Monthly Archives: December 2012

Certain Propositions Concerning Callout Culture, Part Three

Callout culture comes from a place of class, educational, and ability privilege. If you have ever taken a gender studies class, you have educational privilege and almost certainly class privilege as well. If you have enough time to keep track of whether transsexual, transgender, trans, or trans* is the preferred term this week, you have class privilege. If you can understand dry academic feminism books, you have educational and ability privilege. (Actually, bell hooks has some great writing, particularly in Feminism Is For Everybody, about how academic feminism and its children, including nearly all of online social justice, have made feminism greatly inaccessible to the people it’s supposed to help. …Aaaand I just proved I’m exactly the sort of person I’m complaining about.)

It is amazing how a group of people whose whole thing is checking their privilege refuse to check their privilege when it’ll stop them from feeling like a Super Cool Activisty Person. But you know what? There are lots of people who are trying to figure out where they’ll sleep tonight or what food they’ll eat, who are barely literate, who are trapped in an abusive household, and for the vast majority of them whether you call it “equal marriage” or “gay marriage” is a complete nonissue.

Callout culture has some incredibly oppressive dynamics. For all its conversation about not caring about the precious feefees of the cis white dudes, callout culture has this remarkable tendency to target women and queer men. See also: the incredible amount of energy directed by the online social justice community against radfems, a tiny and powerless minority of transphobes, as opposed to against literally anyone else. Or Dan Savage hate. Sure, Dan Savage is a fuckwit, but is he any more of a fuckwit than every other advice columnist ever? (Captain Awkward and Ms. Manners aside.) And yet the amount of hatred Dan Savage gets is disproportionate to the amount of hate other advice columnists get.

Partially, this is because Dan Savage and radfems are Part Of Our Community (TM), and leftist groups are always far more interested in fighting the People’s Front of Judea than we are in fighting the Romans. And partially it’s because nothing is more perennially popular than femmephobia, queerphobia, and misogyny.

Well-intentioned knowledgeable people can disagree. Okay, look, people. Most of the callout culture nonsense is not actually about, you know, important issues, because nearly everyone that participates in callout culture agrees that Western society is racist and you shouldn’t murder trans women and so on. Instead, we tend to have arguments that look like this:

Person A: Nonbinary people who were female assigned at birth experience privilege that nonbinary people who were male assigned at birth do not.
Person B: Yes, but it is also kind of fucked to divide up nonbinary people by our assigned genders, as if female-assigned nonbinary people are pseudomen and male-assigned nonbinary people are pseudowomen.
Person A: TRANSMISOGYNISTIC SCUM.
Person B: BINARIST SCUM.

When, uh, actually, if we stayed away from the screaming, we’d notice that both Person A and Person B are kind of right. As a female-assigned-at-birth trans person, I am far less likely to be a victim of a hate crime (for just one example); however, it is also fucked to classify me as a pseudo-dude. Callout culture makes complicated, nuanced discussions like this much more difficult to have.

Final ethical guidelines. 

1) Whenever you have the energy for it, rationally and civilly argue with those you disagree with.
2) Whenever you don’t have the energy for it, consider blocking them instead of shouting.
3) Some views are so beyond the pale with adherents that are so unlikely to be convinced that shouting and insults are called for in order to convey that This Is Not An Acceptable Thing People Believe. It’s generally better to put some rational argument between the insults in order to explain why it’s not acceptable, though.
4) Not every view that disagrees with you is so beyond the pale that no one sensible agrees with it. If you think so, then maybe you should quit activism, because the whole point of activism is convincing people and it seems like rather a waste of energy.
5) In general it is better to shout at people who are not part of your audience rather than people who are. They are less likely to feel insulted and the fact that shouting at people makes convincing them difficult is less likely to come up.
6) If someone who is generally sensible says something horrible, clarify if they meant what you think they meant before you start screaming.
7) Stop fucking assuming people you disagree with are privileged.
8) Try to criticize people who are outside your community too, it’s good for you.
9) Remember that you do not know what other people are going through– both people you’re criticizing and people you are being criticized by– and that it is better to err on the side of kindness. Or the block button. The block button is awesome.
10) If other people do not follow these rules, listen to them anyway. Note that I don’t say “agree with them”; it’s possible that they are an asshole and also wrong. And obviously if something is detrimental to your mental health, the block button, it is awesome. But as much as you can, listen to everyone. People might not phrase things in the most compassionate and persuasive way possible; they might, in fact, phrase it in an obviously douchey way. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

