It's Call Out Culture!

A blog dedicated to pointing out the flaws that I perceive in both the rampant "call out" and "outrage" cultures that have recently sprung up on social media (and specifically Tumblr).

[itscalloutculture]

What is “Problematic”?

Okay. I’m just going to come out and say it.

In my opinion, everyone is problematic.

That’s right. Everyone.

In recent years, there has been a trend on the rise in social media of pointing or calling out the “problematic” behavior of anyone from celebrities to internet personalities to just regular people like you and me. Any time anyone says or does something that could even be construed as disparaging or degrading towards a social minority of some kind (ie. people of color, sexual and gender minorities, etc.), they are ruthlessly picked apart by the people on social media who only yesterday may have professed to be their biggest fans. This intense form of call-out culture had lead to things like a whole blog on this website being created and dedicated to compiling instances of when and how celebrities have screwed up, and people have been driven off social media for any and every perceived infraction.

I have witnessed much of this behavior first hand. Tumblr is the website that, in my opinion, is most guilty of this kind of stuff. The recent incident where people accused YA author John Green of being a pedophile is one of the best examples I can think of, and clearly illustrates everything that is wrong with call-out culture on the internet especially.

The call-out itself as a tool can, in the right situation, be an effective means of furthering one’s cause, especially in social justice situations. It can serve to highlight someone’s bad behavior in a very public way, and probably springs initially from some perceived truth that may be valid. But the mass audience people have at their disposal on social media is more often than not likely to take the call-out and proceed to blow it way out of proportion. In more extreme cases, like the John Green incident, the call-out may also be a life ruining accusation that the accuser has no evidence for and cannot prove. If this is the case, it can end up causing serious problems for the accused if taken and run through the insane online rumor mill. Call-out culture has become so vehement and violent in recent years, that I believe it has lost sight of its original intention, and only serves now as a means to completely belittle and humiliate people to make oneself feel better, or like the morally superior party in the situation.

We all do things or say things in life that we aren’t proud of. There is not one person in the world who has not done or said something that in the call-out culture view would be “problematic”. Not one. The important thing, in my opinion, is what we end up choosing to do about it. There are people who, after witnessing the reaction from others, realize that what they did or said was not appropriate, apologize, and take steps to make sure they never do or say it again. Then there are people who don’t seem to care, who don’t apologize or make only a lame attempt at one, and who continue doing or saying things that are hurtful.

The latter kind of people are the people who need to be called out. They are the people causing further problems and the ones who should be told vocally that what they are doing is wrong. The trouble with call-out culture is that it seems as though they often cannot discern the difference between the people who apologize and learn, and the people who don’t. As a result, people who did or even might have had the chance at a learning experience from their mistake get harassed to an extreme, just for the tiniest of “problematic” behaviors, and the people who harass them get lauded as the great furtherers of a cause. In reality, all they are are bullies jumping at the chance to use someone else as a stepping stool to get more recognition and appreciation.

When I do something bad that hurts someone, I apologize. It’s what I’ve been told is the right thing to do, and so I do it, learn from my mistake, and move on, continually endeavoring to not make the same mistake again. It’s all I can do. It’s really all anyone can do when they engage in what call-out culture would call “problematic behavior”. But imagine if every time you did something that hurt someone, hundreds of people followed you around for days afterwards and mocked and belittled you for what you’d done. No matter if it was something tiny, like accidentally bumping into someone on the street, these people worked to make you feel like you were the scum of the earth. This is exactly what call-out culture often ends up doing, and is, in my opinion, it’s biggest problem. Call people out who don’t apologize or try to make it right, call people out who commit big infractions and don’t seem sorry about it, but the people who genuinely seem sorry and willing to learn? All they need is someone to tell them politely that what they just said or did was hurtful, and then gently remind them to try and do better next time.

