Some Things Never Change: Outrage and Persuasion in Online Literary Debate
by Michael Simon
Recent events have provided plenty of opportunities to diagnose the culture of debate in our online literary communities, as well on the Internet more generally, from the controversial essay by Elizabeth Ellen at Hobart to the conversations prompted by Jesse Bradley’s poem “A Mother’s Advice,” published at Lockjaw, and the Ted Hash-Berryman interview at Queen Mobs Teahouse.1 That the responses to these controversial works have entailed outrage is not a surprise, nor is this necessarily a bad thing. Outrage-based responses can be productive, but they are of limited value when used as part of a larger, forceful strategy for “winning” a debate that emphasizes rejecting an opponent’s speech out of hand, and the atmosphere they create can complicate efforts to persuade by putting participants on the defensive.
In response to recent allegations of abuse by men in the literary community, Elizabeth Ellen published a disjointed essay at Hobart that expressed anxiety about what she calls “the whirlwind of ‘taking down’ male writers/editors,” referring both to the allegations themselves and the subsequent online discourse around them. In a commentary for The Nervous Breakdown, Brett Ortler reads the essay as “an unorthodox attempt to empathize with the alleged perpetrators in the face of what at times felt like an online mob.”2 On the other hand, Mallory Ortberg, writing at The Toast, notes skeptically that “criticism from other feminists is so frightening that [Ellen] will fall apart at the slightest provocation.”3 Ellen’s essay admirably resists the pressure to condemn out of hand the male writers named as abusers, but in pushing back she goes too far, endorsing the narrative that victims’ experiences, particularly women’s, are up for debate and appropriation.
When public discourse around issues of abuse and misogyny is perceived to be bellicose, how do writers who engage in the debate protect and ground their arguments? One strategy these writers use is to draw on their own personal experiences as a reality check, as well as a source of authority. Ortberg tests the logic of Ellen’s proposed standard for consent prior to a sexual encounter against dangerous moments in her own life and concludes, “it should not take everything you have to turn down someone’s offer for sex.” Ellen herself uses the strategy, to disastrous effect, when she confesses to having committed acts of physical coercion as a child against younger children. She brings up her own history ostensibly because “I think it is important for us all to remember our faults and those things we are most ashamed of” before casting stones against male literary figures accused of abuse—a call for restraint that might in another context persuade. But instead of supporting her point, her confession, which seems hastily assembled, shows a lack of introspection that leads Ortberg to understandably deem the essay “devoid of moral sanity.”
While it seems likely that Ellen brings her own disturbing childhood behavior into the essay (in addition to her underage relationship with an older man and her marriage to a younger man) to lend authority to her criticism of Sophia Katz’s disturbing rape account published at Medium it’s hard to say, given the essay’s disjunctive quality and tangents. Ellen remarks that she would never judge Katz “were we not being asked (by Sophia? By ‘the public’?) to judge the entire situation.” In the same spirit, then, she would seem to offer her own account as abuser for readers to dissect. Yet judgment of this sort is profoundly difficult. What would it take to decide that Katz could have done better? Not only a full grasp of who said and did what, but also an understanding of Katz’s mental landscape, including her motivations for initially staying with the man who assaulted her, her fears and trigger points, how she imagines herself (as a human, woman, writer, etc.), and the various other facets of her inner life that may have shaped or constrained her consciousness, statements, and actions, any element of which she may have left out of the piece or misrepresented, either intentionally or inadvertently.
