Sexual Harassment Is Alive and Well

Sexual harassment is alive and well in American high schools. It is thriving in American middle schools, and even, at times, in American elementary schools.

It may not involve vulgar gestures. For the most part it centers on systematic verbal abuse. As they transition into puberty, America’s children are likely to be taunted by slurs, slanders, and insults about their burgeoning sexuality.

It belongs to the larger problem of bullying, but it is certainly one of its most important aspects. Calling children dumb or retarded counts as bullying, but assaulting them with terms like slut or queer seems to be more common.

How prevalent is it?

Stephanie Pappas reports: “According to a 2010 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, 44 percent of gay male students and 40 percent of lesbians said they'd experienced bullying in the past year, compared with 26 percent of heterosexual boys and 15 percent of heterosexual girls.”

No one doubts that this is unacceptable. Everyone recognizes that it is a symptom. Of what, people are not so sure.

Has this form of bullying become more prevalent than it once was? Or is this just the way it’s always been?

If I had to guess, based on my own distant memories of how it was when I was in high school and middle school, I would say that the situation has gotten worse.

After all, in the old days children rarely used profanity. Since profanity was frowned on, children did indulge their taste for profanity.

At a time when gay students were very, very rarely “out,” slurs against gay students would naturally have been less common.

At a time when adolescent girls were invariably virgins, and when their mothers would never have allowed them to dress like hookers, the word slut was used less often.

How did we get to the point where these forms of abuse are commonplace?

For over two decades now America has been engaged in an ongoing conversation about sexual harassment. Public consciousness has been raised. Everyone knows it’s bad. Everyone knows that it’s pervasive. Thanks to lurid media reports we talk about it all the time.

We even believe that the more we talk about sexual harassment the less there will be. Unfortunately, the chatter seems only to produce more harassment. Among schoolchildren, at the least.

When it comes to the word that is most likely to be used to taunt and malign young girls—SLUT— sex positive feminists like Jaclyn Friedman have declared that women should proudly embrace their sluthood. In that way, they imagine the word will lose its sting.

We have also seen a multitude of SlutWalks. There, women dress like sluts, proclaim themselves to be sluts, and pretend that their activity is going to make the epithet less painful.

Since they do not know any better, these groups consider that they are advancing the cause of sexual liberation.

The same cause has allowed schools to teach sex education to pre-pubescent students. It has convinced the nation that when children talk about sex openly and freely, they will have a healthier attitude toward it. The cause wants sex education to function like a form of mental hygiene.

They insist that a child who knows the right way to put a condom on a banana children will have a healthier sense of his or her sexuality.

Feminism has been central to this movement, especially in its insistence that there is no such thing as sexual difference. Even sex-negative feminists rail against the double standard. They are happy to feed children the message that there is no significant difference between boys and girls, men and women.

Television shows and other media outlets have also been teaching children to be open and honest about their sexual orientation. They have no awareness that the decision to be "out" might have consequences that an adolescent is incapable of evaluating.

For those who believe that society will take a giant leap toward sexual liberation as soon as television dramas portray different sexual orientations positively, these shows are a godsend.

Of course, they are deeply puzzled by the fact that American high schools have not yet transformed themselves into the set of Glee.

Taken together, these policies aim at making sex something normal and healthy and wholesome, something that can and should be shown off in public, without fear or shame.

They assume, as a matter of ideological faith, that cultural forces have been repressing healthy, wholesome, normal sexuality, turning to from a force for happiness into something dirty and ugly, something that needs to be hidden from the public.

I will mention in passing that some serious thinkers have objected to this liberationist ideology on the grounds that sex is not fun unless it’s a bit dirty.

Funnily enough, in the name of freeing the world from sexual repression, this ideology has been repressing sexuality.

Surely, it wants to repress sexual differences. Actually, you are not even allowed to talk about sexual differences or sexual identity any more. You have to talk about gender. Sex, you see, is too divisive and too patriarchal.

Unfortunately, the sexual liberationist ideology is wrong about sex.

The sexual liberationists believe that all forms of sexual pleasure are created equal. They are not.

The sexual liberationists believe that the difference between the sexes is a social construct. It is not.

The sexual liberationists believe that sex should be discussed openly and honestly. It should not.

The sexual liberationists believe that sexual repression causes people to think that sex is dirty and deviant. It does not.

By disconnecting sex from reproduction, the sexual liberationists have tried to eradicate the difference between the sexes. They have forced it to assert itself even more loudly.

By militating against shame they have undermined modesty, especially for young girls.

By insisting that a free and open discussion of sexuality is a good thing, they have made it permissible for children to use sexual innuendo.

They have failed to understand that if sex is never exhibited openly in the public square, there is a reason.

First, human, that is, social beings are identified by their face not by the appearance of their external genitalia.

Second, sexual desire is enhanced by modesty. If you remove the mystery from sex, people become desensitized to sexual stimuli. Once that happens, they will naturally require more hard core stimuli.

Has this campaign for sexual liberation been a success? Considering the amount of sex-related bullying that American children suffer on a daily basis, you would have to conclude that it has failed, miserably.

Erin Gloria Ryan finds it difficult to understand: “In spite of efforts by big names like Lady Gaga and Dan Savage, teens continue to treat each other like shit.”

I would suggest that it is not despite, but because these big names are out in force trying to repress human sexuality that human sexuality has been revealing an uglier side.

Sex always has an ugly side. If it was as pretty as the liberationists think it is, the human species would have found a way to put it on public display.

Sexual liberationists have made a virtue of indiscretion and shamelessness. The results are visible in the amount of sexual abuse that far too many high school students have to endure.

Research has suggests that sex-related bullying targets girls by taunting them with the SLUT.