[itscalloutculture]

Avengers: Age of Ultron and the Appeal of "Outrage Culture"

When the new Avengers movie came out this past May, my other blog was suddenly filled with posts like this:

And like this:

And like this:

While these posts may not make a whole lot of sense to someone who isn’t intimately familiar with the movie and the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe fandom in general, I think anyone can recognize from some of the wording that people were exceedingly unhappy with the treatment of certain characters and storylines within the movie. I use these posts as examples here not to confuse readers who are less knowledgeable on the topics they speak to (if you don’t understand everything the above posts are talking about, it’s okay), but to illustrate the kind of outrage that people were expressing after the movie came out.   

I’d been to see the movie with a friend, and had come home filled with the kind of righteous indignation that can only fill me when the writer of a book or movie or show butchers what I perceive as the correct characterization of a favorite character. As soon as I got home, I was online and on Tumblr, ready to seek out and reblog every post I could find that agreed with me about the disservice Joss Whedon had done to the characters I had come to love. And believe me, there were a lot. The sampling above are probably some of the mildest that were going around.

For a couple of days, it was really quite fun. Expressing my anger at Whedon over social media felt trendy and satisfying. Everyone on my dashboard was doing the same thing, and it was great to be able to stand in solidarity with these people who were just as enraged about Natasha Romanoff’s awful storyline and characterization, the complete elimination of the Maximoff twins’ comic book story background, or even something as small as Steve Roger’s idiotic “watch your language” running gag.

By the time a week rolled around however, the shiny appeal of shitting on someone just for the sake of shitting on them had worn off somewhat, and I began to see just how far I had fallen into one of the classic traps. In my annoyance at seeing my favorite characters slandered so by a writer, I had allowed myself to be pulled way too far into the drama that the fandom was cooking up around the movie, and was now in a place that didn’t feel quite as comfortable anymore; it was a place of almost constant anger and frustration that, while it may have felt good and fun in some strange way, was in reality quite draining and stressful. I realized I needed to take a step back from all the drama, so I stopped reblogging the posts, and for the most part tried to focus on what I had liked about the movie, and what I was looking forward to in the upcoming Marvel releases.

This was not my first foray into the world of “outrage culture”, and I’m sure it won’t be the last, but I think it serves as good example to explain exactly what outrage culture is, why it’s appealing, and also why it can be an issue.

Outrage culture, as I see it, is state of being a group of people can get into when they decide to be angry about something much longer than necessary, just for the sake of being angry. It is often very present in online communities, and something that happens a lot in fandom and more social justice oriented circles. Social media lends itself well to being a place where outrage culture can thrive, since it is easier to spread awareness/anger for a subject through retweets/reblogs/resharing, and also easier to rehash old subjects for the sake of getting people worked up all over again.

I can’t deny that outrage culture is appealing. Righteous anger is a heady state of being at first, and especially when that anger is shared by a whole group of people and directed at a specific target. I’m sure other people have had an experience where they have gotten angry about something just for the sake of getting angry, and I’m sure most people would agree with me that it can fun and make one feel powerful and on the right side of everything for a period of time. Anger and annoyance are strong emotions, and as such can be intensely felt. They are occasionally good stress relievers; I know I often much more satisfied about something after I’ve had a good rant about it.

But what isn’t fun is letting yourself get sucked down into that anger until it ends up being the only thing you can feel and think about for a while. Anger and annoyance or frustration are not healthy states of mind to be in all the time. They can be good temporary stress relievers, yes, but can actually have a deleterious effect on your stress and energy levels as time goes on. I only speak from personal experience here, but I have found this to be true every time I find myself getting involved in some drama online that is usually the beginning of a new wave of outrage culture. After several days of seeing people angry and sharing in their anger, I feel tired and annoyed most of the time, and those feelings begin to bleed over and affect my life in situations that have nothing to do with the incident that caused the annoyance in the first place.

Some people thrive off drama; they love to be up to date on the latest thing everyone is upset about. There are also people like me, who can’t help but be curious about drama, but cannot stomach it for than a few days at most before it starts to wear on them. I would encourage both these types of people, and anyone who is anywhere in between them, to take a step back from getting angry for the sake of it once in awhile. Ask yourself if getting angry or annoyed about this particular thing is really worth it. Are you doing it because you believe it’s something that is important, or are you doing it because a lot of other people are? Sometimes that’s a hard to answer that question, because it’s not always so black and white, but try anyways. It might save you a lot of stress down the line when you realize just how far down the proverbial outrage culture rabbit hole you’ve fallen.

