Welcome to RMB’s first installment of Naked Pictures of Faceless People, a series of guest posts from diverse anonymous bloggers. (Read more about NPFP’s origins.) These are the posts that are jumping to get out of us, but for whatever reason — safety, embarrassment, conflict of interest, protection of loved ones’ reputations or feelings, or so on — we don’t or won’t or can’t post at our own blogs. Anyone is welcome to submit or discuss a potential post by emailing me at arwyn at raisingmyboychick dot com.
When Activism Becomes Bloodlust
I’ve posted this anonymously, much thanks to Arwyn, because I fear that discussing this openly or even pseudoanonymously will make me a target. For that reason, some details are vastly reduced in this post and my own experiences with situations of this type have not been discussed.
Normally, activist groups have a rightfully heavy handed rule to prevent people from defending privilege. When someone calls you out for something, back down, accept it and apologize. Safe bet they’re probably right, you know? Don’t criticize the callers tone, don’t criticize the way the caller brings the call out on, just accept it and move on.
It is built on the fact that the people who get pushed down by prejudice are dealing with abuse and harassment every day from people with privilege over them and that expecting them to be polite in the face of that is extraordinarily unfair. And really, pretty privileged and entitled. This is a caution thing: it is to give a bit of an advantage to oppressed peoples to deal with that oppression; leeway so that the excuses used by the privileged and self centered to escape are more constrained, allowing more calling out to be successful and maybe even make changes in how society works.
When people do concentrate on the tone, it’s called a tone argument and it’s mostly used by concern trolls, insincere pretenders and people who don’t get this concept that oppression kind of sucks and maybe oppressed people are tired of being polite when others are always treating them badly.
And it isn’t like I haven’t been on the other side of that either. It does suck when people who don’t face what I face, who are privileged over me in some way, tell me that I’m being mean to them or that they would listen if only my tone was better.
So it is a good rule. It prevents more bad things from happening to groups that already face a lot of bad things and it takes away the excuses that people use to get out of having to deal with what they just did or said and how its wrong.
So then… what do you do when someone is taking advantage of this rule to honest to god abuse people?
I can’t vouch for whether the person writing this is sincere or not. I don’t need her to be sincere to get this point across. I don’t know her, I don’t know who else was involved. And if you do know who else was involved or know her, I would appreciate it if you didn’t reveal information that could endanger her; she seems pretty adverse to going into details and I can’t really blame her.
I gleaned from her post that she is talking about this occurring in movements and activism, which is why I started my post the way I did — because what she writes about looks to me like a case of the call out and tone argument avoidance rules being used to justify, enable, and protect an abuser’s abuse in an activist community. Now, I can’t be sure if this alleged abuse is horizontal in privilege and oppression, or bottom up. But for either type, the tone argument rule still applies. Horizontal bigotry (usually internalized self hate being used on others) can still be called out, and tone arguments are still a problem for that. And so that means that the tone argument rule and the activist resources are being used to justify abuse.
Let’s talk about abuse. Abuse is a horrible thing. It is destructive, cycling and terrible. I have faced abuse — several times actually. It trains certain patterns into you. Patterns of fear and hope. Fear of the abuser and hope the abuser will change. The hope is the hook. It keeps you there. The fear is rope, it ties you down, keeps you from fighting back. You cycle between fear and hope and the abuser uses this to control you. Abuse is pretty much always about control, whether you control someone because you think you have their best interests in mind or you control them because you were hurt and now you’re going to take it out of the hide of anyone who reminds you of who hurt you.
That’s the really freaky thing about abuse: it can sometimes (a lot less commonly than most think though) act like a virus. One of the people who abused me was also abused when that person was younger. No doubt I worry about the possibility of me being abusive in the future (yes, women can be abusers) and I’ve worked really hard to get back to a healthy place so I don’t have bitterness and hate to fire at people for what happened to me.
Abuse isn’t ever justified. And using emotional attacks, lies, sowing fear, spying, using personal information against people to manipulate them and harming them in order to control people is abuse. There’s really no exceptions.