Second-guessing Katz is, in other words, profoundly unproductive. Yet Ellen not only challenges Katz’s evaluation of her own experience, she also seems to expect that readers of her Hobart essay will turn the same scrutiny on its author. Concerning her own actions as a young abuser, Ellen remarks, “I know you’re going to say this doesn’t count,” thereby inviting readers to wade knee-deep into her personal moral dilemma. Of course, Ellen didn’t invent false intimacy as a writing strategy, but her direct appeal to and challenge of her readership suggests a certain apprehension about that readership, and about the quality of online discourse more broadly. And she has reason to be apprehensive. Ellen’s reading of Katz’s narrative reflects an unfortunate dynamic in our relationship to the Internet: a tendency to think we know more than we actually do. And when that tendency is directed digitally toward an alleged victim who has spoken up, it picks up on the common tactic of discrediting women’s voices when they threaten the status quo. Although Ellen may have had good intentions in writing her essay, and despite her attempts to avoid a rush to judgment of alleged abusers, her criticism of Katz and her own confession can be read as endorsing the misogynistic presumptions of male access that treat women’s bodies as contestable territory.
Of course, women’s bodies have long been treated in this way, especially in literary contexts. For instance, Eavan Boland notes the history of Irish male poets using women as “passive, decorative” emblems in their work, emblems that deny and destroy the lived experience of women they represent, even as the emblems themselves take on the mythical status of muse or national symbol.4 Featured in the first issue of the online journal Lockjaw, Jesse Bradley’s poem “A Mother’s Advice” envisions a woman as a passive subject of violent torment. Yet the poem offers no moral “context” for that treatment, as Die Dragonetti notes in a Luna Luna response, and in doing so it renews a longstanding trope of aestheticized violence against women for which other men are the intended audience.5
In another Luna Luna response to Bradley’s poem, Sarah Certa writes that the Lockjaw editors’ use of a trigger warning, intended to allow readers who may have suffered past trauma to skip over it, “still implies that it’s okay for Bradley to articulate—and aestheticize—the narrative of a violence that is not his to articulate.”6 Certa suggests, correctly in my view, that writers and editors have an obligation to recognize that the work they publish online shapes the digital environment for their readers. But saying a particular subject “is not his to articulate” wades into a more specific and problematic debate over ownership. Certa’s statement in effect claims that subject for “us” and not for “them.” As with any such claim, “we” gain and “they” lose. But the discourse on the ethics of writing women also loses, I suspect, when discussion about the context of a given work becomes a tug-of-war over a disputed narrative subject.
The impulse to resist misogynistic trends in contemporary literature can lead us to draw inappropriate lines in the sand. Dragonetti, writing about the Queen Mobs Teahouse interview with Ted Hash-Berryman, whose work has blatantly targeted women writers, argues that the interview validates his work and is “consistent with the oppression of dominant culture,” which “permits and justifies [Bradley’s and Hash-Berryman’s] actions as ‘art.’”7 An interview can certainly serve as a soapbox for an interviewee, and it can offer a neutral or even positive space for controversial or offensive behavior. But Dragonetti suggests an us-versus-them situation, in which offering an opponent the opportunity to speak is a strategic mistake. How much attention is paid to Hash-Berryman, rather than who is persuaded by what he or his critics have to say, seems the measure of success.
The Internet is especially conducive to us-versus-them types of engagement and has played a big role in unleashing the power of outrage. The New York Times recently covered the Twitter-shaming phenomenon and the devastating effects it can have on those subjected to it, including depression, PTSD, and job loss. The Times article describes an instance of Twitter shaming as a combination of “an ideological crusade against . . . perceived bigotry” and “a form of idle entertainment.”8 It then goes on to compare the phenomenon to older forms of public punishment like “the stocks, the pillory, the whipping post.” Our legal system no longer punishes criminals by forcing them into a hostile public environment; instead, for better or worse, we isolate convicts from public view in confined and often unsafe spaces. Yet the Internet, and especially social media, recreates some of the punitive qualities of our premodern public spaces, spaces in which misbehavior can quickly lead to overwhelming responses of outrage.
That outrage cuts both ways. A Twitter user expressing a racist sentiment (as in the story covered by the Times) may invoke understandable outrage from one audience, but a woman speaking up in a male-dominated subculture may get responses intended to “put her in her place” from another. The critic Anita Sarkeesian, speaking to NPR, describes the online harassment she experienced in response to her critiques of the depiction of women in video games as involving “everything from my social media accounts flooded with misogynist and racist slurs to trying [sic] to hack into my social media and email.”9 She also notes “a number of other women who are fearing for their lives and leaving their homes because they’re receiving threats as well. So this is actually a larger problem within the gaming community right now.”