It makes sense. SlutWalkers and sex positive feminists have been trying to make the word less of a vulgar epithet. But if the word has supposedly lost its sting, why should a girl not use it all the time to diminish the girls she does not like?

After all, it isn’t such a bad word, is it?

What is going on here? What genie has just escaped from its magic lantern?

Researchers believe that these forms of abuse and harassment are part of the process of sexual identification. And not just any old free-form sexual identity. They show children defending  normal sex roles. After all, if no one else is doing it, the task falls to the children.

Erin Gloria Ryan reports that a girl can be bullied for being too much a girl—being a slut—or for being too little a girl—being a tomboy or a lesbian.

When children are beginning to assert their sexual identity, they often begin by employing what we can call a primitive way of thought. Let’s call it oppositional thinking. They do not know how to assert or to show that they are X so they do it by insisting that they are not Y.

Oppositional thinking is not the final stage of sexual identification. It seems merely to be an early stage, befitting adolescents.

Boys assert their sexual identity by distinguishing themselves from girls, often sharply. If they want to conform to the norms of sexual behavior they have one sure way of asserting that they are real boys: they slander other boys who are effeminate or gay.  

With girls things change slightly. Girls often assert their sexual identity by bullying other girls who do not conform to the norm for girlish behavior.

But when they take out after girls they consider sluts, they are also asserting their own moral value. They are asserting the value of their own sexuality and announcing that they will not give it away for free. Part of being a girl or a woman involves placing a very high value on one's intimacy.

As most people know, promiscuity undermines a girl’s self-respect. It does not undermine a boy's confidence. This does not mean that a boy’s promiscuous behavior makes him a man. It doesn’t. It makes him a stud.

Strangely enough, while a girl who hooks up might be labeled a slut, it is very rare that a stud is slandered by being called a gigolo.

 

Lena Chen Discovers Shame

Many people know the feeling. You worked your way up the high school status hierarchy until, in senior year, you basked in the glow that comes to those who have made it to the top.

You might not have been captain of the football team but you were an academic superstar. When you walked the halls, everyone know who you were. Freshmen and sophomores whispered your name with an admixture of awe and envy.

And then you were accepted to Harvard or Yale or Princeton. Parents around town told their children that they should emulate your wondrous example.

You were It. You were the Dude or the It Girl. They threw a party for you when you left for Harvard, proclaiming that you were now going to conquer the world.

Bright eyed and aglow you arrived at Harvard, only to discover that no one knew who you were, or much cared. From being the glory of your high school you have sunk into perfect anonymity. You might as well not have existed; you were invisible.

Some first year college students deal with the encroaching anomie by joining fraternities and sororities, by going out for the marching band or the rugby team, by working on the newspaper or the radio station.

Others stay lost. They give up on fitting in. They see themselves as permanent outsiders, suffering the grievous offense of being constantly ignored.

They begin to crave attention, any kind of attention. Without it they feel like they are going to starve. They decide that they must become famous, celebrated, someone.

They want people to know who they are, to talk about them in dorm bull sessions. They want their presence known. No matter what the cost.

Given the ambient culture, they think they can avenge the countless slights by becoming a campus celebrity. They might have learned that there is no such thing as bad publicity and that as long as people know who they are they will never again be anonymous.

If they are women they might have suffered through the mind-warp of a course in gender bending. They  might have learned that men and women are the same, that sexuality is a positive force, and that they need to express theirs openly and honestly.

Or they might have dabbled in the works of sex-positive feminists like Jaclyn Friedman and her band of enablers. There they would have learned that they feel isolated, alone, and anonymous because they are not fully expressing their sexuality.

The path to popularity leads through hooking up. Is there a better and easier way to connect with boys? Once the boys know that you hook up, they take notice; they see you; they seek you out; they offer you attention and more.

Any old connection feels better than disconnection. If you’re a woman it’s relatively easy. You put out and they connect with you. They may not want to talk to you in the morning; they may not know your name; but still, you could have spent the evening at home, alone.

If you feel badly about it, your feminist enablers will tell you that it’s just a sign of residual guilt. You need to do it more, to be more free and open about your sexuality.

Of course, anyone can hook up. There is no real distinction in that. You become one of the easy girls on campus, the kind that boys seek out when they are looking for some quick, painless pleasure.

Even if you become the hook up queen, you have still not reached the status of a genuine campus celebrity.

If your name is Lena Chen, and you are attending Harvard, you then take the next step: you start a sex blog. Link here.

Allow Chen to describe her experience: “During my sophomore year, a long-simmering discontentment with this academic pressure cooker led me to start SexAndTheIvy.com, a blog about my undergraduate misadventures and the lessons that I learned from screwing and screwing up. I wrote about navigating hookups, self-medicating with alcohol, and feeling like a misfit at an elite school where everyone else seemed so much more self-assured. But unlike your typical diary of a disenchanted youth, these thoughts were published on the Web for all to see. Little did I know that the website would find its way into the browser windows of sympathetic students across the country. For the next two and a half years in college, in between attending queer and feminist rallies and talking friends out of careers in finance, I confessed insecurities and gave graphic accounts of sexcapades to an audience of thousands, many of them my own peers.”

How did that work out for her? It didn’t work out very well. Somehow or other, no one ever warned her about the social cost of flagrant exhibitionism.  

She got attention, far more attention than she had ever imagined, but it was the wrong kind of attention. She became a campus celebrity. Everyone was talking about her. Yet, it didn't feel exhilarating. It felt like shame.