So, if the claims from the writer of that blog post linked are true, then someone is using the rules of an activism community — used to protect its own (or people who face worse than most of those in the community but still have ties to it) — to abuse.
That’s… not good. At all.
This isn’t a topic I’m terribly comfortable with discussing. My past history of abuse makes me a bit troubled by the whole thing. The idea that someone could take advantage of these systems and hurt me, abuse me, well, it’s terrifying. Not only that, but I have a lot of privilege in a bunch of areas and I also face a few oppressions as well (I won’t get into which I have in either sense, doing so puts me at risk in a way that would negate the usefulness of having gone anonymous) so I have both the risk of using tone argument and my privilege to silence people and the absolutely awful experience of being silenced using those exact same methods.
So raising a topic like this feels really disingenuous and worrisome, on top of scaring me. I worry that by raising this topic, I’m enabling tone arguments and undermining the rules that protect oppressed people and our/their (as the case may be) discourse.
But that’s why something like this is so bad. Because it puts us in this double bind dilemma. Do we address the concept that oppressed people can be abusers and can take advantage of these systems to do so and risk undermining a rule that prevents one of the worst types of entitlement based derailment out there? Or do we protect our rule with as much caution as we can and end up allowing someone to continue to abuse and harm people freely?
But really, it isn’t so much a dilemma as it is more of a really hard question. Because we know we can’t let abuse go. Abuse can not be condoned. It can not be enabled. It can not be allowed. Or we have no right to expect our own lives and health to be protected from abuse. So instead of the binary dilemma, it’s really a question of: How do we address the topic of oppressed people who take advantage of the systems in an activist movement or community and use them to enable, hide and allow their abuse of people, either in a horizontal privilege relation or who have a given privilege that the abuser doesn’t, without undermining those very same systems and the protection they afford to oppressed peoples?
I seriously don’t know. I’m not even joking. I guess like this. Maybe. I’m not even sure if I’m addressing this sort of thing correctly or if I’m undermining these systems myself. Or alternately, if I’m not addressing them correctly in a way that downplays or continues to enable the abuse that could happen (and may be happening now, to not just the person above, but to others, possibly even me). It is a topic that that makes me second guess myself a lot. It is also a topic that truly scares me because if it can happen to the woman above then it can happen to me. It can happen to you. And as a survivor of abuse, that’s not an idea I like thinking about. So I worry that my own fears are pushing me towards bias.
And there is an even bigger question about these (presumably rare but still dangerous) abusers after we solve the one above, with the same stipulation that we can’t break the systems that protect oppressed people in movements.
How do we stop them?
——————————-
Please support the Naked Pictures of Faceless People project by commenting on the posts. Comments which attempt to guess the identity or any aspect of the identity of the blogger will be deleted, however. Protect and respect this space as though it were your own work on display here, naked and faceless.
Anonymous comments are welcome on NPFP posts. Simply put “Anonymous” or any pseudonym in Name, and either your own or a fake email addresses (ex me@me.com) as the email. NOTE: If you have a Gravatar associated with your email address, it will show up even with an anonymous name! In which case please use a different or a fake email address.
Arwyn
In my bathroom hangs a plaque with a picture of a yin yang and the word BALANCE. I can never get it to hang straight. This probably says something deep and meaningful about my life.
I don’t think you can. I’d love to have a glib answer, but it’s not there. We are poised under the sword of Damecles with this issue. I have been on one side of it. In a blog post someone put up I questioned some of the assertions and conclusions, mostly to try and understand more. I was instantly attacked by the author for being ignorant, privileged, and a traitor (mind you that was my interpretation of what they said. When I responded, probably too much in kind, they instantly wailed that I was using a tone argument against them, and that I had nothing to say. When I said I did agree with some of what they had said then I was accused of playing devils advocate. Their views were always right, mine were always wrong. Was I in the right? No Were they? o. The truth was somewhere in the middle.
That said, it appears if we call someone in ‘our community’ of this we suddenly divide the community into warring factions, doing no one any good. Yes, people will use what is available to ‘win’, which includes abusing the systems designed to protect them to be able to say what they want with impunity. But calling them on it boosts their visibility and does nothing towards solving the problem.
