Bullying for social justice

[liv]

It seems to have become a truism in certain corners of the internet that the Social Justice movement has gone bad because all they do is bully people in the name of vaguely pro-minority causes. This is a slippery sort of meme, I feel. It's hard to counter without appearing to argue in favour of bullying. I am going to attempt to push back against it, though, because what I see is that this social justice = bullying idea is being used as a rhetorical shield for some quite nasty stuff.

Certainly people can come up with examples of unarguably inappropriate behaviour carried out in the name of social justice. Yes, Requires Hate was abusive and sometimes used the language of anti-racism to justify her abusive behaviour. But she's literally one person, and I really don't think she's typical of people who care about addressing racism. Yes, there are examples of people posting hateful anon comments on Tumblr because they don't like someone's fandom ship. But somehow, this is being treated as directly equivalent to literal Nazis: both sides are just as bad.

What I'm seeing is that any kind of criticism along social justice lines is more and more dismissed as bullying. If I state that I have a problem with Marvel portraying Captain America as a Hydra agent, I am not bullying Marvel. I'm also not bullying people who like Marvel properties, or comic book nerds, or white people. If I make a case that women should be able to do their jobs without constantly dodging attempts to assault them, I am not bullying celebrities and bosses who misuse their power, or men who aren't as romantically successful as they'd like to be, or men in general.

The nature of the modern internet is such that it's quite easy to get into a situation where lots of people at once disagree with you or criticize you vehemently. I can see that a pile-on like that has many of the same emotional resonances as bullying, but again, it's false to equate lots of people agreeing that whatever media used shitty racist tropes, with deliberately targeted attacks. It's certainly not equivalent to actual mob violence, as detailed in this old but very cogently argued post by Mandolin: Criticism alone is not an Assault.

I do appreciate that some people have mental illnesses or are survivors of abuse or both, and find criticism a lot harder to deal with than people like me. I am very interested in finding ways to support social justice causes that are as inclusive as possible. But I don't think the right answer is never to criticize anyone for eg being racist, because some people have stuff going on that makes any criticism painful. I don't think it's right to say, we should never have rules against bigotry, because some people find it hard to deal with complex social rules.

One example that's been really bugging me is more and more people claiming to suffer from 'scrupulosity'. I don't doubt that that's a real symptom of some kinds of mental illness or neurodivergence, because pretty much anything you can imagine is sometimes a psych symptom. But equally, almost everybody has the experience of getting worked up due to over-estimating how strict a particular rule is, and how bad the consequences are of breaking it, especially if they've ever been young or new to some subculture, and they recognize their experience in the label of a symptom, so they assume they must have that symptom. It's not reasonable to argue that there should never be rules regulating anyone's behaviour in any (virtual or physical) space, because some people have 'scrupulosity' and might be distressed.

Another variant is people claiming to be 'triggered' by feminism. Sure, it's possible, people can have trauma triggers from just about anything. It seems like most of this sort of discourse grew out of some kind of utilitarian thought experiment or rhetorical gotcha: haha, you can't ask people to stop committing microagressions against people who have past trauma, because what if someone is traumatized by feminism or anti-racism?! It's based on a complete straw man: no actual social justice activist is arguing that you have to ban ever doing anything that anyone might possibly find traumatic or triggering. Rather, the point is that it is right to support people in dealing with their triggers, including giving notice of where something triggering might be encountered, and providing spaces where a particular trigger is guaranteed to be absent (no, they are not completely 'safe' spaces because nowhere is entirely safe for all people from all threats). It's not bullying people who enjoy fireworks to set up a space where sudden loud noises are avoided, and the same goes for more complex social and psychological triggers.

I started noticing this during #RaceFail, where particular white women were very upset about being criticized for making racist comments, because they had social anxiety or they had been bullied as children or their parents or exes had abused them with unreasonable criticism. I don't doubt that this is true in many cases; unfortunately there is a lot of bullying and abuse around and it leaves lasting scars. There needs to be a better solution than welcoming and supporting bigoted and hateful behaviour, though. In the last 15 years, this idea seems to have spread much further, it's no longer specific individuals not being able to handle criticism, it's more like, all criticism of anything along social justice lines is bullying, because there might hypothetically be a mentally ill person or trauma survivor out there who can't handle any negative comments.