In her words: “Shame wasn't something that came naturally to me. It was something that I learned against my will, and now that I know it inside and out, I don't know how one can possibly unlearn it. Sexual freedom is a sham. Over my blogging years, I've become acquainted with enough erstwhile sexual radicals to realize that my story is not an isolated incident.”

Somehow or other, her feminists enablers had not told her about this. They cared less for her well being than for their cause. Their advice had flung her out into a world she did not understand, the world of public reputation.

And they had not told her that once you make a spectacle of your sexuality, once you become a campus celebrity, it is very difficult to go back to the status quo ante tempestatem.

Lena Chen gradually became aware of her dilemma. The more she understood it, the worse it became. As she tried to figure out how to make it all go away, and as she started seeing how difficult it is to banish images from other people’s minds, she nearly had a nervous breakdown.

Was her situation hopeless? Is a bad reputation forever? Not at all. It just feels that way. This is yet another reason, when you are feeling like the world has just collapsed around you and that you are irrevocably lost, why you should not go with your feelings.

Difficult, yes; painful, yes; very hard, yes; hopeless, no.

You may believe that the Mad Ave. term, "rebranding", is an offense against everything you hold sacred, but Chen managed to use it to her advantage,.

She found a boyfriend; happily stopped writing her sex blog; and set out to rebrand herself.

here she describes her transformation: “Trolling my blog isn't interesting anymore now that I'm not habitually liquored-up and bed-hopping. I got my shit together, gained the respect of others in my field, and now I play house with my boyfriend. I share recaps of events I've spoken at and update readers with travel announcements. I post pictures of my extremely photogenic dog and the home-cooked dinner I made from scratch. I've built a persona and a brand. I'm Lena Chen, the Harvard girl who went wild, then went Betty Homemaker, and retained her feminist street cred to boot. For the most part, these aren't just superficial changes. My close friends remark that I'm more stable than I've ever been. My readers -- including those who have been reading me for years -- marvel at my seemingly perfect relationship and ask me how I make it seem so effortless. In three short years, I transitioned from divulging every secret worry to refraining from revealing any vulnerabilities at all.”

Losing respect is easy. Regaining it is difficult, painful, and time consuming.

Clearly, it would have been better had Chen never written a sex blog. But her ability to recover her reputation and her dignity shows the way for young women who have found themselves in similar situations.

How Much Does Character Count on Wall Street?

Who is responsible for the financial crisis? What is the ruling ethos on Wall Street and in the financial world? Did the Wall Street culture fail, or did flawed human beings make bad decisions?

If human beings bear some responsibility, why has no one been punished? What happened to justice?

Of course, there’s punishment and then there’s punishment. Being criminally indicted is one thing; being ostracized, losing your reputation and good name, is quite another.

The first requires the workings of the criminal justice system. The second requires a culture that promotes good character and sanctions bad character.

Call the first a guilt culture and the second a shame culture.

Yesterday Steven Davidoff offered an important analysis of the cultural ethos that pertains in the financial world. Link here.

He sees a prevailing system that no longer values reputation and good character but will tolerate anything you can get away with.

In a shame culture what matters is your reputation, your character, your good name.

If you get caught behaving unethically by putting your interest ahead of your client’s, then your reputation suffers and people will no longer do business with you.

In a guilt culture, what matters is whether or not you have broken a law, thus, whether or not you can be indicted and convicted by the criminal justice system.

Davidoff is certainly not suggesting that everyone who works in finance has bad character. Yet, he does provide examples of individuals who bore some responsibility for the financial crisis, but who did not lose their reputations.

They were not ostracized; they did not become pariahs in the financial world; they ended up with great new jobs.

Davidoff cites these examples: “Former directors of Lehman Brothers and Bear Steans still serve on the boards of public companies, and one, Jerry A. Grundhofer, a former director of Lehman, is on the Citigroup board. Traders responsible for disastrous mortgage bets have easily found lucrative jobs in finance.

"Or take Daniel H. Mudd, who not long after being ousted as chief executive Fannie Mae was named chief executive of the Fortress Investment Group. At Fortress, Mr. Mudd has been paid a salary and stock options worth more than $30 million in the last two years. This was despite the failure of Fannie Mae while he was at the helm, an event that wiped out almost all shareholder value and has cost the federal government more than $90 billion.”

It isn’t just that these bankers were not sanctioned for their failures; they were rewarded.

Has this always been the case? Davidoff says that it was not: “During the Great Depression, Goldman Sachs was caught up in a scandal involving the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation. The taint of the scandal drove away business for more than a decade and made the firm extremely focused on reputation.”

Why does reputation no longer matter? Davidoff sees a number of forces conspiring to undermine the value of good character.

In brief, he says that the investment banking business has become less about people, thus less about reputation and character, and more about “size and technology.”

When trading and brokerage became more important than investment banking, the value of reputation and relationships diminished.

This was even more true as trading became mechanized and digitized. The geeks and nerds who were running trading platforms were not sociable people. Their jobs and their compensation did not depend on their contacts, their client relationships, and their good name.

The larger these firms became, the less important single individuals were. Where banking used to be conducted by smallish investment banks with a limited number of partners whose capital was at risk, reputation and relationships were the lifeblood of the business.

When the firms became larger and more public, no single individual could really be held to account for the activities that were being run by quants and trading programs.

One imagines that many senior executives barely understood what the traders were doing.

And there’s more. Davidoff explains: “Again, individuals were less important as size dominated. A client now trades or does business with a bank based on its positions or ability to make a market or loan. The executive at the bank executing the transaction is unimportant.”

This diminished any single executive’s personal responsibility: “These trends have become omnipresent in corporate America generally as it too has exponentially grown. And when these companies failed or otherwise committed a wrongdoing, their size allowed their reputation to be ignored. After all, it wasn’t the executive’s fault that the bad event happened. It was just the economy or other external factors.”