Yes. This. I’ve been wrestling with the same issue, and completely at a loss. Part of what makes so many of the silencing arguments (tone, etc) so powerful is that sometimes they have a grain of truth to them. It is how they are used that is the problem, not necessarily the arguments themselves. But that is such a hard distinction to draw in practice.
Another issue is the problem of a system that only allows criticism one way. Bottom up is certainly better than top down because it helps to start balancing past inequities, but it’s still an unbalanced and unsustainable model that results in people being abused.
Honest truth?
I have no answers. When someone pushes back in a forum and I don’t agree or don’t understand, but it’s clear they’re opposed to me (rather than trying to explain), I back off and shut up. Because past experience has taught me nothing else is safe.
Activists – even for things I agree with – make me nervous. Because they are passionate, and a tiny but terrifying (and unpredictable) subset will turn that passion on whoever says something wrong.
The worst part is, I often have no idea why. If I saw their point and realized I’d been an ass, it wouldn’t be pleasant, but I’d be apologetic and I’d have learned something. Often, I don’t learn anything at all…except one more person I’m scared to talk with. There’s an activist blog that the first time I commented, someone responded with such sharp and unrelenting criticism of any view that didn’t match theirs that I’m scared to ever comment again.
I like the author of the blog. They are not the person who shut me up. But they didn’t seem to have a problem with the tone of the response either.
Maybe I really was wrong and just don’t understand why. I don’t know. I know that I felt so criticized that I was scared it would escalate, and I know that nothing short of my family’s lives would be worth risking that. Not even the cause of helping others who may (or may not) have some of the same concerns and experiences I do.
I was talking about this with a friend the other night. We came to several points of agreement:
1) The tone argument (“you’re too angry!” “act nicer!” “I don’t have to listen to you when you talk like that!”) is a horrible, evil silencing tactic (duh), and is pretty much an automatic fail on the part of any oppressor/privileged person who pulls it.
2) But there is a line, and it can be crossed. There is a point past which language and “calling out” and behavior is no longer justified anger, and becomes unjustified attack — abuse, even. (I have been on the receiving end of that in a few instances, and witness others — though far, far more often I have been uncomfortable at an entirely-justified and reasonable calling out of my privilege and ignorance.)
3) We cannot allow the oppressors/privileged to define that line for us — because that’s what’s happening now, and it results in an always-moving target, a point of niceness no marginalized person can ever achieve, a point of cruelty and abuse no privileged person can ever be guilty of.
Therefore, I think, we have to be responsible for drawing the lines within our own communities. We have to admit that there is a human, interpersonal component to all this that deserves attention as well, that the language of oppression and privilege and intersectionality — though really, really important and useful — is not enough on its own. I don’t think it’s good or effective to try to limit or dictate others’ styles of activism or coping with the kyriarchal culture we live in (which means I accept a lot of activism within my movements I am personally not comfortable with), but surely we could come to some agreement on what is not activism anymore, but is simple bloodlust. Defining that — agreeing at the least that it exists and that we need to try to define it — seems to me a good first step.
Sady it Tiger Beatdown has been talking about some aspects of this recently — that we can “win” on a basic points-based oppression scale while completely missing the underlying reasons. And while when someone’s standing on your neck, it’s entirely understandable and reasonable to yell “Get the hell off my neck!”, if the ultimate goal of social justice and anti-oppression work and intersectionality is to get all persons recognized and treated as persons (which I think it is), then doesn’t it seem like we should, in fact, treat other people as persons? Which doesn’t mean we have to like them, and it still means we can get angry at them, and yell at them when they’re treating us disrespectfully (or endangering or destroying our lives), and to the best of our ability block and protect ourselves from harm — but we don’t abuse them.
I don’t know if that answers any of your questions, but those are some of my thoughts on the topic. Thank you for writing about this — it’s been on my mind for a while, and I appreciate you addressing it so thoroughly.
Thank you, Arwyn.