[pattheflip]

Don't confuse critical thinking with dogma (or: the new progressive religion)

I spend more of my time and energy talking about politics to strangers on the Internet than I ever thought I would, and over the last few years of participating in the events and conversations around Occupy, Ferguson, GamerGate, Baltimore, and every other flashpoint in this on-going culture war, I’ve noticed a problem.

Specifically, I’ve noticed a problem with the way the left-to-far-left folks – you know, the vast and contradictory coalition known as “progressives” – engage in political discourse online (and probably in person, too, though I can’t say I’ve noticed this as much). The problem starts, I think, because we often place too much emphasis on highlighting the fucked-up things people say or do, and demand that blood and sanctions be exacted upon the person who fucked up.

This behavior has yielded plenty of thinkpieces coming from across the political spectrum indicting the modern “call-out culture”, which leaves people afraid to make mistakes publicly or say the wrong thing for fear of being pounced on by the people they thought of as allies.

Thing is, I don’t think the problem is actually the call-out itself; I think that is a powerful tool in identifying our own problematic behaviors and becoming better people.

I think that the problem isn’t calling people’s behavior out so much as the lack of intellectual humility that I have been seeing in the execution of the public call-out. I feel like many times I see someone tweet about A Horrible Thing Someone Said with a slight sense of glee lying beneath a pious veneer.

I see people accumulating political capital – typically by accumulating masses of followers and influential retweeters to build their capacity to influence online discourse – by drawing attention to shitty things that people do and say. They’re consciously performing as a Good Person On The Internet, and people follow them so that they can also feel like Good People On The Internet.

That makes me feel super weird and uncomfortable for all kinds of reasons. We end up seeing Good People On The Internet disagree, and the conversations end up polarizing between two camps united behind personalities, not critical analysis. People aren’t arguing about whether X message or Y action was racist or sexist, they’re arguing about whether they think Person A is a better human being than Person B.

It’s demagoguery, not critical thinking, and it leads us to start reducing political ideologies down to factions and figureheads. What’s worse, we often end up reproducing the same damn privilege structures we’re fighting against in our own movements, as the influence and political capital ends up going to privileged allies who get to feel like they’re The Good People. (Just think about how much attention and fawning white dudes get for tweeting about social justice-y stuff.)

Hopefully if you’ve read this far, you should start feeling a little bit prickly. You’ve probably engaged in some of the same public performance of Good Personhood, or blindly retweeted an opinion by a known Good Guy just so you can make sure everyone knows you’re On The Level, or something like that. Good! That’s exactly how you should be feeling.

Learning to be good people

I originally titled this essay “The New Progressive Religion” because, from my outsider’s perspective of religion I see some parallels that might better help explain the issues I’m talking about.

I grew up in the Bay Area – born in San Francisco, moved to Oakland when I was about 14. I wasn’t brought up to be very religious, though my family on both sides were Catholic. I never quite understood what grown people got out of practicing religion as a kid, but as an adult, though, I think I get it: I want to be with people who have similar ideas about what it means to be a good person (and to be good people to each other) as I do, so if I can find an ideology that accurately captures this, all I need to do is find people who share that ideology and I’m set.

Both religion and politics are trying to answer an old question – “How can we be good people to each other?” – typically by laying out a system of ethics and then prescribing behaviors and rules based on those ethics. Organized religion tries to answer this question with texts that we use to parse a divine being’s will; intersectional feminism tries to answer the question by analyzing how our individual relationships to other people are mediated by power we wield over each other but don’t fully understand.

Now, when you start incorporating ideological teachings into the way you live your life, there isn’t really a lossless copying method. There is no perfect follower of Christ, just as there is no perfect feminist; practicing either is a constant process of study to figure out how to interpret ideology into action, and then learning from the results of the action to better clarify or refine the source ideology.