About these ads

Certain Propositions Concerning Callout Culture, Part Two

Not all people who do oppressive things are privileged. See also: Michelle Malkin. Trans women who believe in Harry Benjamin Syndrome. Misogynistic women from Phyllis Schalfly to Suzanne Venker. “Ex-gays.” Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

This is a natural fucking consequence of the fact that marginalized people are not a hivemind. Sometimes marginalized people believe different things! Sometimes they believe actively evil things, or things that are oppressive to themselves or other people! I literally have no idea where you people get this idea that “people who have suffered” and “people who are assholes” are non-overlapping groups.

It’s relatively common for social-justice-type people to say that they don’t care about the precious feefees of some white cis dude, they care about being welcoming to the women of color he’s oppressing. Okay, cool. But there are women of color who think that affirmative action is unjust, or white people should be allowed to say the N word, or whatever the white cis dude was yammering about. Do you care about welcoming her? Do you care about her precious feefees?

As far as I can see it, your options here are as follows: say that you don’t care about the precious feefees of people who are doing oppressive things, including trans/queer people, women, and people of color who are doing oppressive things; not be a douche to people until you’ve confirmed that they’re white cis dudes; or not be a douchebag to anyone.

Unfortunately, the online social justice community has decided to go with a different plan, which is as follows:

  • Pretend anyone who disagrees with you is a white cishet man, even if they aren’t. (Seriously, until you’ve seen a woman of color told that she’s ignoring the voices of women of color, you haven’t lived.) 
  • Classify trans people who were female assigned at birth, white cis women, and gay men in the “we’re allowed to be as douchey to them as we want because they are PRIVILEGED OPPRESSORS” category.

Not all people who don’t like anger are privileged. To oversimplify a lot: there are two kinds of people in the world. There are people who are angry! about! INJUSTICE! and want to shout a lot about it, probably with lots of insults. And there are other people who don’t want to be yelled at.

There is a certain tendency to assume that marginalized people are the ANGRY ONES and privileged people are the ones who don’t want to be yelled at. I have no idea where this conclusion came from. I mean, I could argue that privileged people have the spoons to get angry about social justice, and marginalized people have to deal with oppression all day every fucking day, including people being angry at them constantly, and would really just like a place where people are calm and civil and kind and they can relax a bit.

But I’m not, because that’s stupid. Instead, there are angry people who are oppressed, and people who hate anger who are oppressed, and while some of this has to do with oppression a lot of it is just natural personality variation.

Not silencing people is not an option. Not silencing people is a great plan; I am totally okay with everyone being able to speak out. But not silencing anyone is not going to work. If you say “no, you have to stop yelling and insulting people,” you silence some of the people who are angry! about! INJUSTICE! On the other hand, if you let people yell insults whenever they like, you are silencing the people who are afraid that if they speak up they’ll be yelled at. And the second group is not going to loudly spew insults about how they’re being oppressed; they’re just going to be quiet and stop talking and censor themselves and eventually leave the movement altogether.

I’m not sure what the ultimate solution is to the problem, other than “everyone becomes more compassionate.” For instance, when I get angry, I need to recognize that there is another human on the other side of my computer screen, one that has life circumstances I don’t know about, and avoid hurting them. On the other hand, when I end up sobbing because someone else is angry at me, I also need to understand that their anger comes from a place of suffering and pain and to have empathy for them.

The block button exists. This is advice I’m directing at both groups! If you are so angry at someone that you can’t do anything except scream contentlessly, then perhaps it would be better to block them. On the other hand, if someone is making you sob or curl up in a ball of triggered, then perhaps it would be better to block them. Thankfully, online, you don’t have to put up with people you don’t like.

I think that might be Part Two of the angry people/people who hate anger solution. Both groups can say their piece, but not necessarily in the same social circles.

Furthermore, there is no ethical requirement that you try to convince every idiot who stops by. If you are unlikely to change your mind, the person you’re talking to is unlikely to change their mind, and your readers are unlikely to change their minds, DON’T TALK ABOUT IT. If taking care of yourself requires that you don’t engage, DON’T ENGAGE.