I guess my big worry here is that many of our communities don’t make these lines and often refuse to. So then some privileged folk or some of our own get abused and have no recourse. That’s just something that deeply troubles me, the idea of having no recourse to deal with abuse.
Is the “tone argument” ever had between men? Men are never told they attract more flies with honey. Whenever I am told to adjust my tone so as not to seem too aggressive, I know that is code for “stop acting like a man.”
I completely agree that debate can cross into abuse but I am concerned that while privilege and oppression are mentioned here and are most definitely significant, on the issue of aggressive tone *only* women are called on it.
Jake — I think that the tone argument is disproportionately weilded against women (*especially* trans women and black women), but it absolutely is used against men too: just think of the “angry black man” stereotype. No black man can express any negative emotion without risking it, and forget anger, no matter how legitimate. It’s found across marginalizations, regardless of gender, though it does, it seems to me, change with gender (men’s tone is used to show they’re dangerous, women’s tone shows that they aren’t real women; but either way the effect is to silence the oppressed).
Point taken Arwyn. I agree. Add also “angry young man” which uses the age of the speaker to dismiss any validity in the statement, as in “You’ll understand when you are older.” I do think though that women tend to get bogged down in trying to accommodate the tone argument and we internalize the criticism. I think other marginalized groups may try and change the appearance of the argument – to look less hostile – but not to change how they actually feel. I think men feel no need to alter how they feel – merely how they express how they feel. Women are made to feel that anger/hostility/aggression is wrong but only for women. I would like to have the tone argument with non-cisfemales and really be discussing the harm of violent speech.
Men are hit with the tone argument derail when they have other oppressions they face, usually in relation to those oppressions. For instance, a man with disabilities might be told his tone is too harsh by people who don’t have disabilities.
Here’s where I think there can be grain of truth in the tone argument.
Let’s say I say something stupid, unthinkingly racist.
If someone comes at me spitting mad, hurling insults and questioning my validity as a decent human being, I’m going to put my defenses up. If I hear what they have to say at all, it will be later, after I feel safe again and have time to process everything.
Whereas a calm explanation of the problem will at least get me thinking, and is far likely to make an enthusiastic ally because the respondent saw at least the potential for me to not be an enemy.
This is not, at ALL, to say that she has no right to her anger, or that she shouldn’t express it, or that her reaction in any way mitigates or justifies the wrongness of my initial action. It is the observation that the more productive conversation will often be the calmer one, and that I think the tone argument is often invoked in a misplaced and ham-handed attempt to point this out.
That being said, it is so often misused, to silence or patronize people, that it is very hard to even have the conversation about how the social justice movement can communicate more effectively.
Strongly agree with you Heather. Allies can not be gained by beating the verbal crap out of the other, however personally satisfying the fight may be. But we all need to have negotiation as the goal and leave room for the healthy expression of anger.
I don’t agree with this. The whole point of my post was to discuss how the tone argument can be used as a shield to protect abusers, not take apart the tone argument. If a person is merely angry or harsh but not actually abusing someone, then tone argument still completely applies.
I’m sorry but I have to say I find your post very difficult to follow. The phenomenon you discuss (or that I think you are discussing), the abuse of some members of an activist community by failure to control the abusive behavior of one or some members, is a common problem. The only way I know of to control it is to set up the community with clearly stated boundaries that are enforced. Frankly I can’t figure out what you are saying about the tone argument. The post to which you link was even more confusing to me. That writer wrote interchangeably about activist communities, social communities, and her family of origin. While behaviors in one kind of community can trigger memories of trauma incurred in another, I don’t think my responsibilities in those different communities are the same. I have found (coming back around to the sexism common in the tone argument) that in predominantly female organizations I am expected to treat everyone with the same level of compassion and sensitivity I do my children. I disagree. I have all the children I want and don’t think I need to exercise the same standard of care with adult co-workers.
If a community has not established a mechanism for controlling destructive members, it will lose me (well, eventually anyway). So what is it you are suggesting?
In the OP, I discussed how oppressed people can abuse up (less privilege in an area up to more) or to the side (people with the same privileges), privilege wise. It’s less common, but it can happen. Then I pointed out that this can happen in activism groups.
