Naming the problem

[tim]

This is a follow-up to my article "Refusing to Empathize with Elliot Rodger: Taking Male Entitlement Seriously".

As I mentioned initially, Lundy Bancroft lists a number of tactics abusive men use in conversations. In Why Does He Do That?, he notes that when one of the abusers he works with attempts to use one of these tactics on him or another group participant, and Bancroft calmly names which tactic it is instead of reacting, the abuser usually gets even angrier. So in that spirit, I thought I would compile a list of responses to my article and classify them according to the abuse tactics they use.

Here is a subset of Bancroft's list of conversational abuse tactics in p. 145-146 (n.b. all page-number references are to Why Does He Do That?)

1. Sarcasm
2. Ridicule
3. Distorting what you say (this was one of the most common responses I saw, in which the interlocutor would make up a caricature of what I wrote and then attack that, instead of engaging with the actual ideas).
4. Accusing you of doing what he does, or thinking the way he thinks (AKA projection, as discussed on p. 142)
5. Using a tone of absolute certainty and final authority -- "defining reality":

   When Mr. Right decides to take control of a conversation, he switches into his Voice of Truth, giving the definitive pronouncement on what is the correct answer or the proper outlook. Abuse counselors call this tactic defining reality. Over time, his tone of authority can cause his partner to doubt her own judgment and come to see herself as not very bright. (p. 82)

6. Not listening, refusing to respond -- I've rephrased this as "dismissal", since the original list was concerned with in-person conversations where one person can literally ignore the other. Online, the equivalent of this is not ignoring, but replying in a way that doesn't at all engage with the content, rather labeling it in ways that create negative sentiment without actually trying to refute ideas. Dismissal is not ignoring (it's great when people ignore things they don't like or don't care about!) -- the effort that the abuser puts in to communicate "I didn't read this, I didn't think it was worth reading, but I'm still going to attack it" shows that it is important to them that the person being abused not be heard. (Compare Kathy Sierra's "Trouble at the Kool-Aid Point" and my own previous discussion of false dismissal.)
7. Changing the subject to his grievances
8. Provoking guilt
9. Playing the victim
10. Name-calling, insults, put-downs. I'm calling out "insulting intelligence" as its own subcategory:

    The abuser tends to see his partner as less intelligent, less competent, less logical, and even less sensitive than he is.... He often has difficulty conceiving of her as a human being. (p. 63)

    One of the primary rhetorical weapons used against underrepresented people in tech is that we're not intelligent, and indeed, that was a large part of what made the original manifesto abusive.
11. Threatening to harm you

There are others, but I listed the ones that are most relevant to online conversations. And I would add two more:

• Demanding explanation, where the interlocutor asks for more justification either in ways that make it clear they didn't read the entire piece, or didn't read it carefully, or don't actually want to debate and are just asking in order to steal attention. Sort of like a human denial-of-service attack. The person demanding explanation is like the type of abuser Bancroft describes as "Mr. Right":

  "Mr. Right tries to sanitize his bullying by telling me, 'I have strong opinions' or 'I like debating ideas.' This is like a bank robber saying, 'I'm interested in financial issues.' Mr. Right isn't interested in debating ideas; he wants to impose his own." (p. 83)

  "It is frustrating, and ultimately pointless, to argue with someone who is certain beyond the shadow of a doubt that his perspective is accurate and complete and that yours is wrong and stupid. Where can the conversation possibly go?" (p. 144)

  Demanding explanation is abusive because it's deceptive: the abuser who demands an explanation holds out the promise that he is reasonable, he can be persuaded, and the conversation can go somewhere positive if you just explain more. In reality, he is not open to being changed by what he hears, and is just trying to waste your time and/or entrap you for more abuse. Demanding a 1-on-1 conversation also reflects entitlement to the time and attention of the writer, who has already provided plenty of explanation. It is pretty obvious to me when someone is asking questions out of genuine openness to change, and when they're doing it in a rude and entitled way.
• Gaslighting; Bancroft discusses discrediting extensively (p. 125, p. 146) but doesn't call it out in the above list. "You're too sensitive", "You're overreacting", and -- when not justified, other than by the purported oversensitivity of the writer -- "You can't make that comparison, it's ridiculous" are all forms of gaslighting. They attempt to make the listener doubt their own perceptions and judgment. I included gaslighting comments under "ridicule", but it's worth pointing out that this is a common and insidious form of ridicule, since it seems superficially reasonable (of course we all think that nobody should be too sensitive, or react too much, though the boundary for how sensitive it's acceptable to be is rarely discussed).