There's some weird language slippage going on, too. I keep seeing people arguing that it's horrible to describe anything as 'problematic' because that means everybody who has anything to do with that thing is a terrible evil human being, and it's bullying to imply that might be the case. But the whole point of the word 'problematic' is that it means the opposite of 'irredeemably evil', it's a reference to How to be a fan of problematic things, where the exact point is that you can like really problematic things and still be not only a good person, but a good social justice activist.

What it looks like to me is that 'purity culture' is the new 'identity politics'. Anyone who cares at all about issues that disproportionately affect minorities, who wants stories to be more diverse and less prejudiced, is an evil bully who cruelly attacks people for having different tastes. Criticizing anything at all along social justice lines (as opposed to purely aesthetic criticism, as if a totally apolitical critical view were really possible) is equated with wanting to ban, censor and punish anything that doesn't completely follow an impossible standard of totally unprejudiced perfection. My feeling is that the impossible standard is the other way round: there's all kinds of advice to criticize the behaviour not the person, not to use absolute moral language, and so on. But if even saying "I found that media a bit problematic" counts as bullying, well, what that boils down to is that nothing that supports the status quo can ever be criticized in any way.

I don't want anyone to be bullied, and I most certainly don't want to contribute to bullying. But I also don't want the concept to be extended so much that it becomes meaningless, or worse, a way to let racists go completely unchallenged.

Comments

[sonia]

I'm glad you wrote this. I think it needed to be said.

At the same time, I furiously resent that you had to write it. I think your last sentence covers it: (most) people who equate social justice and bullying *want* the concept of bullying to be extended so much it becomes meaningless and *want* to let racists go completely unchallenged.

It's a rhetorical trick akin to questioning the veracity of the research on tobacco and mortality. When they're on the wrong side of truth, they throw obscuring dust in the air for all they're worth.

[liv]

Thanks for the supportive comment. I am not sure about the relative numbers; some people really are concerned about bullying and inclusion of people with mental health stuff going on, and some people are throwing obscuring dust. I'm not sure that most people are in the second category, but basically decent people are being influenced by those bad actors and that's what I want to argue against.

[sonia]

Reading the rest of the comments, I want to acknowledge that bullying does happen in social justice circles, just like it happens everywhere.

I think the amount of obscuring dust being thrown up these days is terrifying.

[naraht]

I have some mixed feelings about this.

First of all, I'm entirely with you on the danger of discussion of social justice being shut down as "bullying." I was around for Racefail and the number of people who managed to derail serious discussions with their hurt feelings was very, very high. (Although there were also more bullies around than Requires Hate.) People who care about addressing social justice issues have been getting pushback on these grounds for a long time, and sadly will continue to.

And yet there are also people who are not necessarily serious about social justice who are definitely seizing on some of the terminology to do their own bullying and fight unrelated battles. I'm with you on 'problematic' but in large parts of Tumblr it has taken on much stronger tones and no one would accept that "you can like really problematic things and still be not only a good person, but a good social justice activist."

Unfortunately I've been sucked into Tumblr due to a current fandom and when I talk about "purity culture" on Tumblr, what I mean is people saying things like "shipping a 16 year old boy with an 18 year old boy is literal pedophilia because he's literally a child!!" Or "queer is a slur, you shouldn't describe people as queer." You might think I'm pulling up some extreme example. I'm not. And much of this is not about the media itself but about individuals also on Tumblr. Lots of people do want to ban, censor and punish things that are not to their taste. (I would pull up more examples but it's early in the morning and I don't want to overload the comment.)

If this is the price we have to pay to be able to talk seriously about social justice, then it's a price worth paying. But the attacks driven by "purity culture" strike me as extremely harmful, not the same thing as social justice, and I'd hope that one can be concerned, in different ways, about both of them simultaneously.

[liv]

Yes, you're certainly among the people with long fandom memories here. I think Racefail had a mix of hurt feelings / white fragility derailing with people who really did have trauma around ostracism and unfair criticism. So people of goodwill couldn't just dismiss it all as derailing, not to mention that it was this huge sprawling mess of hundreds of blogs and journals.