After that, I pointed out that the common usage of the tone argument, which is essentially the expectation that oppressed people must be nice and polite always, isn’t the same as announcing that abuse is going on. But that people tend to conflate the two. Makes more sense now?
The rest of your comment is confusing, could you please rephrase?
Heather, I recently read something that strongly resonated with me, I think on a comment thread at Love Isn’t Enough (formerly The Anti-Racist Parent). It talked about how there are different strata of knowledge/awareness/thinking/etc, and each of us can only influence those who are in the strata nearest to us. Putting it in, for example, lactivist terms, someone who isn’t sure she wants to breastfeed at all isn’t going to be influenced by me, the flop-it-out, no-artificial-nipples, nurse-’em-’til-whenever radical in-your-face lactivist. BUT, she might be influenced by someone who breastfed for 1y, mostly at home, and sometimes pumped and used bottles. But that isn’t to say my form of activism is wrong: I wouldn’t reach her, but I might help the 1-year breastfeeder reconsider how long is “too long”, or feel more comfortable nursing in public.
Similar things are true in every other form of activism I can think of. Someone completely entrenched in white supremacist culture (which is to say, mainstream America, not the KKK), who still believes in “reverse racism” and thinks Affirmative Action goes way too far isn’t going to be reached by someone who, for instance, calls mainstream America a white supremacist culture, talks about white privilege as a matter of course, and uses “racism” with the very specific definition of prejudice + (institutional) power. And they might find such a person off-putting, and even dismiss them for being “angry” or “not nice enough” — which is the tone argument, and is unacceptable. BUT, that person might be reached by someone who uses less accusatory, inflammatory (to white supremacist culture) language.
So we can acknowledge that different styles of expression and activism are more or less effective for any given person without then saying that some should never be used at all. There’s room for many, many kinds and styles of activism — the question addressed here is how do we define when it crosses over into abuse, and what do we do about it then.
Arwyn, that’s brilliant. Thank you.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean telling someone that there’s no such thing as reverse racism is abuse, or poor tone. And, the person on the other end can be very abusive, as has happened to me recently, including on this blog recently! (Not by Arwyn!)
See my comment below.
Okay. I guess it just seems to me that these points are self-evident. Of course oppressed people can be abusive to those less oppressed. And the tone argument often furthers oppression rather than pointing to abuse.
I don’t know if I’d say “often”, but well, yes these points should be self evident. But they aren’t to most. I guess that’s why it needed to be said. I’m still lost on what to do about it though.
I am privileged in many many ways. But there are also some scenarios where I am oppressed. When I am facing a comment from an oppressor, I will try to assess their intentions before deciding how to respond. Bad intentions = anger and strong words in response. Good intentions = clear, but polite, calling out. I figure I have little chance of changing the mind of someone with bad intentions, but someone with good intentions who is tripping up may just need a little help to get to the point of being a true ally.
I also desire the same treatment in return. I don’t always get it and that is fine and fair. It isn’t up to my in my position of privilege to tell someone in an oppressed group how they should treat me. However, if I try to listen, offer support, and help spread the message of an oppressed group and get shot down every time I do it, I am less likely to put my neck on the line. That is just human nature. So I will back off and certainly do my best not to oppress that person/group, but I am less likely to speak up in support of them. In my mind, not being willing to speak up is a form of passive oppression. But speaking up = accusation of injecting myself into a conversation on someone else’s issues and doing it wrong.
All that to say, I think people who are trying to be allies are worth being nice to (even when you are calling them out) and I don’t think it is a silencing tactic to say so. But people who are intentionally or callously being oppressive deserve whatever tone comes their way.
Interesting post. I read the post at Three Rivers Fog. I have definitely experienced what zie is discussing there, in regards to bullying in online communities. It’s a shame.
And, I have experienced activists who would rather not cooperate with an ally. I think there is a difference between helping an ally be an ally and refusing to work with them at all when they are doing the work they are supposed to be doing (checking and admitting privilege, doing background reading, etc). As an ally, though, I realize that it is not the job of the oppressed to necessarily teach me or work with me, period. I am really happy when I find someone who will, though. And, hostility hurts no matter, what, especially if you have good intentions and are really doing to work.