The analysis

I read:

• All of my mentions that were replies to tweets (from me or other people) linking to "Refusing to Empathize with Elliot Rodger, or that linked to the essay without replying to me.
• Two comments on my Dreamwidth post that were screened and that I deleted.

(I excluded a lot of mentions that could also have gone on this list, but were replies to tweets unrelated to the essay. My favorite one of those, though, was a response to a picture I posted of a display of boxes of LaCroix sparkling water, which said something like "looking for something to drink so you can get fatter?")

The following table lists all but one of the responses, along with the abusive tactics each one employs.

There was one response that didn't use any of the abusive tactics above. It was illogical (blaming Marc Lépine's actions on Islam because Lépine's father was Algerian), but may have been written in good faith, even if it was ignorant.

So in short:

• 27 critical/negative replies
• 26 out of 27 use at least one abuse tactic identified by Bancroft; most several
• The remaining one is illogical / primarily based on religious stereotyping.
• No substantive criticisms. At all.

I am often wrong, and many times, people have had critical things to say about my writing. Sometimes they were right. Often, they were non-abusive. But something about this essay drew out many abusive responses, while no one had a genuine intellectual criticism. When you call out and name abuse, a way that you can tell that you were right is that the abusers get more abusive. I'm sure there are places where this essay falls short, logically, or could be better expressed. But no one has pointed them out.

The results

comment	abuse tactics used	source
[A GIF of Homer Simpson opening his door to a mob pointing guns at him, with the text "DELET THIS"]	Threats	Twitter
[A GIF with the caption "I'll register you as a retard"]	Name-calling; insulting intelligence	Twitter
Questioning ridiculous diversity quotas is equal to perpetrating domestic violence	Sarcasm, ridicule, distortion, defining reality, playing victim	Twitter
hey any more talk like that and I will report you for Misdemeanor Thought-Crime	Sarcasm, ridicule, distortion, playing victim	Twitter
YAAASSS SLAAAAAY, FUCK WHITE PEOPLE [with a gif]	Sarcasm, ridicule, distortion	Twitter
I also do not see any facts in this thread refuting what the manifesto says. He has citation you do not	Defining reality, dismissal, insulting intelligence, demanding explanation	Twitter
[threatening Hitler GIF]	Threats	Twitter
For someone like you it must be a dream job to be inside the bunker of #CorporateCensorship. Happy days eh?	Sarcasm, ridicule, distortion	Twitter
"Not wanting diversity just for its own sake is one step away from going on a shooting spree." You're fucking insane.	Ridicule, distortion, name-calling,	Twitter
As a survivor, Google is acting more like the abuser silencing the person who dared speak to the abuse	Accusing you of thinking what he thinks, provoking guilt, playing the victim	Twitter
Just like all communists, you promote violence against those who disagree with.	Accusing you of thinking what he thinks, playing the victim	Twitter
we already know, the guy is self parody with his strawman, weak bait from a weak mind. no "muh mentions" for him.	Ridicule, name-calling, insulting intelligence	Twitter
I love how you delete negative criticism, must make you think that you are right all the time	Ridicule, distortion, accusing you of thinking what he thinks, changing subject to his grievances, playing the victim	Twitter
Let Google be a shining beacon of diversity & fempower, showing the world how fully embracing this ideology is a game changer. #PurgeGoogle	Sarcasm, ridicule, distortion,	Twitter
Look fatso you're gonna be the next elliot Rodgers at Google hq	Accusing you of thinking what he thinks, name-calling	Twitter
Pretty extreme to compare a guy with marginally backwards views on gender to a couple of very vicious murderers.	Distortion, defining reality, changing subject to his grievances, provoking guilt, playing the victim	Twitter
[GIF of a white man punching an antifa protestor]	Threats	Twitter
All I see is women crying that have never experienced actual abuse. If they had theyd be stronger instead of crying every 5 mins	Ridicule, distortion, defining reality, threats [this is a version of "I'll give you something to cry about"]	Twitter
You are the worst type of person. How does it feel to be the New era of Nazis? You Leftists are the new Nazis and you don't even see that.	Provoking guilt, playing the victim, name-calling	Twitter
“...am biologically worse at engineering than cis men” the memo doesn’t even imply this & your comp to murderers is a huge overreaction	Distortion, defining reality, changing the subject to his grievances, playing the victim	Twitter
It takes a real bitch to think established biological fact is hateful politics. Check into a mental health clinic.	Defining reality, name-calling, insulting intelligence	Twitter
It is fascinating to see with what completely incoherent and off-topic ramble the #Google memo is countered.	Ridicule, defining reality, dismissal, insulting intelligence	Twitter
unhinged	Ridicule, name-calling, insulting intelligence	Twitter
Just wondering, how is the Google Memo at all related to Eliot Rodger or Lépine ? How is it remotely sane to compare two people who murdered women in the name of derangement, to someone who is arguing you should make tech naturally appealing to woman rather than discriminating in order to artificially lower the disparity? I doubt you're willing to have a conversation about this, because this post shows you have a little arrogance with your own views, but it really is a shame that people aren't even allowed to have an open forum with people in order to really solve these problems. This isn't about free speech or equality to you, it's about being irrefutably right.	Distortion, accusing you of thinking what he thinks, defining reality, dismissal, playing the victim, name-calling, insulting intelligence, demanding explanation	Dreamwidth
"Suggesting that there might be such a thing as gendered occupational interests (cf. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/) is abuse, the same thing as wanting to control all women, and should be lumped in with Elliot Rodger's manifesto. OK buddy XDDDD"	Sarcasm, ridicule, distortion, defining reality	Dreamwidth