I think there's been a shift since then towards people more deliberately exploiting the goodwill of people who want to be inclusive and intersectional. And yes, on the other side, people using vaguely SJ sounding terminology to pursue personal vendettas.

I don't know what to make of the anti-shipping / calling everybody a pedophile stuff on Tumblr. I think some of it is just that pedophile is the worst possible insult, so some, especially younger people, apply it to anyone they want to insult. It doesn't seem unlikely that some of it originates from the kind of weird para-Christian culture that produced Warriors for Innocence and Strikethrough. People who think all sex other than a within a church-approved heterosexual marriage is in fact tantamount to child abuse. I also think some of it is, hm, young people who have been constantly warned about Predators on the Internet, and don't yet have the critical skills to distinguish between: an adult is trying to groom a child victim by intentionally exposing them to inappropriately sexual material, and: an adult is talking about sexual things with other adults somewhere minors happen to be able to see.

And the Q-slur debate is a weird beast indeed. I don't know how much I buy the theory that it's deliberately planted by some kind of radical feminists, but I suppose it's possible. I lean towards the simpler explanation, that reclaimed language is an incredibly difficult and sensitive issue, and people are taking insufficiently nuanced positions on it, again partly due to youthful inexperience.

You have a good point that when responses to bad media shift from attacking the media, to attacking individuals, that's a problem. But I also think the two are being deliberately blurred together by people who want to get away with stuff. Such as complaining of censorship whenever anyone chooses not to consume media that offends their politics.

I'm not saying that purity culture doesn't exist. It does, and it is a problem, just as identity politics is a genuine problem when oppressed proletarians blame members of a different ethnic group for their troubles instead of showing solidarity against exploitation by the powerful. But in a similar way to right wingers dismissing all anti-racist work as 'identity politics', now right wingers are dismissing all criticism of representation issues as 'purity culture'.

[jesse_the_k]

I also think some of it is, hm, young people who have been constantly warned about Predators on the Internet, and don't yet have the critical skills to distinguish between: an adult is trying to groom a child victim by intentionally exposing them to inappropriately sexual material, and: an adult is talking about sexual things with other adults somewhere minors happen to be able to see.

That's a fascinating and charitable take, which I can now use to think about this topic more. Thank you so much for posting.

[slashmarks]

I think there are a lot of people who would be abusive in any social environment seizing on terminology specific to social justice to abuse, and to create pocket of fear around themselves where everyone is beholden to their whims and orders for fear of being declared problematic. In these cases it could have been anything; people of the same type use whatever ideology available.

I think there are also cases where what are really more like minority nationalist movements - in the exclusionary and sometimes violent sense of the term - are being elevated as examples of social justice because they're against discrimination (as long as it's against them; not against anyone else). In these cases they aren't actually left wing or social justice inclined in any sense of the word; they're just right wing reactionaries from a different set of the population.

A lot of the criticism you're looking at is quite genuine and accurate, coming from people who are *primarily immersed in or just left* those corners of what gets referred to as social justice. But a lot of it is, as you say, being generalized inappropriately as a shield, or taken to absurd conclusions; and then that language is mirrored by people who just want to feel good about dismissing social justice in general.

I also think that a lot of what is currently being called purity culture is unproductive to the point of harming the movement, regardless of whether it constitutes harassment (some of it definitely does, some of it isn't). Like, infighting that makes people refuse to speak to each other ever again or cooperate politically over questions like whether a certain term is reclaimed or not, whether a TV show is problematic or not; people who want to make everything about the revolution and claim that participatory democracy is a betrayal because it involves the establishment. A lot of the criticism of Hilary Cliniton was along these lines, and it apparently was being spread by paid Russian saboteurs to demoralize the US left and depress voter turn out - you see how that worked out (I can dig out links on this but I don't have them handy). Causing infighting/splintering and such are tactics premiered by COINTELPRO to neutralize groups. So I don't think that saying, "Well, this is the price we pay for discussing racism" is necessarily a great idea, either.

Another way of putting this is probably that not all anti-prejudice activism is created equal and there needs to be room to criticize the criticism, too.

So I don't know what the solution is except that people need to be more specific about what they're criticizing. I do think that use of terms like "bullying" is usually unhelpful because they're so inherently vague.