I also think the opposite problem, the typical anti-privilege backlash and tone BS is much more common and should be the main focus of these dynamic problems, though. In fact, I didn’t want to derail the what you won’t blog about thread, but someone on it did there, toward me. Seriously, the original post and the nonsense in reaction to it was five months ago, and zie is still complaining about it here and elsewhere, and it was only because I had the audacity to post (something completely unrelated) on the thread. At least zie switched from calling me a “cunt” on twitter to not as “creative” as here. Yeah, because racism denial takes a lot of creativity. That’s why saying “but I was brought up POOR in the GHETTO!” is on every anti-racism bingo card, because it is such a creative response to complaints about racism.
I think the abuse in these communities, when you look at it, can be explained in the regular abuse dynamics language, (see #2, for example) and is rarely simply an oppressed individual telling a nonoppressed individual to watch their tone. Since oppression isn’t only one quantity, that situation is rare, anyway. And, as destructive as the bullies can be, especially if they have a lot of support, they usually can be explained with the right language. I have been in those situations, and have unfortunately had to leave communities that were important to my support structure, otherwise. But, usually the people who really were my allies left with me.
Just like people who really are allies don’t think it’s creative to call white privilege “white guilt”, and saw through that nonsense pretty quickly.
I know exactly what you mean. The other half of that comment was directed at me.
Oh, no! Well, I am glad this post on bullying (unfortunately) gave us an opportunity to point it out.
And, I sincerely offer my empathy to the original poster, the faceless person. It can be especially excruciating when you are a member of a community and have a common purpose, and use other members for support.
I haven’t checked referrer logs in months, barely enough energy to write. I approve comments every… couple weeks, or so. So I just found this.
I definitely don’t want to discuss the particular incidents or cast of characters that motivated me to write the post — which is about a dynamic I’d observed well before I became a part of the community those incidents occurred in.
If I am reading the post right (and if not, I apologize, my brain is fairly foggy): yes. This is definitely a component to that dynamic, when it occurs in social justice communities. We all recognize the concept of a tone argument (even if we might not always recognize that is what it is when it’s used in situations we aren’t attuned to yet). And you know what, it’s a good base rule to have: a person’s tone, approach, aggressiveness or lack thereof, personalness or lack thereof, should never be used to dismiss or neglect to consider the content of a person’s comments/criticisms.
But I feel like there’s a little more nuance to the concept, which is sort of the area I was trying to get at in my post: “tone” is about the particular slant to a person’s speech, the way they are speaking. What I was trying to articulate is more of a pattern of behavior — which includes speech, but is not solely comprised of speech.
It might be behavior of following a person to gather information — of using knowledge of that person in a targeted way to wound a person or weaken a person’s defenses — of using trusted friends and acquaintances, carefully plying them, coaching them, persuading them to do or say things that weaken that person — etc.
It might also be use of “the tone argument” as a way to discredit the person — intentionally saying something in an outrageous way, then claiming the person used the tone argument against them (whether the person said anything or not) and trying to cultivate support, for instance.
In other words, our own rules in our community, which we settled on for very good and valid reasons, can be twisted around to use against us by a person who is so inclined. Which, I think, is the over-all point you were trying to make – (right?)
It makes it so much more difficult to address, because it has to be addressed this way: anonymously on the part of the person speaking against it, or with any identifying information (names, places, subjects altogether) carefully scrubbed and speaking only in the widest generalities so as not to alert the abuser and possibly end up with more escalation. And then people have no context with which to evaluate the situation, which is essential to truly understanding the problems with it. (Plus, some people might not agree that it is abusive or problematic, and that is their right, and it is true that not every person/story can always be trusted for veracity. Generalizing means that you remove the context by which others can determine the trustworthiness of the complaint.)