Finally, officers and directors of banks and major corporations are personal friends with each other. They are more likely to excuse friends who might have institutional authority but who did not really know what was going on.

Given that they themselves do not know everything that is going on in their own companies, and do not want to be held accountable for it, they are more than happy to excuse people they consider to be their personal friends.

Given this amoral universe, a universe where reputation does not really count, Davidoff believes that it was inevitable that the government would step in to impose more stringent regulations.

In his words: “In the absence of reputation, the government and regulators act as substitutes to ensure appropriate conduct. The government becomes the enforcer through civil and criminal actions for law-breaking. So what you get is more law to cover for lost reputation.”

Here we have something of a chicken/egg problem. Which came first: the diminishing importance of reputation or the increased regulation?

After all, the banking industry was not exactly unregulated. As many wise commentators noted at the time, the financial industry was heavily regulated. Surely, it was much more regulated than were hedge funds.

It makes some good sense, too. The more you live in a regulatory universe that attempts to control your every gesture and decision, the more you will feel honor-bound to find the fault line in the system, the one thing that they forgot to forbid.

Once you are thinking in terms of what you can get away with because no one has thought to prohibit it, you are not too far away from thinking about which prohibited actions you can get away with because you are unlikely to get caught.

If the financial crisis began in a highly regulated industry, then perhaps the way to restore the industry is to reduce regulations, not to double down with them.

Forced Marriages and Honor-Based Violence

The BBC reports that there has been a marked increase in forced marriages and honor-based violence in Wales. Link here. Being pusillanimous to a fault, the BBC never mentions which particular community might be the source of these horrors. Of course, the local police force has set up a community outreach program and a support system for the girls who manage to escape this terror. 


Even though British Prime Minister David Cameron recently declared that multiculturalism did not work, it is alive and well in Wales. Of all places.


Unfortunately, when no one has the courage to write the word Islam next to these barbaric practices, those who practice them are spared the shame and opprobrium that they so richly deserve. Absent such shaming, these practices will continue, and young Muslim girls in Great Britain will continue to be sacrificed to the gods of multicultural diversity.

Do Apologies Fail?

Many years ago I wrote a book called: Saving Face: America and the Politics of Shame. Ostensibly, and actually, I wanted to clarify the distinction between two of the most important negative emotions, two emotions that involve social sanctions for bad behavior: shame and guilt.

Since most people use the terms interchangeably, as though they were just two sides of the same coin, clear distinctions seemed needed and desirable.

Differentiating guilt and shame is not that difficult. Guilt involves breaking the law. If you commit a crime or transgression, you will feel guilt.

Guilt is an anxious anticipation of punishment. Once you receive the punishment, your guilt is over and done with.

Shame is about failure. When you let the team down, do not show up for an appointment, use the wrong fork, or lead your company into bankruptcy… you feel shame. Since there are different levels of social responsibility, there are different degrees of shame.

In none of those cases have you broken any laws or committed any crime or transgressed any taboos.

Since shame involves a loss of reputation, overcoming it is far more difficulty than overcoming guilt. You can only overcome shame through several clearly defined steps.

First, you should apologize, thereby announcing in public that you take sole responsibility for your own failure. An apology must be stated with sufficient sincerity to be credible and meaningful.

Saying you are sorry is not enough. If your face is not contorted in a severe grimace, your apology will feel insincere.

Second, when you apologize you are vowing never to do it again. If you apologize for failing to show up or for failing to keep your composure, and if you should then fail to show up or lose control, your actions will have voided your apology.

If the purpose of the apology is to erase the mark of disrepute you have brought on yourself, going back on your vow will make that mark more indelible.

Third, in most, but not all cases, an apology should be accompanied by your making some amends for your failure. If you have failed your corporate or political responsibilities, you will need to resign your position and to withdraw from society for a time.

Shame involves ostracism; it’s primary sanction is isolation from the group. An apology accompanied by self-withdrawal saves the group the trouble of ostracizing you. You should not, in other words, apologize and then go back to work as though nothing had happened.

In the long run, apology will put you on the path toward restoring your reputation. It says that the failing was yours and yours alone, but that it is not the meaning of your life. It says that even though you showed yourself to be untrustworthy, you want people to overlook your failing and to trust you again.

Thus, apology erases a failure in the sense that it declares that the action was not a meaningful expression of who you are.

Often shame and guilt are confused. Under some circumstances you can feel both at the same time.

When a financial officer embezzles company funds he is committing a crime. Unless he is a sociopath he will feel some guilt. Hopefully, he will be prosecuted and incarcerated.

At the same time he has failed to uphold his responsibility to his company, his colleagues, and his family. Thus, he should also feel ashamed and owes many people an apology.

On the other hand, a neighbor who had promised to water your plants during your vacation but forgot to do it will feel shame, but not guilt. He has not broken any laws; he will not be indicted and prosecuted. He owes you an apology and should make amends.

I am reviewing these points because a reputable publication, Scientific American, recently reported on some research into the power of apology and grossly misunderstood the issue. Link here.

Worse yet, it drew conclusions that can easily mislead people.

The research in question claims that apologies fail to live up to expectations. It suggests that, as a general rule, people feel much better about an imagined apology than they do about a real one.

One might read this and conclude that apology as a tool of relationship repair is overrated, and thus, that when you offer one, you are essentially engaging in an empty ritual. Such a conclusion would not tend to encourage sincere apologies.

Since I have often argued in favor of the ritual of apology, I naturally find this all to be unacceptable.

Apology is a social ritual. It does not fail. People may fail when their actions do not conform to what the ritual requires. When that happens apology does not do what it should be doing. But that does not mean that it has failed. It means that you have failed.

