Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

you think this was sexual harassment?

How on earth is this not?

i think victims of harassment have to know it's going on?

if my own college exp is anything to go by (lo these many years past) frats and men's sports teams putting together 'bang books' like these is pretty common! can't really fathom the impulse to, like, systematize, write down and then publish your locker room talk. but then again i stayed out of locker rooms entirely until i was in my 30s.

this almost exact thing happened when i was in (small private liberal arts) school. a photocopy of something like this, pics and ratings and comments, leaked. it was a big school controversy but iirc nobody really got punished? maybe some kind of forced apology, then a campus workshop day on women's issues. cancelling the team's season is awesome, shows some guts from the administration.

there is the odd practice of punishing kids within a sport for non-sports related infractions they did -- which leads to some really messed up thinking if the acts become criminal. like, thanks for victimizing me, your 4 game suspension or w/e doesn't really address my life at all.

xp so it's only a problem when people don't know about it?

i think you mean 'do', and obviously that doesn't follow. the question is what 'it' is.

It's not really non-sports related, it was fellow members of the soccer program they treated this way.

j., read the damn article that you posted, the people in the "book" did have knowledge it was going on.

beyond that, the idea that knowledge of it could have been contained and remain is so laughable as to be totally moot

xp four years after the fact

i'd be shocked if this is the first recruiting group of women's players to know about the book, it seems way more likely that tolerance for this kind of bullshit is thankfully dropping

j you are a shithead. it has been happening every year since 2012.

or since at least 2012

and it got out, and the players who were "rated", commented on, and given a "position" have seen it

doesn't fit into this thread at all

you guys sure turn into morons when you think you're being opposed in your moral condemnations

lol sure dude

good luck caping for guys who make bangbooks in the future

can't really fathom the impulse to, like, systematize, write down and then publish your locker room talk.

It's sort of a natural extension of the '1-10' game, the impulse to quantify and compare and the impulse to document your preferences.

if only there was a nearby messageboard that might demonstrate the popularity of this impulse

i don't think the documentarian or quantifying impulses are involved (except insofar as they are caught up in a competitive spirit that bleeds over from the intended activity of the team) so much as is a folk-traditional impulse that is probably common to a lot of sub-institutional social groupings in settings like colleges and schools, where there is a high degree of turnover, thus a low degree of institutional memory and a tendency to dissipation of the group's achievement-enhancing potential.

the academic article on microagressions and 'cultures of victimhood' that made the rounds last year distinguishes between cultures of honor, dignity, and (they claim) victimhood (there was an l.a. times reply that countered this with a culture of solidarity). the behavior internal to the men's team was clearly an outgrowth/undergrowth of honor culture, and it seems like for the most part the school's cancellation of their season is consistent with motives and reasons that are a part of sports' residual honor culture: the punishment is to lose the chance to achieve and the status that comes from it, and the reason for the punishment is that on a variety of levels the team members' behavior was dishonorable. not that it was harmful in any superficially perceptible way (maybe on their own characters, on the continuation of the team culture), or disrespectful (somehow, for sure, but in an indirect enough way that consequentialist pleading gets back into the picture, and anyone inclined toward respect-talk could just say that they certainly never would have talked this way TO anyone), but that it mars the status of the players and anyone who's getting vicarious honor from them. which maybe accounts for the very natural non-sports/sports transition made in the institution's punitive move.

i think the women's team's letter mostly recognized this, too. there's some move toward employing dignity- and respect-talk (the authors of that academic paper use a sociological frame to look for instances of any form of social control, including ways for offended or injured parties to make appeals to broader constituencies, in order to try to distinguish between the ways they function, and that kind of appeal seems to be at play in the letter), but mostly they use honor-culture language, like you would expect from athletes and high academic achievers, to vindicate their no-lesser status. their parting shot is in the same register: you will never win me (or, less prominently, they remain unaffected: a more stoic undercurrent).

It's not really non-sports related, it was fellow members of the soccer program they treated this way.