Rational arguments work better. When you argue with someone online, you’re not arguing to convince them, you’re arguing to convince the other people who are reading your argument. Arguing to convince someone who is firmly enough convinced of their point of view to argue about it on the Internet is unlikely to be effective. (Exception: if you’re arguing with someone who already has deep respect for you.) 

With that in mind, consider. If you happened to stumble across people arguing about some topic you don’t know anything about– the Singularity, Israel vs. Palestine, whatever– are you going to be more convinced by the person who uses logical reasoning and facts and cites their sources, or the person who screams DIE DEATHIST SCUM?

My point.

Certain Propositions Concerning Callout Culture, Part One

Callout culture, for those who are not familiar, is a toxic dynamic that social justice communities, especially those on the Internet, tend to fall into. Callout culture essentially means that when you do something oppressive, everyone is allowed to yell at you as much as they like and whatever they like, even if you apologize. It reaches its epitome on Tumblr, in which people occasionally tell suicidal people to kill themselves because they used the word “crazy.”

If you don’t know much about callout culture, I recommend you go down to the “further reading” section: there are lots of links that explain it on a more 101ish level than I am going to here. This is definitely inside-online-social-justice baseball.

Tone arguments are a real concern. I am going to put the points I agree with about callout culture rhetoric up front in the vain hope that people will not attempt to disprove me by talking about them in the comment section. There are people who will use another person’s perceived anger as a reason not to engage with them. This is shitty, and also a logical fallacy. After all, if someone says “you motherfucking asshole, the sky is blue, I hope you kill yourself” the sky is still blue and you should not believe the sky is green because that person was a dick.

It is also relatively common for people to use accusations of someone else being a jerk to recenter the conversation around that person’s jerkishness rather than around whatever thing the first person did to make the second person be a dick to them. That’s derailing! And kind of awful!

In addition, the kyriarchy is in general a lot better at recognizing asshole moves against privileged people than asshole moves against marginalized people. So you get people saying “Jeez, I just said ‘tranny’ and this crazy tranny blew up at me. So oversensitive!” No, dude, you’re a dick and she got pissed at you cuz you’re a dick. Reasonable people get pissed at dicks.

Anger can be empowering. Marginalized groups in general are policed about their anger against their marginalization. Some groups, such as people of color and the mentally ill, are stereotyped to be angry, so even the slightest expression of anger by those groups ends up being read as Scary Black Man or Monstrous Mentally Ill Person. Other groups, such as women, are not expected to be angry at all. For these reasons a lot of marginalized people tend to repress their anger.

For these groups, the right to be angry matters. Having a space where they are free to express their anger is liberating for a lot of people. Instead of pushing their anger down and smiling and making nice, they finally have a chance to express the emotions they actually feel. I mean, there’s a reason telling people that their emotions are Wrong Things and they Should Not Have Them is a tool of abuse: invalidating people’s emotions is seriously shitty for their mental health.

That doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want. Probably the biggest flaw I see in callout culture thinking is the inability to separate “my anger is valid, liberating, and empowering” from “literally anything I do because of my anger is valid, liberating, and empowering.” 

Guys: there are some things that are beyond the pale. Beating people up. Any sort of threats. Doxxing people, unless it’s to keep them to cause greater harm to other people (doxxing Violent Acrez? Fine. Doxxing some random kid who said something racist on the Internet? NOT FINE). Telling people to commit suicide. Et cetera, et cetera, you get the idea.

I’ve seen people say “I’m not comfortable policing how oppressed groups express their anger.” BullSHIT you aren’t. You are perfectly comfortable saying that you shouldn’t send people rape threats or call a black person a nigger even if they say horribly oppressive things. I am just suggesting that we expand the list of things that are Not Okay a little.

Further reading

Alicorn, Me And The Abstracted Persona of the Anti-Ism Community At Large.
Flavia Dzodan, Come one! Come all! Feminist and social justice blogging as performance and bloodshed.
Jo Freeman, Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood.
Natalie Reed, Five Ways Cis Feminists Can Help Build Trans Inclusivity And Intersectionality (mostly the first point, but the rest are also good and you should read them)

Ask Men’s Top 10 Cruel Things Women Do To Men

Ask Men has decided to present a Terrible List of awful things that women do to men. So I have decided to explain why this is wrong! (Warning: some of the items on this list are actually emotional abuse.)