There are many problems with the research.

First, it suggests that people apologize for transgressions. In the experiment the researchers invented, those who receive an apology have been cheated out of some money.

As I suggested, apology, by definition, does not focus on transgression, thus sin and crime. It involves a failure to fulfill a social obligation.

When people apologize for cheating you, they do owe you an apology, not for transgressing or cheating, but for betraying your trust and confidence.

Second, the researchers assert that our “cultural wisdom” sees apology as “the first step in mending a broken relationship.”

Actually, apology is the first step to repairing a broken reputation. Hopefully, restoring your reputation will help to repair your relationships, but the two are not the same.

Third, the research suggests that the purpose of apology is to help us to “forget about the bad things that have happened.”

Even though apology is a first step in that direction, it is not about erasing bad events, but about helping people to forget your failures, to encourage them to see you differently.

Apology is only a first step in a long process. The fact that an immediate apology does not produce the expected results in the experiment's subjects does not cast aspersions on the social ritual as much as it does on the failures of these researchers to understand the terms of their experiment.

Fourth, in the research experiment those whose trust was betrayed received written apologies.

If apology expresses shame and if shame involves the loss of face, an effective apology should be offered face-to-face. At the very least, the person’s face should be visible.

Reading facial expressions is one of the most important ways he have of telling how sincere the apology is. Sending an apology by letter, by email, or by text deprives you of that information.

Fifth, in the experiment, the subjects receive apologies for having been cheated, but they do not actually receive any recompense.

If they found this reality less satisfying than an imagined apology, good for them. They were rejecting faked apologies but maintained their belief in the effectiveness of apology.

Their imagined apologies were closer to the correct ritual than were those offered in the experiment.

As I suggested, the experimental subjects understood something that the researchers missed: apologies don’t fail. People fail. If you don’t understand that, you do not understand apology.

Bloggers Anonymous

Is anonymity the enemy of free speech?

Can the marketplace of ideas continue to function when people can freely hide their identities?

Do people write anonymously on the internet because they want to slander and defame others with impunity?

Yesterday, Stanley Fish addressed some of these issues in a compelling column. He was writing about a book that offers a shrill attack on the internet. Entitled The Offensive Internet, the book argues that since the internet allows authors to hide their identities, it promoting an especially virulent form of assault, and thereby is ruining public discourse. Link here.

Stanley Fish sums up one part of the argument: ‘The practice of withholding the identity of the speaker is strategic, and one purpose of the strategy (this is the second problem with anonymity) is to avoid responsibility and accountability for what one is saying. Anonymity, Martha Nussbaum, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago observes, allows Internet bloggers ‘to create for themselves a shame-free zone in which they can inflict shame on others.’ The power of the bloggers, she continues, ‘depends on their ability to insulate their Internet selves from responsibility in the real world, while ensuring real-world consequences‘ for those they injure.”

Surely, this is alarmist hyperbole. Just as surely, it is an exaggeration, paying lip service to the marketplace of ideas while attacking, in the most uncivil terms, the internet itself.

As Fish adds: “In the course of the volume the Internet is characterized as a cesspool, a porn store, a form of pinkeye, a raunchy fraternity, a graffiti–filled bathroom wall, a haven for sociopaths, and the breeder of online mobs who are no better than ‘masked Klan members‘ in their determination to ‘interfere with victims’ basic rights.’"

While no one would grant the internet moral agency, this level of exaggeration suggests that the authors are not just exercised over unprotected slander, but that they have a larger agenda. It appears that they are making the case for regulatory control of the blogosphere because they feel that it brings out the worst in human nature. Better yet, they seem to believe that the worst is the truth of human nature. They have so little faith in freedom or in human judgment that they see nothing but calamity coming from the free and open expression of ideas.

Regardless of the high tech aspect of this argument, its proponents are saying that human beings are too evil for freedom.

If the authors really wanted to rectify the fact that our culture is awash in incivility, they should have started by toning down their own overheated rhetoric and by practicing civility themselves.

I would not deny that some people hide behind anonymity to slander, libel, and defame. None of these is constitutionally protected free speech. All can be prosecuted or litigated.

Were it simply the question of passing a law that requires internet providers to reveal the identities, if known, of those who commit such actions, most of us would be in favor.

Beyond that small minority, some people blog anonymously because they are shy and discreet or because they want to protect their reputations or their lives.

Several prominent psych bloggers write anonymously for professional reasons. Among them are Robin of Berkeley, Shrinkwrapped, and F*ck Feelings.

Others might fear the consequences of saying things that others might find blasphemous. Cartoonist Molly Norris stepped forth in her own name to sponsor a contest about drawing a cartoon of Mohammed.

For her pains, the FBI insisted that she go into witness protection and change her name.

A whistleblower might be wiser to blog about corporate dereliction under the guise of anonymity. An assistant professor who is up for tenure might think it wise to express his politically incorrect opinions anonymously.

Anonymity is a classical way of avoiding censorship. In a culture where people are quick to take offense, and where differences of opinion are often denounced as hate speech, why would it not be reasonable for some people to blog anonymously?

Stanley Fish is correct to say that the identity of the author of a blog post, or of any verbal expression, constitutes part of the message.

If you receive a stock tip you would probably want know whether it was coming from Warren Buffett or Stanley Fish.

But, we also know that a person who chooses to mask his identity also loses some of his credibility.

If it were simply a question of anonymous shaming, that would be one thing. But the intellectuals who wrote this book do not limit themselves to shaming. They also want to regulate what they call the intentional distribution of disinformation.