Conclusion

The dominance of abuse in the negative responses to my piece doesn't prove I'm right, of course. It doesn't prove there's no good argument against my core theses, and it doesn't prove I didn't make any mistakes. But given that a lot of people were so eager to debunk my article, if there was a good argument, don't you think one of them might have found one?

I think giving names to abusive conversational patterns is extremely powerful and I think it's important to distinguish between criticism and abuse, and notice when the only thing people can seem to muster up in response to anti-abuse discourse is more abuse.

Comments

[anotherslashfan]

This is another great essay on this topic. I'm sorry to see that apparently all of the "criticism" you received was basically abuse and that you had to see and read all of these replies (one shudders to think of people of more internet reach who receive hundreds or thousand of these abusive reactions).

[tim]

Fortunately/unfortunately, I had to go out of my way to see most of it. Twitter's quality filter is actually working pretty well now, but that has the downside that you don't really get any warnings about what's happening unless you are hypervigilant like me. (I made sure to do a search in an incognito window so I could see stuff unfiltered, including by people I'd already blocked.)

And yeah, abuse scales up in a way that anti-abuse tools don't. I can't imagine what it's like to be someone with 10K+ followers, either.

[altamira16]

Thanks for writing this out. I experienced a lot of 2-5. I can't tell you how many men were trying to accuse me of illiteracy because they were totally willing to let Damore off the hook because he said "on average." The accusations of illiteracy were so prominent that briefly I thought someone should just create a bot that searched for the words "Google memo" and just accuse people of illiteracy.

[tim]

People (including people who work for Google) kept saying "Did you read it??? He didn't say that." Which, I did read it, so while in some cases those people were being disingenuous, in others I think they genuinely couldn't comprehend that someone else could read it and not be taken in. Also, as I wrote on Twitter, if someone tries to make you drink poison, "you won't know it's not lemonade until you drink the whole glass" is not a persuasive response when you notice what you're drinking.

[someonefromthewater]

Both of these posts are outstanding! Kudos to you for compiling a table of abusive comments and deconstructing them; it is, indeed, powerfully therapeutic, hard to apply to domestic violence but super useful when there's a paper trail.

I'm not sure if there's a codified name for the abuse tactic of "you're deleting comments, clearly you hate free speech/can't handle intellectual debate". There should be. (Separate from name-calling and distortion of reality; it's trying to bait someone into engaging with a broken-record argument. Bloggers who *don't* delete comments on the grounds that they don't like censorship get burnt out and exhausted, and it shows.

You are awesome.

[tim]

Thanks!

I would say that getting mad about deleting comments falls under entitlement / ignoring boundaries (demanding contact when someone doesn't want to give it.) I'm not sure if there's a name for adding the "clearly you hate free speech" part, either. I think it falls under trying to induce shame (accusing someone of acting in a way that contradicts their (assumed) belief in free speech, etc.) and to some extent, insulting intelligence (since the accusation suggests that someone isn't smart enough to "win" a debate), but you're right that there should be a single name for it.

Arguing by trying to exhaust somebody... which I think is in the book ("treating an argument as war", specifically war of attrition).