So, with religious folks, you get some people who put a whole lot of work in studying and analyzing, and you get some people who go to Church once a week and listen to the teachings because that’s what everyone in your city does. In my experience, the people who put more work into studying their religion are the ones that tend to be the most accepting and open-minded and are pretty good at Being Good People, while the people who treat the learning process as one-way end up holding a set of rules as sacred even when doing so seems contrary to the end goal of Being Good People.

This is what I’ve been seeing in progressive spaces: There are people who study and critically interrogate their practice of their ideologies, and there are people who treat Progressive Social Justice Politics Stuff as a dogmatic set of behaviors and attitudes and use their adherence to and others’ deviance from to define themselves as Good People.

Which is ridiculous, because the experiences and ideologies at the core of that Progressive Social Justice Politics Stuff are constantly being challenged, iterated on, and added to, so the idea that anyone could be dogmatic about it seems kind of bizarre.

The need for intellectual humility

I never felt a strong need for religion in my life. I think this is because when I was in college, I started being actively involved in my campus Asian American community, working in both social and political organizations, and cultivating my knowledge of intersectional feminism through study and practice. It was kind of funny, actually – I majored in Philosophy and generally felt like all the ethics stuff we studied was more of a logician’s circlejerk, while the electives I took in the Asian American Studies department were directly relevant to giving me the tools I needed to start trying to make sense of the world and How To Be A Good Person.

One of the side effects of studying this kind of thing in school is that our professors did a great job impressing upon us that this field of knowledge is incomplete. The words and theoretical frameworks they gave us so that we could begin to describe the experiences we shared but couldn’t name were still works in progress. The academic roots of ethnic studies, like any other political theory or philosophy work, came from intelligent people finding ways to understand the people around them. We were just testing the waters. We read selections of the core texts, but never the full texts, or perhaps never all the texts. Not that you need to find this in school, mind you – but for a guy like me who is prone to thinking he is smarter than he actually is, it sure fucking helped.

This inculcated in us a certain kind of ideological humility. When you see thinkpieces explaining why X action is actually kind of racist, the part that explains why it’s racist isn’t handed down from a monk on a mountain; it’s the intellectual outcome of applying a theory of power that helps us understand how we can unintentionally hurt or suppress each other. This theory is constantly being challenged, iterated, and refined as people continue to build this body of knowledge based on contributing their experiences and understandings to the pile. Being Good is not a solved problem.

So we continue to study, and we continue to practice our politics expecting these theories to change – expecting someone smarter than us to come by and explain to us that we’re wrong, that we missed something.

And when it comes to applying the knowledge we have of How To Be Good People to criticize each others’ behavior, we should strive to do so knowing that our understanding is imperfect and we are seeking to improve upon it, not to draw battle lines between mini-celebrities or jockey for social and political position.

Here’s the thing, though: I arrived at my current political beliefs by taking a bunch of really great college classes with a bunch of really great (and endlessly patient) professors, and then taking than knowledge and working through it in daily life with my friends, family, and loved ones. It’s a painful process, and near as I can tell, it never stops.

And when I see people tweeting up a storm about some fucked up shit, it sometimes comes off as though that speech isn’t coming from an ideological base that is carefully cultivated, but from a set of internalized rules. Kind of like the guy in your local health and fitness forum who spouts off all the “right” advice for lifting and dietary regime but couldn’t actually tell you how it works (and where it might not).

People go to school specifically to study this kind of thing!

People who haven’t even been born yet are going to go to school for this shit, and write some amazing books that will make everything we know about being Good People look as hopelessly barbaric as slavery does now!

Some people don’t really have to go to school for this shit because they live it every day!

We’re all complicit in interlocking systems of oppression that ruthlessly fuck over our fellow human beings and we’ll probably never in our lifetime manage to be even net-neutral in terms of our impact on other people!

Forget being a Good Person – the best we can hope for is probably “Less Shitty People Than Everyone Around Us”!