As vigilante expressions of outrage become increasingly normalized in our online culture, entering into debate and speaking one’s mind means taking on, in many cases, an unacceptable level of personal risk. And although our digital spaces have acquired a punitive character, they remain at a distance from the justice system. How do we best engage with one another given these realities?
For one thing, we should acknowledge that personal safety is not a zero-sum game; that online acts of belligerence and intimidation toward “you” do not make “me” safer. Instead, we should recognize that our language and behavior online have the potential to confound or facilitate productive dialogue. We should also reconsider what good citizenship in digital spaces means, both for ourselves and for the next generation. The more we come to depend on the Internet for the public life of our democracy, the more urgently we need an ethics of digital citizenship than can accommodate rigorous exchange without endangering its participants.
Elaine Equi captures the persistence of the status quo in our digital age in her poem “Some Things Never Change.”10 Its speaker describes herself as
replaced by files, codes,
a social network
held together with pins.
Describing her own physical form discarded, her identity dismantled and uploaded to the Internet, Equi’s speaker seems to reconfigure traditional tropes of the female body. Yet despite the change, she remains strangely passive, “held together with pins.” Although her network’s “reach” is now much greater than that of her former body—although, in other words, she has a broader audience—the social realities remain largely the same. But there is a silver lining: her digital form, like her physical one, is just a representation “pretending” to be her; a useful reminder for anyone reading, writing, or publishing online. Let’s take a step back, remember that none of us can be reduced to our external identities, and temper our outrage toward a more productive and persuasive debate.
Sources
1 Elizabeth Ellen, “An Open Letter to the Internet,” Hobart, October 3, 2014, http://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/an-open-letter-to-the-internet; Jesse Bradley, “A Mother’s Advice,” Lockjaw 1, http://www.donotlink.com/framed?620607; and Kim Vodicka, “A Look inside the Dungeon of Ted Hash-Berryman’s Castle,” Queen Mobs Teahouse, December 30, 2014, http://www.donotlink.com/framed?617692.
2 Brett Ortler, “Sympathy for the Devil: In Defense of Elizabeth Ellen,” The Nervous Breakdown, October 14, 2014, http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/bortler/2014/10/sympathy-for-the-devil-in-defense-of-elizabeth-ellen/.
3 Mallory Ortberg, “On Deciding What Counts: Elizabeth Ellen and What Makes a Victim,” The Toast, October 6, 2014, http://the-toast.net/2014/10/06/deciding-counts-elizabeth-ellen-makes-victim/.
4 Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (New York: Norton, 1995), 134–35.
5 Die Dragonetti, “Writers and Editors Respond to the J. Bradley Poem and Ted Hash-Berryman Interview,” Luna Luna, January 23, 2015, http://lunalunamag.com/2015/01/23/die-dragonetti-writers-editors-respond-j-bradley-poem-ted-hash-berryman-interview/.
6 Sarah Certa, “Writers and Editors Respond to the J. Bradley Poem and Ted Hash-Berryman Interview,” Luna Luna, January 24, 2015, http://lunalunamag.com/2015/01/24/sarah-certa-writers-editors-respond-j-bradley-poem-ted-hash-berryman-interview/.
7 Dragonetti, “Writers and Editors Respond.”
8 Jon Ronson, “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life,” New York Times Magazine, February 12, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html.
9 NPR, “One Feminist Critic’s Battle with Gaming’s Darker Side,” October 18, 2014, http://www.npr.org/2014/10/18/357194775/one-feminist-critics-battle-with-gamings-darker-side.
10 Elaine Equi, Click and Clone (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2011), 54.
Michael Simon is an editor in New York. His poetry and prose have appeared in the Atlas Review, Best New Poets 2013, Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, Epiphany, and elsewhere.