Give you her number and never picks up the phone. Yes, in general, it is douchey behavior to reject someone with something other than an outright “no.” While lots of people try subtle rejections (especially when they’re young) because “no” is incredibly awkward and hard to say, a lot of women  do it because they’re socialized into being compliant and not making a fuss. Also, if your “convincing her” to give you her number involved ignoring her “no, I don’t want to give you her number,” then your right to complain about her ignoring your calls has gone away, you’re a douchebag.

Use men for free drinks. So… don’t buy women drinks? I don’t know, I don’t drink, but personally I like to keep flirting and sex work separate (and to be paid a bit more than a drink). “I will buy your attention with a drink!” is gross, especially if you’d call her a bitch if she refused the drink. If you’re going to be putting capitalism in human relationships, you should also put in the bit where I get to be like “no, I don’t want to sell my product to you.”

Use men as placeholders. Not much to say here. It is douchey behavior to want to break up with someone but not do it until you have a replacement.

Emotionally manipulate men. Okay, look, dude, using your emotions to manipulate people into doing what you want? IS EMOTIONAL ABUSE. You don’t need to get all cutesy about “a man’s complete incomprehension of female feelings” (quote from the article). People of all genders emotionally abuse people of all genders, and talking about emotional abuse of men as some tee-hee naughty thing women do is minimizing abuse and making it harder for survivors to recognize how wrong their situation is.

Use physical violence. HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK WHY ARE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND USING MEN FOR FREE DRINKS ON THE SAME LIST

Criticize her men in public. Again, douchey behavior, assuming it isn’t a consensual part of their relationship dynamic (says the person whose partners occasionally jokingly threaten to murder zir as a part of flirting). But given the last two I’m thinking this article is possibly a call for help from an abuse survivor, in which case criticizing one’s boyfriend in public is yet another tactic of abuse. It’s okay! There are helplines! AskMen writer YOU DO NOT HAVE TO SUFFER ALONE.

Not disclose her relationship status. I hate hate HATE this issue of disclosure, which also comes up with trans people (especially trans women) a lot. First, some people are notoriously dim about who’s flirting with them and so don’t know that they’d have to disclose. Second, people always sound so reasonable when they say “I just want to know if the person I’m flirting with is dating someone,” and then you realize that the only way they’d be happy is if people opened the conversation with “Hi, I’m Megan, and I have a boyfriend.” (And then they’d probably call her a bitch who’s making up a fake boyfriend to avoid having to flirt with him after he paid for her drinks.)

Withhold sex. No. Fuck off. Everyone has the right to refuse sex for any reason or no reason. If you want sex more than your partner does and they don’t want to talk about a way to reconcile your needs, then you are perfectly free to break up with them. (As a person who has been the higher-libido partner in several relationships, there are compromises higher-libido and lower-libido partners can make, but they have to be made on a bedrock of “you’re allowed to say no to sex whenever you want.”)

Test their men. Aaaaand we’re back to emotionally abusive tactics! Seriously, I would have so much more sympathy for this list if it didn’t randomly jump between “abuse” and “the ladies not having sex with me when I want it.”

Flirt to inspire jealousy. I’m pretty sure if one of the guidelines for your relationship is “don’t flirt with other people in front of me” and then you do that’s cheating? So okay.

Self-Objectification

Yesterday I read a rant about Fake Geek Girls by a woman who complained about other women “self-objectifying” by being sexy and how difficult it made things for her as a more masculine woman.

Before I rant, can everyone agree that that argument is dumb? Assholes who only care about women for their sexiness will continue to only care about women for their sexiness if everyone stops dressing up like Slave Leia. They’ll just fetishize people in the next most “sexy” outfit while ignoring everyone else. The problem here is not Slave Leias; the problem is assholes. Got it? Okay.

I said on Twitter that anyone who uses the word “self-objectify” is an asshole, since it inevitably gets used by the sort of people who believe that I am single-handedly upholding the patriarchy by masturbating on camera for money. But  upon more thought I think the word has potential.

Objectification means treating people like things. Self-objectification, therefore, means treating yourself like a thing.