ETA: I also know social circles where being accused of liking/watching "problematic" media can result in being shunned. It isn't about 'criticizing something even mildly is an attack,' it's about 'saying that you did something problematic is a way of accusing you of an unspecific, horrific sin without having to prove it, after which your guilt is assumed.' Most of the people criticizing the word problematic, in my experience, advocate saying racist/sexist/etc with specific examples instead.

[liv]

Thank you, this is an absolutely fascinating perspective and I'm sorry I didn't come back sooner to say so. I'm particularly reminded of your insightful point about deliberate propaganda now that we've officially been informed that some apparently anti-racist Tumblr accounts were run by professional Russian propagandists. Definitely some of the 'Clinton isn't ideologically pure' stuff was being manipulated. I also think there is intentional manipulation of the 'don't be mean to racists, that's bullying!!!!' meme going on. For example, I've seen reports that there was a coordinated campaign of suspiciously similar messages, particularly Twitter DMs, with talking points about how punching Nazis means you hate free speech.

I do agree with your first paragraph: some people are bullies, including some people who profess admirable ideals. I am not convinced this is a particularly worse problem in social justice focused communities compared to anywhere else, though.

Also really fascinated by your ETA! It seems like we've come full circle from, don't ever even allude to the idea that someone might be, omg, racist, because that's the worst possible insult ever and will destroy someone's life, to: don't say 'problematic' because that's a non-specific call for a person to be shunned.

I certainly don't believe we should uncritically accept any unwanted side effects as the 'price' of discussing racism. Sometimes I feel a bit like the social justice community collectively are dealing with a young child: yes, I'm being mean and unfair, no, you still can't run into the road / hit your sibling. I want to kind of skip over the bit where any time someone criticizes representation or lack thereof in media, they immediately have to deal with the 'you're a bully' response before they can actually engage in meaningful discussion. But I agree, sometimes the person doing the criticizing actually is bullying.

[slashmarks]

I mean, I think there will always be people who are problems in any given community, but communities can be more or less hostile to that kind of behavior and give them more or fewer tools, and I think a lot of the contemporary social justice toolkit is easy to retool for abuse. In particular the legitimization of public shame as a tool of persuasion is really concerning, as is the pressure to believe all accusations uncritically, since both of them mean that a sufficiently socially influential person can punish anyone they feel like without a lot of pushback; if that person is already involved in SJ that can mean losing all of their social support at once.

Also, the tendency to assume people who claim marginalized identities must be trustworthy or must be in the right in any conflict with someone with fewer is easily turned on its head, and probably for that reason I'm aware of several high profile cases of people pretending to have identities they didn't in order to justify behavior including academic fraud and sexual abuse. Requires Hate actually was the person she said she was afaik, but she also used this pattern to get away with abuse.

The deliberate distortion of the concept of "the tone argument" - from "people will always focus on tone when hearing something they don't like" to "any tone/approach is legitimate to use in pursuit of SJ" is also not great, since it's easily used to turn any intra-SJ criticism into bigoted behavior that should be called out. I would argue that this post itself is a product of that attitude trickling out from the most insular and cult-like spaces; your argument is essentially that you've seen people saying that some SJ activists are behaving poorly, and you assume that can't be true on the basis of their affiliation with SJ.

I'm not totally sure how to neutralize these problems, although I think that call outs are um, a very specific tool for a very specific situation that are not being used well. There's a lot of research on the damaging effects of public shame.

[(Anonymous)]

But is anyone seriously claiming that saying "I find that a bit problematic" is bullying?
AFAIK the complaints about bullying are about harassing people, sending them death threats, and hounding them out of their IRL jobs, for having opinions that don't meet the latest SJ orthodoxy; behaviour that SJ people agree is bullying when it goes in the other direction.
I've seen some worrying discourse to the effect that it's OK to behave like that to Those People because of the opinions they hold; that "punching Nazis" (note, literal violence) is not only excusable but actively virtuous, even when they're not really Nazis at all but people whose sociocultural opinions are significantly to the left of most of the people who fought the actual Nazis.