None of the above factors should stop anyone’s desire to be a Good Person in the slightest – but it should put our own efforts to do work on ourselves in perspective, I think. Especially when we choose to take on the responsibility of pointing out how someone else could be a Good Person.

Asking people to change their lives super hard and we should treat it as such

I think that one of the hardest things to do as a person is tell someone that you know how to live their life better than they do. It’s a pretty bold assertion, and we shouldn’t do it lightly! But it’s kind of what we’re doing in a call-out.

When we call out shitty behavior, we are trying to communicate that a certain action caused injury: Hey, you said this thing and it was pretty hurtful for Reasons, and if you are trying to be a Good Person, I think it would be a good idea to make amends and not do this thing again.

But it’s very easy for that call-out to become something sinister: Hey, you said this thing and it was pretty hurtful for Reasons, and I want people to know that I am a Good Person and you are a Not Good Person.

One comes from a place of desire for mutual improvement; the other comes from a desire for personal validation at another’s expense. One is productive; the other is not.

What’s more, I don’t actually think it’s easy to tell in the moment how much of a call-out is motivated by selfish vs. selfless reasons. These are a few questions that I often ask myself, though, and they might help you as well:

Are you publicly broadcasting your call-out because you want the attention, or because you feel like your call-out’s success depends on others’ signal boosting?

Are you privately communicating your call-out because you think it’ll be more helpful for the recipient, or because you want them to save face?

Are you using your voice instead of amplifying others’ because you want the spotlight, or because you want to put yourself on the line as a visible supporter?

Are you signal boosting someone else because you want to amplify marginalized voices, or because you don’t want to stick your own neck out?

Are you being witty because you want your hot take to be the one that wins Twitter, or because you feel like your wit serves to better illustrate the damage done?

Are you as vocal in sharing the good as you are in calling attention to the bad?

Are you holding strangers on the Internet to higher standards of behavior as you do your friends?

If you have your own suggestions on ways to keep yourself honest, I’d sure as hell love to hear ‘em.

Be excellent to each other

I know there are some people reading this thinking, “Patrick, you jerk, you just wrote this thing so people will think you’re a Good Person. You’re performing Good Person just like everyone else.”

I can see why you would think that way! I used to be much more invested in the idea of appearing like a Good Person than actually behaving as such; it’s a thing I am still working on.

Believe me: I don’t like getting in Twitter fights with people because I think it’s super hard to actually change people’s opinions most of the time, and so it just becomes mutual public grandstanding in order to appeal to and broaden your follower base. I don’t think my opinions are anything special, and I wish people would pay attention to me for the neat stuff I would like to someday make or the stupid jokes I write on Twitter, not this post. And when I do call something out, I have a sinking feeling of dread in my stomach as it starts to spread around the Internet, because I know that there are lots of people out there smarter than I am about this stuff. If you see me grandstanding, tell me.

Let’s stay humble, be excellent to each other, and…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0uVwVUVsbY

…you know the rest.

–patrick miller

[chasemcgill-deactivated20170714]

tumblr drags people for being close-minded and i get it, but at a certain point i’m like damn, stop with the superiority complex and give people a chance to grow, lord knows you didn’t come out of the womb a social justice blogger with a steve rogers obsession

[fandomisnotyoursafespace]

Fandom is not your safe space.

Nor should fandom be your safe space. Fandom is for people to explore all sorts of possibilities in fiction and art. Not all of those possibilities are going to be fluffy, “wholesome,” “healthy,” “uplifting,” or whatever other adjective the Morality Brigade here on Tumblr wants to trot out.

Fiction is not reality. Depiction is not endorsement. No, it may never be “just a movie/fic/artwork,” but that does not make it reality. Fiction serves particular purposes, and one of them is to permit us to vicariously experience certain dangerous or otherwise unpleasant things safely.

If you believe that the purpose of fiction is to “uplift” us and fiction that does not is wrong and bad, congratulations: You’re a right-winger. (Or maybe you’re on the extreme left. When you get that far out to the ends of the spectrum, it doesn’t matter.)

