is very different
from talking to someone on the phone, or sitting across from me. Maybe, just
maybe, when someone is a borderline narcissistic sociopath, or has tendencies
along those kinds of lines where it seems easier to pick up a gun to solve your
problems, maybe that person would get more positive results from talking to
humans in the real world instead of “ImBobaFettBitches1974” on some message
board that’s connected to the thing this person obsesses endlessly about.
I told you all of that, to tell you this: I want to start
trying to do something about it. The sexism, I mean. The misogyny. I want to
start making a change. I don’t want my friends to be scared anymore. I don’t
want to hear about another woman’s stalking incident. Only, instead of going
into my little cyber-cave, I want to stand out, in the middle of society, and
say, “Okay, let’s do this! Who among you is a shithead? Come forth, and let me
smack you!”
Yeah, that approach probably won’t work. I know that. Ever
since the cosplay controversy, I’ve kept my eyes open at the various shows and
conventions I attended. I paid more attention. I checked in with people more
frequently. And you know what I discovered? Nothing. Nada. Bupkiss. Mind you, I
was ready to step in, to intervene, to sweep the leg, even, if necessary. But I
saw nothing, heard nothing, and experienced nothing that was actionable. I’m
not saying nothing happened at all, but I am saying, I was looking for it, and
personally saw nothing. Maybe if I had my telepathy helmet on, I could have
scanned the whole convention and found the two or three skeeves and pointed an
accusing finger at them and scared them off. But I have limits.
I’ll keep looking. And I’ll keep trying. But I want to know:
how do we as men start to apply peer pressure to people who need it when they
are keeping their mouth shut around us, hanging back, and in general slinking
around because they know we’ll call them on it? And worse, how do you keep that
lesson from transmogrifying into “the popular kids beat me up and stuffed me in
a locker today because I tried to talk to one of their girlfriends” in their
brain-damaged heads? Because at night, online, that’s exactly what it’ll turn
into.
I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know where we start.
I only have one idea to put forth. It’s probably not going to be well-liked,
but that’s that, really. Maybe the Internet shouldn’t be wide open. Maybe
anonymity online is a bad thing. Maybe if you want to comment on blogs, message
boards, or send private messages, you have to provide your real information,
instead of goofy screen names. Maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way, and if
so, please tell me. I’m willing to be educated. I’m just thinking in terms of how to curb some
of the bad behavior. Anonymity tends to bring out the worst of us, instead of the best of us. Now there's studies that show trolling online is psychologically in the same head space as Narcissistic tendencies and sociopathic behavior. And also, the people who troll more often than others are (surprise surprise) sociopaths. Why give them the platform to disrupt?
I don’t think registering your real name, I.P. address, or other measures will change the minds of ingrained misogynists, but if more women
feel comfortable taking to the Internet, and there’s a mechanic in place that
allows anyone who gets threatening messages to shut the other person down with
extreme prejudice (and maybe even fines or penalties), then more voices can be
inclusively heard (and agreed with) and that is in and of itself a kind of peer pressure.
My stance hasn’t changed. If I see something happening, I’m
going to butt in. If you come up to me at a show or anywhere else for that matter and tell me someone was being
a creep, I will help you. But these whiny, abusive, self-absorbed creepshow guys are scattering like cockroaches when
the kitchen light comes on, and until we can all be in the same room together,
it will be difficult for the rest of us to police our own. I'm open to suggestions.