The first example I can think of is actually not sexual, which makes me happy, because I am the one-person Objectification Means More Than Sexual Objectification brigade. I think everyone’s had a time when they feel like they ought to work on this project– whether it’s keeping the house clean, writing a book, working on their thesis, or whatever– but they can’t. Maybe their mom just died. Maybe they have Spoons Issues. Maybe they’re stressed about an upcoming layoff at work. It happens. And yet I always get pissed at myself when this happens. I’m supposed to be a robot, dammit! I’m supposed to produce results regardless of any silly ‘things’ that are happening in my ‘life.’

So I end up on Tumblr for six hours straight being angry at myself for not working instead of doing the self-care things that will actually put me in a better state to work. This is a suboptimal result.

But the thing is that I’m not a machine that can do identically good work given identical inputs, no matter what’s happening around me or what just happened to me. I’m a human with a squishy human brain. It is unreasonable of me to expect that I will behave like a Book-Writing or House-Cleaning Machine.

I think it’s very difficult to tell from the outside whether someone is self-objectifying. You could be cleaning the house when you’re stressed because you believe you’re a House-Cleaning Machine Who Needs None Of This Self-Care Nonsense, or because cleaning the house is actually how you cope with stress. Some people have sex they don’t really want because they feel like they have to be a Nympho Pixie Dream Girl; some people don’t have sex they do want because they feel like they have to be a Pure Innocent Madonna.

I think a lot of those naive ideas of self-objectification come from people who are generalizing from themselves to other people. If they dressed up like Slave Leia it would be because they feel like they have to be a Nympho Pixie Dream Girl; therefore, no one dresses up like Slave Leia because they really like Leia and flirting with cute geekboys is fun.

But even then I don’t understand the anger. If someone’s self-objectifying, I really can’t imagine a response beyond compassion. I’m not mad at girls who feel like they have to be Innocent Pure Madonnas because they’re making it harder for me to be a slut or something. I feel bad for them and want to give them a hug and tell them that the chains clasped to their wrists and ankles were unlocked the whole time.

Why I Don’t Care About The Sandy Hook Shooting

Twenty-seven people died at the Sandy Hook shooting. To put it another way: a number of gun deaths equivalent to the Sandy Hook shootings happens in the United States about every seven hours.

It is absolutely ridiculous to make any sort of decisions about policy related to gun deaths based on Sandy Hook or other mass shootings. Less than one percent of gun deaths in the United States are related to a mass shooting; mass shooters are less than two-tenths of one percent of people who commit homicide related to guns.

And yet the national conversation about mental health and gun policy (as well as a few also-ran issues like school prayer and whether we should make more men be teachers) will once again be about how we prevent Sandy Hook, as if that is somehow more important than preventing the other 99% of gun violence.

Not to mention that trying to prevent Sandy Hook leads to stupid fucking policy. For instance, the NRA’s armed guards in schools idea. Even assuming for the sake of argument that armed guards would prevent deaths related to school shootings… how the fuck is that not a tremendous waste of resources? Thirty-three people died in school shootings in 2012, not counting suicides (which armed guards aren’t much help with). You know how many died in 2010 and 2011? None. Zero. Zilch. Nada. 

Great plan, guys. Seriously. Great plan. 

I think there are a couple reasons people think about Sandy Hook more than other kinds of gun violence. For one thing, you literally couldn’t escape news of it for about three days, whereas you can usually escape news of gun violence via not reading your newspaper’s Local page. (And since newspapers are going out of business, it’s getting even easier.) For another, the victims at Sandy Hook were innocent, mostly white, mostly middle-class children, whereas typical victims of gun violence are often people of color, poor, drug addicts, sex workers, those who “had it coming,” and other people that our culture basically considers expendable. 

In short, if there is one policy change I recommend in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, it is this: stop covering mass shootings. Don’t give the perpetrators glory or the copycat shooters ideas. Leave the people of Newton alone to grieve. And stop giving people stupid-ass ideas about how gun violence works. 

Is Drunk Sex Rape?

My mention of this article on Twitter got a lot of pushback, so I figured I should talk about it in a space more suitable to… like, any nuance. At all.

First: “X can’t be rape because then I would be a rapist” is a colossally stupid argument. Most rapists do not self-identify as rapists! In fact, as Lisak shows, most rapists have reached levels of self-delusion in which “I just held down someone and fucked them while they said no, it’s not like a rapist” is a thought they actually have. So don’t make that argument! It sucks.