If you think that anyone who writes or reads noncon is a rapist or rape apologist, you are too stupid for words. If you think that anyone who ships an incest ship or an adult/teen ship is an apologist for incest or pedophilia, you are too stupid for words.

It is none of your business what other people write, draw, and ship. Let me repeat that: It is none of your business what other people write, draw, and ship. You do not get to tell them they’re “trash,” you do not get to concern-troll them with passive-aggressive nonsense like “love yourself more uwu,” and you absolutely do not get to harass them off Tumblr or elsewhere.

Also, their past trauma or lack thereof is none of your business, either. Nobody has to present their “cred” as a rape or incest survivor before they’re allowed to enjoy fanworks that don’t meet with your approval. Total strangers don’t owe you their backstories. For that matter, not even your friends owe you every detail of their backstories. Mind your own business.

Don’t want to see all this “problematic” content on your dash or elsewhere? Unfollow people. Learn how to use Tumblr Savior, XKit, AO3 Savior, and similar tools. Control your own online experience. It is not the responsibility of others on this site to take care of you, who are a total stranger to them. Given how heavily female Tumblr skews, such demands are nothing but reinforcement of the expectation that women are supposed to take care of everyone else but themselves. (Yes, women are still oppressed as a class, even before you factor in intersectionalities.)

It’s amusing how some of you have the “courage” to dogpile, harass, and stalk others on this website whose taste doesn’t meet your oh-so-pure standards. People who create fanworks are soft, easy targets to kinkshame, aren’t they? Especially when, again, most of them are not cis straight men. Women have been policed and shamed throughout history for exploring their own sexuality — including by other feminists. The 1980s were full of feminists policing other feminists:

Often conflated with radical feminism, antiporn feminism grew out of radical feminism in the late ‘70s and early '80s—as did its counterpart, pro-sex feminism. The feminist porn wars of the '80s are largely forgotten to the general public by now, but at the time they were heated, divisive, and intensely personal. In 1982, Bar­nard College’s Center for Research on Women held a conference called “Towards a Politics of Sexuality,” which was picketed by antiporn feminists for including explorations of s&m and overall pro-sex viewpoints along with discussions of race and sexuality as well as sexual history (many of which were published in the 1983 anthology Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality).

Yes, sex-positive feminism was eventually co-opted by patriarchal forces, but it started out because a great many feminists were heartily tired of radfems telling them they were “traitors” and “brainwashed” for liking anything but the blandest, most euphemistic, and most painfully egalitarian erotica. (If you like that sort of thing, more power to you. Your tastes don’t make you better than the rest of us.)

Getting back to the here and now, I don’t see you going over to 4chan or Reddit with these morality campaigns. More importantly, I don’t see you organizing to go after big media corporations, especially those whose TV shows, movies, and books help form the toxic backdrop of misogyny, racism, rape culture, homophobia, transphobia, and similar bigotries behind everyday modern life. The occasional blogpost calling out this animator or that author, no matter how many notes it gets, is not the same thing as an organized campaign.

No, harassing David Gaider off Tumblr doesn’t count, not when Bioware makes more of an effort with social justice in its games than any other game company does. You can scream all you want about how “allies suck.” You need them in the real world, beyond the hothouse environment of Tumblr. If people in general could be trusted to do the right thing for the right reasons all the time, without pressure, there would be no need for any kind of activism at all.

Nor does screaming “pedophile” at John Green and insinuating that any grown man who reaches out to teenage girls is “creepy.” Yes, his “cool dad” act is annoying, and his books leave a lot to be desired. Have you considered that such outreach is part of his job as a YA writer? Have you also considered that stigmatizing men for trying to be mentors to adolescents, when you have no evidence that they’re actually perverts, reinforces traditional gender roles?

Tl;dr: Fandom is not your safe space. Tumblr is not your safe space. AO3 sure as fuck isn’t your safe space. People will post things you don’t like in all three spaces, which they have every right to do. Get over it, grow the fuck up, take responsibility for your own mental health, and stop confusing your oversized sense of entitlement with “social justice.”