― Frederik B, Friday, November 4, 2016 12:10 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

by 'non-sports related' i mean the team was penalized in terms of their play for things they did off-field.

which in a way seems really inadequate to me! if just some dudes in a dorm with no other activity or affiliation put together a book like this, how would they be punished? what do they 'have' that the school could take from them? would they be expelled? would it be referred to law enforcement?

but since these were athletes, they 'have' this extra thing -- playing on the team -- that the school can then remove as punishment, and the community at large just sort of deems this as just.

j do you have that article handy? idk i'm not buying this 'honor culture' stuff off the bat

it's meant to be a historical/descriptive category w.r.t. the civilizing process, take agonistic greeks as a template, run it forward through history whenever there are developments of highly competitive subcultures/activities within broader societies. offences answered personally, patterns of group retribution are common, face- and status-saving considerations prevent actors from minimizing slights unless they're sufficiently superior in status to be able to brush them off, etc. trace the dignity one through, say, stoicism, christianity, the enlightenment. the authors associate it a lot with bourgeois morality, rights-and-grievances talk, etc. their hook is to try to extend it to identifying a supposed upswell of distinctly different modes/methods of social control in the last however many decades (they associate it a lot with identity politics iirc), to be identified w/ 'victimization', associated w/ microaggressions as a rich target of social control behaviors, etc.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272408166_Microaggression_and_Moral_Cultures

the reply to same in the times was by rini.

but since these were athletes, they 'have' this extra thing -- playing on the team -- that the school can then remove as punishment, and the community at large just sort of deems this as just.

on the one hand, this could be preparing them for the real market, after all isn't the point of playing sports largely to make that into your main career? professional sports players, for all their chasing a ball around, are role models, and a lot of money is riding on public perception of these players, this shit isn't going to fly any better on ESPN.

guys who play soccer for harvard aren't going pro

but they beat yale

rah!

i think the relevance of the honor-culture framing is that it gives a context for evaluating the players' talk/'report'-making that has its own resources for resisting a slide into frictionless liberalist interpretations of the privacy that was involved.

it seems significant that they were focused on their women's team counterparts, just as frats tend to focus on sororities despite in theory being able to project their sexual-competition attitude onto any potential conquests. but in a sport like soccer, by now, the women's team are probably nearly on a par in terms of out-group status, so maybe more than in many other sports (i doubt football players focus their in-group status games on i dunno volleyball players) the teams might realistically think of themselves as (sports) separate-but-equals, each fighting for CRIMSON VALOR or whatever, which urges a certain perspective on the question of the worthiness of (sexual) competitors, particularly when the gender division between the teams is taken to mean that there can be no actual sport competition between them. so their egregious refusal to adopt that perspective (whereas you can at least imagine a team chastising itself, internally, for disparaging opposing men's soccer teams in this way, however little they do that in reality) with respect to the women reads as a kind of substitute or proxy competition, a form of internal status-enhancement engaged in for largely homosocial purposes. the team's overt purposes provide some interpretive cover for bad-faith members who want to think of their 'scouting report' as subject to the kind of in-group privacy that a team used to sizing up competitors would claim a right to. but the need (due e.g. to the breach of decorum, common decency, etc.) to keep the report private, because it would be shameful for it to get out, reflects on the 'proxy competition' badly, as ill-won, or worse as not even won or not even contested at all. which diminishes their status qua sports competitors.

Punishment probably hits them where it hurts (good) but does it do anything to unpick the mindset that led up to the bangbook? Does it need to?

(I suppose I mean 'that led up to making and sharing around the bangbook every year'. I get the idea of ranking sexy people as a lol idea that pops into the head, I suppose everyone does, but as usual there should have been a barrier between idea and acting on it.)

laurie penny

http://thebaffler.com/blog/against-bargaining-penny

Months ago, thousands of “citizen therapists”, mental health professionals in the United States, produced a manifesto airing their concerns about what “Trumpism” was doing to the American psyche:

The public rhetoric of Trumpism normalizes what therapists work against in our work: the tendency to blame others in our lives for our personal fears and insecurities and then battle these others instead of taking the healthier but more difficult path of self-awareness and self-responsibility. It also normalizes a kind of hyper-masculinity that is antithetical to the examined life and healthy relationships that psychotherapy helps people achieve. Simply stated, Trumpism is inconsistent with emotionally healthy living—and we have to say so publicly.

Sanity is socially and politically determined—and when politics change, the definition of who is well and unwell, who is sane and who is sick, tends to change with it. The traits of good mental health, of the supposedly well-balanced individual, are often suspiciously similar to those of the compliant citizen, the obedient worker, the dutiful woman—whatever those traits might be, depending on the mood of the world and the whims of the powerful. Those who oppose the existing order can count on being labeled as deranged, as irrational, especially if they make the mistake of showing emotion in a power regime that considers all emotions weakness, all feelings laughable—except the rage of the “white working class,” as long as it is properly harnessed in service of vested interests. What happens, then, when an attitude of outrage, of resistance, becomes reclassified as mental illness?