On the other hand, “X can’t be rape because then I would be a rape survivor” is a fairly coherent argument, as seen in the number of sex workers who have said something along the lines of “I’ve done sex work, and I’ve been raped, and the two are in no way comparable.”

Second: there is some really massive miscommunication happening on the subject of intoxicated sex and rape.

I feel kind of uncomfortable talking about this, because I’m straightedge. The closest I’ve come to being drunk is having a cup of a friend’s butterbeer recipe, which includes a splash of butterscotch schnapps. You literally could not find a person more unqualified to draw the line between drunk sex and rape. So if I talk about this kind of vaguely, that’s why.

At a certain point of intoxication, people become too intoxicated to meaningfully consent to sexual interaction, and then having sex with them is rape. (Of course, you can give meaningful consent ahead of time, just like you can with someone having sex with you while you’re unconscious.) This is literally what every feminist I have ever talked to believes about rape by intoxication. It is also what Rebecca Watson believes– to quote her post, “I’m going by the common definition here, of someone whose faculties are impaired, e.g., slurred speech, stumbling, etc.” The legal definition of rape, while it varies by area, also usually includes a similar kind of rape by intoxication.

I’m not saying that there aren’t people who believe that having some booze to loosen up before sex is rape, you can find people who believe any stupid thing, but they are clearly not the mainstream of feminism. Seriously, the closest I’ve come to meeting the “if you have a beer and have sex you’re a rapist!” feminist is a woman who thought that we should legally define all drunk sex to be rape because people who weren’t raped wouldn’t prosecute and rapists wouldn’t get off on a technicality by fiddling around with blood alcohol levels. You can have lots of opinions about that position (here’s mine: it’s dumb), but she clearly doesn’t believe that having a glass of wine and fucking is rape.

Now, you could make the case that there are lots of people who have sex while stupid-drunk and don’t feel raped in the morning. This is very reasonable. Personally, I think of it similarly to the way I think of someone initiating sex with someone while sleeping: there’s a chance the person will consent to it, in which case no harm no foul, but you still shouldn’t do it without clearing it with them first, because if they don’t consent you just raped them. Also there’s the concern that two severely intoxicated people could have sex and end up raping each other, which seems like a weird result? But then you need mens rea to rape someone, which you clearly don’t have if you’re that drunk, so I suppose you’d end up with two rape survivors and no rapist.

All that aside, there’s a fundamental disconnect here between the broad consensus of anti-rape-culture people, which is “sex with people too intoxicated to consent is rape,” and what a substantial contingent of people is hearing, which is “tipsy sex is rape.” I have no idea why. Are there multiple meanings of the word ‘drunk’? Is there another word anti-rape-culture people should be using that other people will understand better? (Honest questions: my straightedge self is not really up on you kids and your lingo.)

Short version: Anti-rape-culture advocates, please realize that when some people disagree with you it is because they literally do not understand what you are saying! People who think someone might be saying tipsy sex is rape, they probably aren’t! Thank you and goodnight.

Mental Health Awfulness In The Wake Of The Newtown Shooting

I am this close to declaring that unless you are mentally ill, a person with a degree in psychology or a mental-health-related field, or a major part of the support network of a mentally ill person, you are not allowed to talk about mental health. The only thing that’s stopped me is that a lot of members of those groups are saying terrible things too.

General memo: if you only care about mental health care in the wake of a shooting, you seriously need to question yourself. There are far more mentally ill people who hurt themselves than mentally ill people who shoot up a school. Mentally ill people are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it. Only talking about mental health after a shooting implies that you don’t care about mental illness when we’re being hurt; you only care about it when we’re hurting neurotypicals.

Furthermore, there’s a certain cluster of disorders that people tend to conclude turns people into monsters: personality disorders, schizophrenia, psychosis, bipolar disorder, autism, probably a couple I’m forgetting. In the wake of incidents like the Newtown shooting, people will always talk about people with these disorders as if they’re Scary Alien Monsters Without Empathy Who Will Probably Hurt You.