As Fish presents the argument: “Rather then producing truth, the free and open marketplace of the Internet ‘will lead many people to accept damaging and destructive falsehoods,’ and unless there is ‘some kind of chilling effect on false statements,’ the ‘proper functioning of democracy itself‘ may be endangered.”

Of course, there is a difference between defamatory speech and falsehoods. And then there is the problem of knowing when falsehood is being purveyed intentionally. When we start talking about threats to democracy we are not talking about a teenager calling another teenager a slut.

But then, who might it be who is purveying destructive falsehoods that are threatening democracy itself? And who is going to decide what should or should not be allowed to be reported?

Do you imagine that these writers believe that the New York Times and MSNBC distort the news? From their leftist perspective these publications present the unvarnished truth. Their enemy is Fox News. It is usually what leftists are referring to, without naming it, when they talk about puveyors of lies and falsehoods.

And aren’t these great intellectuals most lathered up over the fact that they have lost their monopoly control of what information the public can access?

Aren’t they just pretending to get lathered up over internet slander because they are looking for a toehold to open the door to censorship and to restore their own power over the marketplace of ideas?

The Carnival of Negative Emotions

Life would be much better if intellectual debates were conducted with more rigor.

Thanks to Prof. Martha Nussbaum we now confuse disgust over certain (but not all) sexual practices with homophobia. Worse yet, we have been convinced that disgust and phobia are the same as hatred.

One might expect that a serious philosopher who studies the question of negative emotions would distinguish between them.

Disgust is fundamentally an alimentary emotion; it involves feelings akin to nausea and causes people to avoid or to expel any ingestible or ingested object that would damage their health.

It may be true that many people feel disgust at the image of genital-anal contact; some feel disgust at the image of genital-oral contact. Others overcome such feelings in order to pursue sexual gratification.

Such feelings do not make them phobic and do not make them haters. By and large the people who feel the most disgust at the pictorial representation of sexual acts are women. We do not want to say that women are bigoted against male homosexuals for as much.

And we do not want people to overcome disgust altogether. No one would suggest that people stop washing their hands after going to the bathroom, for example.

By definition, a phobia is an excessive fear of something you have every right to be afraid of. People are phobic about spiders, heights, crowds, enclosed spaces, snakes, and rats.

A person who is phobic about snakes or rats is not, therefore, a bigot. If you are afraid of snakes and rats, that does not mean you hate them or even that you want to destroy them. It means that you are going to make a very strong effort to avoid them. If you are phobic about heights, you do not hate tall buildings. You will simply make every effort to keep your feet on the ground.

Both disgust at contaminants and fear of dangers to one’s physical existence involve biological survival.

Disgust is therefore not a social emotion; it involves your biological organism.

When individuals or even groups of people are persecuted or scapegoated disgust is rarely the issue.

It is possible to conduct a human sacrifice and not hate the person you are sacrificing. What would the sacrifice be worth if you were not sacrificing someone or something of value.

To understand human sacrifice or a human holocaust we need to understand the workings of guilt.

Some people are scapegoated to placate an angry god. When a group feels that it is being punished for a crime, it will choose someone, or even a group of people, to accept the punishment, and to pay the price of the crime.

When people are punished for being unclean, this also means that they are guilty of having transgressed a law. I recognize that the rhetoric involves a promise of social catharsis, but I do not believe that the reaction concerns disgust, as much as it involves other negative emotions, like envy and resentment.

Along with shame, guilt is an emotion that involves socialization.

You feel guilt for transgressing a law and you feel shame for failing to uphold your responsibilities as a member of society.

Guilt and shame do not involve your survival. They ensure your social being. Being a member of a group requires you to obey the group’s laws and that to fulfill your responsibilities toward others.

If you fail on either of these accounts, you will experience shame or guilt, depending on the nature of the violation.

Among the negative emotions, anxiety belongs to the complex involving guilt. It should be distinguished from fear

You feel fear when in the presence of a real danger-- be it a bear in the woods or a mugger in the alley. You can choose to fight or flee or even freeze before a threatening object or situation.

Anxiety differs from fear because when you are anxious you are aware of having done something wrong, of having broken a rule, and you anticipate punishment. When you are afraid of being punished, you will feel guilt and will anxiously anticipate punishment.

Anxiety does have one thing in common with fear. It involves fear of physical punishment. Crimes are punished either by physical incarceration or the infliction of physical pain.

But guilt, as opposed to fear, has a moral dimension and a social dimension.

Shame involves an immediate recognition that you have failed to uphold your responsibilities as a member of the community. Whether that involves keeping your pants on, showing up at appointments, or fulfilling your responsibilities as a corporate officer, the feeling of shame alerts you to your failure. Shame shows that you have let down the group.

In a culture that emphasizes shame, punishment involves ostracism and shunning rather than physical punishment. A culture that cuts off the hands of thieves is not a shame culture.

These are hardly the only forms of negative emotions. If shame and guilt involve your social being, your membership in a group, another set of negative emotions defines your status within the group.

Within this category we find: envy, resentment, contempt.

Politicians who try to provoke class warfare often attempt to cultivate these negative emotions. They want you to be resentful or envious of those who are more successful than you.

While we tend to direct our envy and resentment toward those we perceive to be our betters, however, we reserve our contempt for those we consider our inferiors.

Class warriors do not limit themselves to envy and resentment. They try to turn these into contempt, by convincing the lower classes to look down on the upper classes. Where the lower classes, for example, earn their way, the upper classes cheat and steal. Where the lower classes contain a vital human energy, the upper classes are dead inside.

As I suggested the Holocaust of European Jews involved envy, resentment, and contempt more than disgust.

