We, the Riffraff: Why Feminism Needs Outrage, Focus, and Civility
by Lynn Melnick
Believe me, I’m exhausted with all the quick-fire, shallow, inconsistent, unfocused outrage that regularly appears on social media. The act of, say, “unfriending” someone, while often a wise move, is not actual activism and I’m weary of “activists” who find a Facebook comment to be as much of an effort as they can ever muster in order to change the injustices in our society. And I often worry that perhaps the rush of rage is what we’re inspired by, anyway, more than any particular cause.
That rush can be useful, of course, which is probably why it exists. If it weren’t for adrenaline, we might feel less empowered in threatening online situations to fight for our survival. But adrenaline is addictive, and those addicting qualities can make the constancy of internet outrage worrisome. The overindulgence in adrenaline can cause (what I will assume are) generally kind and reasonable people to start hurling invectives at anyone who doesn’t see their side exactly. Flight goes out the window and fight becomes the all-consuming focus; danger itself recedes into the background. Like with many drugs, the temporary high might feel invigorating, and sometimes anger can have a cathartic effect, but too often the rage is ultimately destructive.
I will readily admit, the multiple lit world social media dust-ups and blow-ups of recent months have left me shaken for many reasons — but I refuse to give up on the power of the internet to effect real action and growth.
Because, for all its myriad, exhausting, even dangerous problems, social media has been an unforeseen force for positive, progressive change.
Without it — because marginalized voices are so often ignored or silenced in the traditional media— we may not have been loud enough or many enough to locate each other in the fight. I find this very true in the contemporary lit scene, where the traditional gatekeepers no longer hold all the power in large part because they can no longer control the cultural conversation; the cultural conversation has been given back, to some extent, to us riffraff.
Jennifer Weiner last winter, responding to author Jonathan Franzen’s not infrequent attacks on her. She writes: “I’d argue that Twitter is a lovely and appropriate medium for voices that have traditionally been shouted down, shut out or ignored by the places that court the Franzens of the world. There’s a long history – maybe Franzen doesn’t know it? – of women using the materials at hand, whatever’s available to them to make art or make a case. I’d argue that feminist Twitter, women writers advocating for their work, one hundred and forty characters at a time, is a part of that history. So I’ve used Twitter, and blogs, and Facebook, which are what you’ve got when you don’t necessarily have the New York Times. “
I know it can be frustrating to experience the various social media outrage bandwagons people jump on and then drop; the petty dustups and unkindnesses that thrive with the territory of limited Twitter character counts; the concern trolls and the sexist trolls and all the damn trolls. Social media makes easy the kind of throwaway let-me-shit-on-you-to-get-my-yayas-out behavior we see too much of online and people are sometimes dreadful and it’s easier to be dreadful when you’re not standing in front of the person towards whom you’re being dreadful because the effects of one’s speech cannot be fully seen. There also seems to be a disturbing sport to public shaming for some people, where one perceived misstep can cause a damaging pile-on that is often disproportionate to the “crime.”
A particularly grueling, polarizing, and brutal social media fight occurred recently among many feminists who, previous Facebook posts suggest, likely agree on most feminist issues. During this extended altercation, when one woman did not agree with another’s position on the issue of anonymously “outing” sexual misconduct by an editor, she commented: “I hope you choke on the long dick of patriarchy you’re sucking.” This was MRA-level verbal brutalization – I don’t like what you’re saying, so I’m gonna shove a dick down your throat and shut you up. Comments like this have the result of silencing or, worse, triggering, not just the person on the receiving end of the vitriol but many other women bearing witness who might otherwise speak up. No one wins when we can’t accept that we are not going to agree with each other all the time; we need to treat our own allies with respect in such instances.
I realize that these situations become emotional, and often activate already-existing issues and feelings. But activists do themselves and their causes no favors when they hurl graphic insults or point willy-nilly or refuse to focus in a productive way.
Lately I’ve been trying to recognize how much energy I waste by engaging with causes and threads that are confined to an already-convinced population or are dominated by difficult participants who would gladly derail the proceedings in order to shut down the message. It can be hard to resist a middle finger to misogynists, racists, and other hateful people, absolutely, but my bet is they would love for us to expend our energy on minutiae rather than save it for major action. My guess is they would love for us to sit at our laptops and scold each other all day long. Let’s not do that. The saying “pick your battles” holds truth.
But I do get it: sometimes that’s all we can muster—a comment, a click, and then back to our overwhelming lives. And sometimes that works, sometimes the force of people, all together, does have the power to change minds and to change the way the world, and the lit world, works. The recent outcry about “hashtag activism” doesn’t take into account what the collective can do. It is far, far from enough, I know this beyond a doubt, but I think it becomes so easily dismissed because the powers that be (whether the political right or the so-called progressives of the literary world) . Suddenly, we are we may not even have realized were there the whole time. And there is panic from the establishment, the worry that perhaps they’ve accidentally given the riffraff too much of a voice, a voice at all.
I would find it amusing, if it wasn’t so, well, enraging, that, in recent years, it seems that when writers and editors feel the victim of this collective rage (most typically played out via social media), and/or when they are called out publicly for conduct which is frankly unacceptable, their cry is often censorship. Because come on now! Are some people that unused to being told no? A publication or publishing house exercising editorial discretion is not censorship. (If I don’t want to publish you, that doesn’t mean I am preventing you from disseminating your words and ideas elsewhere.)
Raising our voices is the opposite of censorship. The multiplication and amplification of our voices do not negate those mainstream ones with the often built-in platforms. If someone wants to publish shitty stuff, fine, that’s on them; and just as they can publish it, we can protest it with all the necessary outrage we can gather.
If journals aren’t publishing or reviewing women or people of color; if publishing houses find only a fraction of non-white male voices per season; if men are abusive and yet hope to still be embraced by literary and academic circles, then we can and should raise our voices, in whatever forum we have.
Our anger doesn’t have to be pretty, but it should be selective and focused. Our expression of it doesn’t have to be subtle, but it should be thoughtful. Our speaking doesn’t mean we are unable to listen—and too damn bad if it’s scary or you wish you could cover your ears—but we should all object to abusive rhetoric from any side.
I’ve started and stopped, revised and revised again this essay so many times over so many months (I think I almost literally said “stop the presses” at one point!). This is anathema to the “get that posted right away!” tendency of the internet lately, but I think the rapidly changing nature of the internet and larger world perhaps requires an extended thought process. Which all points to the fact that these issues are nuanced and have to be handled with care. A quick “fuck off” to people with whom you don’t agree isn’t going to get any of us anywhere, except a rush of relief for the speaker, a blip after utterance.
Still, through all the rethinkings and revisions, my core belief has held steady:
We do not have to tolerate unkindness and erasure from others. None of us owes a voice to misogyny, to racism, to transphobia, to any hate or oppression. So we’ll use our voices to combat the hate. And our voices might hold our rage. The end. Full fucking stop.
Lynn Melnick is author of If I Should Say I Have Hope (YesYes Books, 2012) and co-editor, with Brett Fletcher Lauer, of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015). She teaches at 92Y in NYC and is the social media & outreach director for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.