Is this the thread for this?

https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2016/12/07/hiding-the-tears-in-my-eyes-boys-dont-cry-a-legacy-by-jack-halberstam/

A report of what happened when they tried to screen "Boys Don't Cry" at Reed College in Portland, Or., last week. The director was in attendance and it did not go well.

Both Reed faculty and students are in the comments.

the remark of one of the reed faculty commenting is interesting: 'many of these students don’t believe in either historicity or objective facts'

the latter is not really special for many students, and probably not exactly true to the manner of belief students actually do demonstrate, which is to credit some facts but to advert to a lack of belief in objectivity when it is comfortable or convenient to do so at this point in their lives when their beliefs are in flux, and they do not always know how to balance acknowledgement of facts with the assertion of the validity of e.g. moral norms whose validity is not established in the same way as mundane or scientific facts are.

but i would guess that it's not that they don't ~believe~ in historicity, they just lack any real understanding of it or pre-formal-education sense for it. the scripts that my students reach for whenever we do material on social justice topics to place abstract moments of critique and progress that obviously have some relativity to historical eras, and determine their implications for themselves in the present, are generally so crude that they tend to abet all kinds of evasions and confusions.

could you fill out your third paragraph further? I am intrigued but not clear enough on what the "scripts" in question are, nor on how crudeness is being measured.

As so many theorists have shown, violence can also appear in the form of civility, empathy, absence, indifference and non-appearance.

i'm not on board for this sentence

don't get me wrong, i think there are all kinds of situations in which imposition of "civility" is a bad thing to do to people, I just think there are different bad things in the world, that's one of them, violence is a different one

Whoa @ the Reed College students. I have to say, even though I am just a few years older than these kids, and hung out in activist circles in college, their manner of thinking about representation is totally alien to me. Also just the idea of shouting at someone for being a "cis white bitch" and having that not be seen as radically misogynistic. Is it common for generational gaps to emerge so instantaneously?

First, younger trans oriented audiences want to know if Peirce herself is trans. And they understand her as a non-trans person who is making money from the representation of violence against transgender bodies.

This seems so cynical. I would love to see more transgender actors cast in roles that reflect their lives, but the failure of a filmmaker to do this in the past hardly makes them a bigot.

treeship, do you view anyone younger than you as exemplary of their generation?

why do these shits think that kind of language is fine? seems to be completely undermine their "position".

1. We need to situate this film properly within the history of the representation of transgender characters.

this is key. when engaging w shit you need to look at it in context. there is something about Like/Dislike culture that seems to disable critical thinking. this blogger does a nice job employing that here. great write-up.

1saethyr, no. What i was saying is that the attitudes expressed by these kids seems very unfamiliar based on what I remember from college (but not grad school!) i went to a kind of non politicized college but i hung out with the lefty antiwar crowd. Lots of people were concerned with fighting homophobia and transphobia, but literally no one would have claimed that a lesbian filmmaker didn't have the right to make a film like boys don't cry, that doing so is itself transphobic

that comment thread needs a "so did we get this sorted"

hey stupid college performative "radicals" donald trump is now president of the united states i think you have some more serious things to worry about than imposing your incoherent values on your fellow students.

It seems like activists like to throw around the charge of "making money off of" as though there was some kind of trans movie equals $$$$$ space to be exploited 15 years ago

It seems the student's issues (judging by the comments) are that the film is not an authentic and current enough example of activism. Seems like we've come to a point where it's about who is more progressive than anyone else and more authentic. Observing the turning points in media historically is a beautiful thing, have we reached holier than thou critical mass?

I hope so or we might never hear whiney and lex performatively shut up about it.

lol

Well, people with relatively more privilege than their artistic subjects do get to control the art/media space and grab the $$ that comes from their art or media. I don't have the mental space or patience to read up on this specific example but it's not crazy to say that it would be preferable if more of the benefits went to the subjects or someone (more?) representative of the subjects.

I guess it sorta depends on how "representative" is close enough for you, and the quality and nature of the portrayal, and probably a lot of stuff. I'm sure in terms of objecting to the profitable objectification of marginalized ppl there's a point where you're just harming the chance of any art getting made about them at all? I don't have any zeal for judging anyone else's tipping point though.