Another category of negative emotions involves self-regard. When you have an exaggerated sense of your own self-worth you are either arrogant or vain. When you undervalue your own abilities, you become demoralized or desperate or helpless. Evidently, much of what we call depression falls within the category of unreasonably diminished sense of self-worth.

We feel anger toward people who threaten our self-regard, whether they are threatening our face or our illusion of face. We express anger because we seek to defend our reputation and because we want to affect a reconciliation.

When anger fails and when the offense is egregious it can turn into hatred.

Hatred is not about defending our honor but about destroying the other person… for a crime real or imagined. It is more about rough justice than about asserting your dignity. It is more about righting a wrong you believe was committed against your person.

When you hate someone you want to destroy him, to punish him for a crime real or imagined, a crime that can only be expiated by his being punished.

This gives us three sets of negative emotions. Some negative emotions sanction the kinds of bad behavior that would threaten your membership in a social group.

Others tend to undermine cooperative enterprise by making you feel that when others are more successful than you they have stolen from you. Essentially, these pervert the desire to succeed.

Finally, another class of negative emotions involves misunderstanding your value, your ability, your station, and your status.

"Americans Vote for Pride"

My new RightNetwork column, "Americans Vote for Pride" is up. It explores one of the overlooked reasons why Americans voted as they did in the last election. Call it an exercise in Poli Psych. Link here.

Is Sarah Palin Being Defensive?

Despite herself, Lizzie Wurtzel confessed a grudging admiration for Sarah Palin. She was drawn to Palin because, to her mind, Palin does not take s#*t from anyone. Which is both true and fair. Link here.

Wurtzel is right to admire a woman who can stand up for herself and defend her dignity without engaging in histrionic displays, without pretending to be a man, without complaining about the injustice of it all, and without relying on a male presence to back her up.

One should mention that all human beings are constantly being put in positions where they need to stand up for themselves and defend their dignity from insults and indignities.

It is very difficult to do this, to assert oneself, while remaining dignified.

We also recall that Jaclyn Friedman recommended that women who are being shamed by others should respond by turning the tables, by shaming them. Link here.

Shame is a wondrous weapon, but it must be used judiciously. There’s shaming and there’s shaming. If you are going to do it as flagrantly and openly as Nicola Briggs did on that New York subway train, you have best be sure that someone has your back. Link here.

And it is also important to note that responding to a criminal assault is not the same thing as responding to an insult.

One can only wonder whether Friedman would agree that Sarah Palin effectively shamed the mainstream media when she chose an interesting way to respond to yet another of its attacks on her intelligence?

Several days ago on the Glenn Beck program Sarah Palin misspoke. She confused North and South Korea. She did it during an extended conversation about recent events on the Korean peninsula. Her error was only one of the many references Palin had correctly made to the two Koreas. Within seconds she corrected herself.

Of course, the mainstream media pounced on Palin and declared that the incident proved that she was too stupid to be president.

I will mention in passing that calling people stupid, demeaning their intelligence, is also a shaming tactic. It is not quite the same thing as the kind of shaming we are talking about here, because it does not involve defending your dignity. It is a gratuitous slur, not an assertion of dignity.

So, Palin chose to fight back, on her Facebook page, by posting the following parody. She, or one of her media advisers, wrote out a mock-Thanksgiving proclamation that might have been given by President Barack Obama. The statement contains a dozen or so of Obama's more egregious errors, errors that the media has happily ignored.

Here is Palin’s text: “My fellow Americans in all 57 states, the time has changed for come. With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago, we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system. We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy, and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. And let’s face it, everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma and they end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early, and they got some treatment, and ah, a breathalyzer, or an inhalator. I mean, not a breathalyzer, ah, I don’t know what the term is in Austrian for that…” Link here.

The original post has links that will take you to Youtube videos of Obama making these verbal gaffes.

In truth, Palin was not primarily mocking Obama. She was shaming the journalists and media commentators who pretend not to notice when Barack Obama misspeaks, but who fly into full attack mode whenever a Republican makes even a minor error.

Palin is responding to an insult. She is shaming the journalists by pointing out, in a charming way, that they lack journalistic integrity.

Palin is being charming, not whiny or complainy, because in most everyday situations, you cannot defend your dignity by looking undignified yourself. A successful defense draws attention to the person you want to diminish and only to that person.

It all seemed pretty clear to me, almost to the point where it was not even very controversial.

Nevertheless, this morning I was reading conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin, currently with the Commentary blog, soon to be with the Washington Post blog. Here‘s how Rubin described Palin‘s mock-presidential proclamation: “More defensiveness from Sarah Palin. Not helpful for a presidential contender. Dead-on for a conservative community organizer.” Link here.

Respectfully, I disagree. To me Palin’s statement is anything but defensive. If you read down her post you will read the rationale for her action: “When we the people are effective in holding America’s free press accountable for responsible and truthful reporting, then we shall all have even more to be thankful for!”

Shouldn’t the press be held accountable for its own bias? Most of us leave the job to media critics, but is it really that bad for a politician to fight back, to defend herself with humor? Is it helpful to call her defensive for doing so? Would it be better if she just shrunk into the corner and took it?

The real issue is not whether this makes Palin a better or worse candidate. It concerns how you should defend your pride self-respect when they are under attack.

I will add that Rubin’s last phrase: “Dead-on for a conservative community organizer” is a bit too snarky even for me. It almost seems like Rubin feels a need to take Palin down a notch herself.

Should She Fight Back?

By now most everyone has seen the Youtube post of the woman on the New York subway who screams: “Then I see his penis out.” Link here.

And we have all thrilled to see the woman fight back against a man who had been trying to press his erect organ against her.

But what is the moral lesson here?