First of all, we don’t know what mental illness Adam Lanza had, or even if he had a mental illness at all, so it’s a bit inappropriate to be demonizing people. Second, most people with these illnesses are not violent. (In fact, even the link between psychosis and violence is muddy.) Third, does it not occur to anyone that talking about how people with certain mental illnesses are Scary Alien Monsters Without Empathy Who Will Probably Hurt You makes it more difficult for people with those illnesses to get the support and care they need? If you think being diagnosed with schizophrenia will make you a Scary Alien Monster Without Empathy Who Will Probably Hurt People, you are going to drag your feet about getting diagnosed… and that means you’re not going to get the help you need.

To talk about some specific examples of fail (warning: these are really, really horribly anti-people-with-mental-illnesses. Read at own risk)…

I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother: No, you aren’t. I understand that it can be really frustrating and occasionally terrifying to deal with a child with mental illness, particularly one as virulent as Michael’s. But seriously, who the fuck compares their child to a murderer and talks about their “evil eyes”? And then fucking includes a picture of their child and the child’s name? (For reasons of preserving my faith in humanity, I’m going to hope it’s a pseudonym.) Why would you do that? I really don’t have a hell of a lot to comment on this that hasn’t been said better by Sady Doyle  and Thursday, so go read those posts instead.

Piers Morgan’s Awful Guest: Okay, look, dude, preferring to be by yourself can be a sign of Asperger’s, but it can also be a sign of everything from social phobia to Avoidant Personality Disorder to just being a fucking introvert okay. Autism does not mean that you’re “lacking empathy,” it means that you are bad at reading social cues and intuiting things about others. You can still feel bad that other people are in pain even if you’re bad at telling when people are in pain. Autistic people might be lonely and anxious and even suicidal sometimes, but that probably has something to do with gentlemen like you assuming that autism can help explain why someone shot up a school. Also, I have no idea how you leaped from suicidal depression to shooting up a fucking school, but I’ve known a lot of fucking suicidal people and it has not occurred to one of us to shoot up a school, so maybe there is a different factor here.

Gunsville, USA: Apparently, a lot of shooters are on different kinds of medication, including SSRIs, tetracyclics, tricyclics, benzodiazepines, sedatives, Benadryl, and pain medication. This is sort of like saying “look! Some of the shooters took cough syrup, some took antibiotics, some took Vitamin C, and some took Viagra! Therefore cold medications cause shootings!”

I mean, Jesus. Who would expect that a disproportionate number of mentally ill people are on meds, or that discontinuing or switching medication might cause problems for some people?

The author diagnosed Adam Lanza and Holmes with “Medication Eyes,” which combined with the I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother person above, is starting to make me wonder if the DSM-V should include Ocular Delusional Disorder, the delusion that you can figure out someone’s psychiatric history by looking at their eyeballs.

It also includes the following sentence:

He said he thinks the main problem is that “crazy” people are no longer institutionalized because all of a sudden hey have “rights” to live under bridges and be as schizoid as they want to be. 

1) Does… does this guy know how expensive mental hospitals are? Who is going to pay for locking up all the mentally ill people? I thought that the conservatives were all about Fiscal Responsibility and Not Universal Healthcare, but apparently that goes out the window when there’s a possibility of locking up mentally ill people.

1a) Takimag, aren’t you supposed to be libertarian? What exactly is libertarian about lifelong imprisonment of people who have done nothing wrong?

2) How is this going to work exactly? There are shooters who never had contact with the mental health care system… are you going to give everyone a complete mental health workup at age eighteen, repeat it each decade, and lock up the people who fail? Who are you going to lock up? Just people with psychosis or schizophrenia? All mentally ill people? People with mental illnesses that you believe turn them into Scary Alien Monsters Without Empathy Who Will Probably Hurt You?

3) Of course the prospect of being involuntarily imprisoned for life will not remotely make people reluctant to seek mental health care or more willing to lie about any symptoms that might get them locked up.

4) I don’t think “care in the community” was particularly well-implemented either, but that’s not because it’s a bad idea. It’s because they kind of forgot the “care” bit and just left people to their own devices. Caring for people outside of mental hospitals whenever possible is a good plan; not caring for people at all is not.