--Rachael/woodpijn

Scrupulosity

[(Anonymous)]

A quick comment re scrupulosity: you and I probably move in different online circles, but my understanding of "scrupulosity" from the usage I've seen is not about social rules in unfamiliar subcultures, but about morality. A central example would be a first-world person, of average means, feeling guilty about spending anything at all on entertainment or having spare food in their cupboards when there are people in the world dying of hunger and cheaply-preventable diseases.
--Rachael/woodpijn

Re: Scrupulosity

[ewx]

I was wondering about what that one meant too. I found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrupulosity but I don’t think it’s what liv meant?

Re: Scrupulosity

[jack]

I've only heard it from one or two people who don't seem to be what Liv's talking about so I didn't have a lot to say, but it sounds like many people have an attitude of "criticism makes me feel soooooooo terrible, you need to not criticise me at all" a bit like people who appropriate the concept of being triggered to say "and you should never say this to me ever even if I'm massively wrong" (people who actually have extreme stress reactions tend to express that differently).

[jack]

I have many conflicting thoughts.

It seems like most of the things you describe fall broadly into the category of "someone, usually someone comparatively both high-profile and privileged, says something horrible, lots of people complain, they feel attacked". I agree that's common, it doesn't represent SJW being inclined to bullying more than any other humans, but that people who feel attacked for being unprogressive want to characterise it that way.

That seems like part of a longstanding pattern, of people feeling persecuted for having to treat other people more like people. Before it was characterised in pro/anti SJW language, I remember people observing that American white christians or white men etc often feel incredibly persecuted by "not able to just do whatever they like", and people pointing to many other parallel examples.

And we should always push back on it, because it's the sort of "just keep repeating the reality they want to be true" that slowly shifts the overton window and destroys the credibility of legitimate criticism.

But I think the "bullying" concept may have a basis separate to that. I've definitely heard people I trust to be at least somewhat upfront about their biases, talking about tumblr fandom and similar communities, with examples of people being way too quick to condemn, and everything like "someone used the terminology which was polite amongst members of group X they know, but many other people disagree with" or "someone enjoyed a show which also had bad things in" or "someone said something thoughtless" treated like they're an unrepentant frothing bigot. And again, this is something I'd expect, both from "communities with many teenagers still figuring out how to be good at being people" and from "people who spent their life fighting for their rights, sometimes being upset that the movement is prioritising other things as well as the struggle they were originally fighting." And I don't know how common that is, if it's what you'd expect from any community, or more so or less so. My impression is that people who say they see this, really are reporting something they see, not based on "racists whining on being called on it". But I'm not actually sure.

But I'm not sure how to make those points simultaneously (which I guess is why they both perpetuate).

[jack]

And I guess, I should focus on fighting the first thing, not merely characterising the things.

[naraht]

I've definitely heard people I trust to be at least somewhat upfront about their biases, talking about tumblr fandom and similar communities, with examples of people being way too quick to condemn, and everything like "someone used the terminology which was polite amongst members of group X they know, but many other people disagree with" or "someone enjoyed a show which also had bad things in" or "someone said something thoughtless" treated like they're an unrepentant frothing bigot. And again, this is something I'd expect, both from "communities with many teenagers still figuring out how to be good at being people" and from "people who spent their life fighting for their rights, sometimes being upset that the movement is prioritising other things as well as the struggle they were originally fighting." And I don't know how common that is, if it's what you'd expect from any community, or more so or less so. My impression is that people who say they see this, really are reporting something they see, not based on "racists whining on being called on it". But I'm not actually sure.

Yes, this is exactly what I was talking about above.

Having been through lots of rounds of social justice discussion on lots of different platforms, I'll add that "purity culture" to me is a very distinct Tumblr-centred and teenager-centred phenomenon, often focused on "safe space" and "protecting minors." (Which I hate having to put into scare quotes like that because obviously I believe in protecting minors!) And with very little tolerance or nuance. These are the sort of people that refer to the term "queer" only as "the q-slur." For instance.

[flippac]

Alas, that's only one purity culture. Anywhere someone can use "safe space" and "protecting $vulnerableGroup" as an excuse, an analogue crops up - it's an issue in a lot of trans spaces, for example, it just manifests differently.