I don’t know. I’ve been really digging in and thinking deeply about abuse in the past few months, and I’m finding and clarifying a lot of things, some of them even unfavorable to me, and reevaluating my own behavior in some places. It just… it’s intensely saddening, watching the dynamics play out and seeing how much it scares people, how it impairs the efficacy and growth of the community in a lot of ways. It’s difficult stuff to deal with.
All I can say is that I’m sorry, that sucks.
On a personal level, because I think you are a wonderful writer and would want for you to flourish and be treasured in your chosen communities.
And, I am sorry on an empathetic level. I have been through this, and it was excruciating. Not even going into the recent issue in which a blogger has followed me around the blogosphere, including commenting on here after me and complaining about me (not Arwyn!), calling me choice names like “stalker” and “bitch” and “cunt”. But, I didn’t join a supportive community intentionally with that blogger. We just happen to share some advocacy interests.
But, a few years ago, I joined a private online community for mothers, based on a small group from a public site, who wanted to get together to help support the members in a way that couldn’t be discussed openly. You know, abuse issues, addiction problems, etc. Well, one of the members was a licensed counselor. And was also abusive. She used my abuse history to attack me, while trying to make a tone argument. Most of the members were outraged and many quit, but some sided with her, and mocked me alongside of her, including calling me a “narcissist” when I was upset about it. One of the moderators tried to create a rule banning any posting of any private messages – and then deleted the abusive private messages from this member that I was posting to show the abuse.
I wish there weren’t so many ugly people in this world.
That is pretty much the point I’m trying to make. That abusive patterns of behavior are protected by a twisting of the rules that social justice communities create in order to protect the members of those communities.
Obviously, I can’t speak for your situation nor can I speak on whether I have anything similar happening. And that’s the issue in the end. These people are so effective at the manipulation of these groups that even speaking out about the abuse is welcoming truly awful consequences. To me, to you, to anyone.
That applies even if someone who writes about this hasn’t dealt with the abusers directly. The abusers may see the post in question, dealing with the general topic and target the individual anyways because the post is a threat to the control the abuser has.
Exploring this topic has revealed some unfavorable things about myself as well. But those aren’t the only issues arising from talking about this. Look at most of the comments in this thread. A huge number of them are spending more time trying to take apart the tone argument rule then deal with abuse patterns being hidden behind it.
I really don’t know how to address this without enabling people to divert my words towards enabling them to use tone against oppressed people. This very thread is evidence of that.
Irony of ironies that I found this post today, when I’ve decided that I’m leaving on Feminism for good. I hate to get all “Good bye, cruel world!” on you, but I suppose everyone has their limits and I’ve reached mine.
Most of my life, I’ve considered a feminist in a general “I support women’s rights” sort of way. It was only in the last couple of years that I started to REALLY learn about Feminism, among other things, largely through reading blogs every day. I’ve never been much of a commenter, but become somewhat active. The feminist, or more accurately “social justice”, blogosphere opened my eyes to a lot of things and for that I’m grateful. But I can no longer ignore or excuse the patterns I’ve seen develop on these sites.
A lot has happened, not all of applicable to this post. What does apply though, is amount the “bottom up” abuse and bullying toward possible allies that I have witnessed, which, when called out, has been dismissed as “tone arguments” even when what was said was very, very clearly out of line. I have not seen anything (other than this post) to indicate that anyone is going to anything about it anytime soon. (In fact, until I read this I was really wondering if I was the only one who saw it. The only other time I’ve seen it mentioned, someone made a comment that what’s said on the internet can’t be abusive because it’s on the internet. Like there aren’t people behind the monitors.)
Call me self-centered, but the last straw was experiencing something like “horizontal oppression” where it was made clear to me there is, quite literally, no place in feminism for someone with my specific “issues”.
Yeah, I know how whiny this sounds. I also know that working for any type of social justice is difficult and thankless. I certainly didn’t expect cookies. But when dealing with people who are supposed to be working towards the same goals as I am starts to feel like the abusive relationship I left, it’s time to get the hell out. And I can’t help wondering how many others are going to leave before this gets settled.
/rant
[...] NPFP Guest Post: When Activism Becomes Bloodlust [...]