5) WHAT THE FUCK WHY DO YOU THINK IT IS OKAY TO LOCK UP PEOPLE WHO HAVEN’T DONE ANYTHING WRONG WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU

Evolution and the Naturalistic Fallacy

I have a sad, horrible addiction to The (He)artist(e) Formerly Known As Roissy, a smalltime pickup artist who enjoys playing up how Daring and Shocking he is by saying the Truths Nobody Admits without actually saying anything remotely daring or shocking or, indeed, truthful. This is partially because I enjoy playing a rousing game of Spot the Logical Fallacy with his occasional rants.

As an example, today’s post. Warning: Heartiste is hateful, frequently triggery, and every kind of Xist you can name. Readers who are not fascinated by trainwrecks are encouraged to look at Cute Roulette instead.

In this post, Heartiste disagrees with traditional conservatives who argue that the purpose of human existence is to have children. Instead, he argues, the purpose of life is to have sex with lots of beautiful, willing women. He proves this by pointing out the revulsion that most people have to donating to sperm banks and how most people prefer having relationships instead. Therefore, evolution programmed us to have sex with beautiful, willing women, not to have children. (This is the stripped-of-awfulness version of his argument, but I trust it is fairly accurate.)

Except that this argument is conflating at least three different questions: “what do genes want us to do?”, “what is the purpose of human existence?” and “what does ‘alpha male’ mean?”

What Do Genes Want Us To Do? No, sorry, Heartiste, you’re wrong, it’s all about having children here. Genes whose carriers reproduce a lot spread; genes whose carriers don’t reproduce die out. Certain genes that lead to people having more children spread more (of course, some genes just spread because an improbable number of the people who carried a different gene had a brick dropped on their heads, which is called genetic drift). You could reasonably argue that both genes that lead to increased desire for sex and genes that lead to an increased desire for children have spread through the population. Of course, sperm banks have not been around for long enough for genes that increase one’s chance of donating to a sperm bank to spread very much and, for this reason, most people feel very little desire to donate to a sperm bank.

What Is The Purpose Of Human Existence? Well, I’m a materialist nihilist, so maybe I am the wrong person to answer this question, but I suppose I can’t solely leave it to religious people and Hallmark greeting cards. Human evolution has left us with a certain number of wants, needs, drives, and so on. Some of them helped our ancestors have children and grandchildren; some of them are side effects of things that helped our ancestors have children and grandchildren; some of them don’t have any actual deleterious effect and so managed to avoid being filtered out; some of them just stuck around because all the carriers of the competitor genes had a brick dropped on their head. These wants/needs/drives/whatever are filtered through an individual’s life experiences (parents, peers, media, nasty bosses, random encounters with shouty people on buses, etc.) to produce Goals and Desires and Meaning and Other Things That Make People Happy. And then people do those things that make them happy and other people happy, and that’s the meaning of life.

You will notice that none of this has anything to do with having more kids and grandkids. Frankly, I don’t see why the purpose of my life needs to be spreading my genes, any more than the purpose of my life needs to be making sure that some random child has as close to an identical upbringing to me as possible. What I want is the product of my genes and my environment; that does not mean that spreading my genes and my environment needs to be what I want. (Unless what I want is More People Wanting The Same Things I Want, which it is sometimes, e.g. feminism, and not other times, e.g. shopping for clothes on the clearance rack.)

What Is The Definition Of An ‘Alpha Male’? Look, you can define “alpha male” as “dude who has lots of women attracted to him” as much as you want, as long as everyone else in the conversation defines “alpha male” as “dude who has lots of women attracted to him.” But you have to stop smuggling in the “purpose of life!” thing. Lots of dudes don’t particularly care about lots of women being attracted to them. They’d rather play video games or argue about Renaissance painting or help people in developing countries, and those are also perfectly valid outcomes of genes and environment. Just because your combination of genes and environment ended up prioritizing sex with 22-year-old blonde skinny chicks over everything else doesn’t mean that everyone’s does.

Also, dude, guys who have lots of women attracted to them do not behave in the way you think they behave. Anecdatally, they tend to be kind, charming, outgoing, and respectful of boundaries, to look like their social group’s norm of attractiveness, and to do things their social group considers awesome. (Anecdatally, this also applies to women.) As for SCIENCE!, well, it shows that women tend to prefer high-dominance high-agreeableness males to any other combination (see Jensen-Campbell, L.A., Graziano, W.G., and West S. G. (1995) Dominance, prosocial orientation, and female preferences: Do nice guys really finish last? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 427-440).