Those of a more Kantian bent, like Jaclyn Friedman, want to universalize the response. To her, all women, faced with harassing behavior, should fight back. If harassment were always to elicit an aggressive response, it would, in her view, stop. Link here.

Why don’t all women fight back as effectively as the woman on the subway? According to Friedman, women feel ashamed, as though they are responsible for what happened to them.

If only they could get over their feelings of shame they would call out the men who harass them.

Speaking of shame, Friedman is especially thrilled that the woman in question is shaming the man who was trying to harass her.

Shaming him in front of those who were sharing the subway ride, but also, once the encounter was taped, to the general public, and hopefully, to law enforcement authorities.

Women need to overcome their own shame while shaming the man who are harassing them. So says, Jaclyn Friedman.

Keep in mind, however, that a man who is willing to expose himself in public has largely overcome his sense of shame. Many of the men who indulge in this kind of harassment are actually proud of themselves for doing it.

While I am certainly in favor of shaming as a punishment, the truth is that the value of the video lies more in its probity as evidence for the prosecution than in its ability to shame the perpetrator.

Shame is a very tricky and very difficult concept. It should, as they say, be handled with extreme care. No one wants to encourage people to become shameless.

If we take our analysis to the next level, we must recognize, as Friedman does, that this woman is empowered and protected by the fact that she and her harasser are surrounded by other people, mostly, by the evidence of the video, by people of the masculine gender.

As Friedman puts it: “It’s not like she's in actual danger -- there are a million people around, some of whom even have cameras out. He's not a threat to her physically in this situation.”

This is not a minor detail. Would Friedman recommend the same response if the woman were in actual danger?

The video may look like a tale of female empowerment. In truth, this woman is empowered by the presence of men, all of whom are presumed to be on her side.

She is relying on the masculine instinct to protect women. Most men look severely askance at what the man is doing. And most of them would help a woman who was in distress for being harassed.

If this is a female empowerment narrative, its basis would be that women cannot count on men to protect them, because all men are harassers, actual and potential.

Sometimes fighting back is right; sometimes it is wrong. To say that it is right in all cases is simply wrong. To say that it is wrong in all cases is also wrong.

Compare the woman on the subway to another woman, named Virginia, who wrote to Margo Howard, advice columnist on the WOWOWOW blog. Here is her story: “I am utterly humiliated! I’m 32, the mother of a 14-year-old daughter, ‘Sarah,’ and a general supermom: intelligent, athletic, attractive and competent. My daughter worships me, and her friends think I’m terrific. I’ve taught Sarah to be independent and assertive, and I always try to set the example.
“A few days ago, Sarah and I came home from shopping and walked in on a couple of young punks burglarizing our home. Assertive me froze! I put my arms around Sarah and told the guys to take what they want and not hurt us. Thankfully, we were not harmed, but we were left on a bathroom floor bound and gagged with duct tape — safe but feeling helpless and humiliated. Neither of us could get loose, and we had to lie there squirming for hours until my husband came home and found us.
“Never during the time we spent bound did Sarah cry, and her fierce efforts to get loose long after I had given up made me feel proud. But her first words when our gags were removed were, ‘Mom, we could have taken them. Why did you let them tape us up?’ Those words punished me more than being confronted by robbers, more than spending hours tied up and gagged. I felt I had let my daughter down. I don’t think I’ll ever recover from the feeling that I gave in without fighting. How do I make this up to her and regain my sense of competence and authority? — Virginia” Link here.

Clearly, Virginia, and her daughter, have both learned that women should always fight back. Perhaps they have read Jaclyn Friedman, perhaps not. At least, they have drunk from the same source.

Whatever Virginia had been taught in Women’s Studies, she forgot it all when she and her daughter were confronted by punk burglars. She instantly shifted into survival mode and chose submission over confrontation. 

Here is Margo Howard‘s response: “I beg to differ. Unless your teenage daughter has a black belt in karate, there’s no way the two of you could have ‘taken them.’ And even if you thought you had a chance, it wouldn’t have been a wise thing — or a sure thing. In such a situation, law enforcement people stress that you acquiesce to avoid the robbers becoming rattled and harming you. The things they took are only things. Your instincts were right, and your daughter’s were immature. (Or she’s been watching too much television.)
“This experience was an extreme version of a teachable moment, and rather than feel humiliated or that you’ve failed, make the lesson to your daughter be that the correct response is not to get into a physical altercation with two men — even “young punks” — intent on criminal activity. You in no way let her down, and I hope you will reinforce the wisdom of behaving as you did.”

Of course, Margo is right. Even if they both had studied martial arts, what would have happened if the punks had studied it also? And what if the punks had had weapons?

Do you want to bet your life on your ability to overpower two men who are, at the least, significantly stronger than you?

One should be careful not to tell women that a few lessons in karate and kung fu will so thoroughly empower them that they will be able to take down men who are bigger and stronger than they are.

Virginia’ instincts were right; her daughter’s were not just immature, and not merely the result of watching too much television. Her daughter had learned from her mother the lesson that feminists have been purveying.

Virginia’s is not exactly a happy ending. She ends up feeling humiliated and, to compound the humiliation, she has to explain to her daughter why the advice that she had been handing out now appears to be so much braggadocio.

Humiliated, yes, but also alive. Dare I say that the story could have had a much more unhappy ending.

Now Virginia feels humiliated for having been found out. She is not equal to her boasts. But how humiliated, how ashamed would she have felt if she had decided to fight back, and if her confrontational attitude had led to the burglars hurting one or both of them?

As a mother Virginia has a moral responsibility to protect her child. When their lives were at risk, her moral sense came to the fore and she chose not to take the risk.

It was surely the right thing to do.