Oh, and gets caught up in "community drama" of the "we're trying to keep tabs on who the confirmed rapists in the community are and others are trying to use that to maintain their own power base and exclude those they don't like" variety.

[siderea]

One example that's been really bugging me is more and more people claiming to suffer from 'scrupulosity'. I don't doubt that that's a real symptom of some kinds of mental illness or neurodivergence, because pretty much anything you can imagine is sometimes a psych symptom.

FYI, I've never heard of scrupulosity being used as a technical term for a symptom in psychiatry, though (I just checked) it does have a short entry in Campbell's Psychiatry Dictionary. I know what it means because it's a term of art from Christian (Catholic?) doctrine for a particular sin, and apparently that's a topic I know a bizarrely large amount about.

I am now interested to be pointed at examples of this usage in the wild. And if any of my fellow psych pros know of a clinical tradition using the concept want to bring it to my attention, I'd be pleased to hear it.

[owlectomy]

Here are a few examples of it being used in the wild:

Scrupulosity and feminism

Thing of Things on Scrupulosity

I think that it definitely happens to people, and definitely happens to some people more than others, but I think it's just how anxiety tends to latch on to any concrete target you give it: if you're an anxious religious person you might be overly worried about sinning or hell, if you're an anxious person in feminist circles you might be overly worried about being sexist or objectifying. And it's partly a cultural problem - in the way that fire-and-brimstone preaching is bad in general but especially for the people who tend to take it too seriously and get very anxious about it - but at the same time, I think it's a problem if all criticism gets silenced out of concern for those who might get too anxious about it and take it too personally.

[siderea]

Liv, while I generally agree with your points here, I feel they are somewhat misplaced, and possibly counterproductive, because it seems to me you greatly underestimate the extent to which bullying under the flag of social justice really is a problem. Tumblr, in particular, has become breathtakingly toxic. RH-levels toxic. (Can we just go ahead and start calling it being RH+?)

RH was not some sort of rare exception, it turns out. RH exploited a hole in the culture of the SJ left that's still there, and having demonstrated how to do it, now has a thousand proteges following suit.

And, notably, like RH, these SJ bullies aren't about confronting actual racists, or sexists, or whatever: they're, notably, about driving people of color, disabled people, and transpeople out of fannish communities.

Just like with RH, somehow it's almost always fellow* people of color or other minorities who are turned on and driven away for being "racist".

This is a crucial point of distinction: people actually working for social justice want to see those they find committing oppression to stop committing oppression. These bullies are not about stopping acts of oppression, they're about driving people away. They are not satisfied by any apology or remedy. Once they have identified a target, that target can do no right, no matter what they do.

Note that in one example (or group of examples) I know of, the thing people were being targetted for was not shipping a black character. That is, it was a fandom for a media fanchise in which there was one black character and many white characters, and there were a little gang going around Tumblr accusing individual fans who shipped two white characters of racism, and then basically going to war against those fans.

Frankly, this is all the inevitable and necessary consequence of how the social justice community handled tone policing. The correct response to tone policing is not that One Can Do No Wrong Asserting Oppression, but that's what happened.

In this context, complaining that calling all assertions of oppression bullying is wrong, while true, is putting the thumb on the wrong side of the scales.

The way to solve the problem of oppressors hiding behind "oh noes bullying" is for the SJ left to clean up its bullying problem, because there really is a bullying problem, and it really is providing the right with this obnoxious cover.

[* At this point, I strongly suspect that some of the people playing this "game" are representing themselves to belong to minorities they in fact don't belong to, and are not, in fact, actually people of color.]

[altamira16]

Bullying for social justice absolutely exists.

It often happens when people are not deeply educated in the issues of social justice doing performative social justice so they can be seen by others as the most socially aware in their peer group. I have always been too old for Tumblr purity culture.

When it happens on Twitter, it usually involves someone who is hypervisible in one community quoting some either ill-advised tweet or misconstrued tweet and telling their followers to look at this person who is most definitely wrong. When that leads to a bunch of people piling onto the person who has a small following, I definitely consider that online bullying. People who get dogpiled like that are not going to admit to being wrong typically. Sometimes they double down.

[sfred]

Hear, hear.

[toft]

Thank you, I found this helpful to read.