On Signifer and Signified, Depiction and Endorsement, and Why Dapper Laughs and Friends Are Complete Tossers

(My laptop got stolen. This is annoying for a couple of reasons, most saliently to this blog because I lost about a dozen posts in various states of completion (along with a load of other stuff that I really should have backed up as well - come back, The Cloud, all is forgiven…). In some ways, though, it's sort of liberating. I'm now back to a clean slate and free to write about whatever I fancy without thinking I should really be using one of the things I've had festering on my hard drive for longer than is probably good for any of us.)

A big thing in the UK in the last couple of weeks has been the rise and fall of a moderately popular Vine user calling himself Dapper Laughs who ended up with his own TV show on ITV 2 (a secondary channel of one of our old commercial terrestrial channels that I can't remember ever consciously watching). His schtick was basically to cat-call and otherwise abuse women in marginally socially acceptable ways and… Hang on, I don't think there was an and. That was it. I mean, I spent half an hour looking through his Vines trying to work out what the fuss was about and honestly didn't really get why he was called a comedian in his Twitter bio, other than that his name had "Laughs" in it. It just seemed to be six-second snatches of some guy being a dick to strangers, which I know some people would laugh at but probably wouldn't call comedy. But I digress.

When the Internet heard of the fact that a well-established national TV channel (sorry, can't quite bring myself to call ITV well-respected) was giving a platform to this guy, a lot of people were fairly unhappy about it, to put it mildly. There were articles in online papers and people tweeting a petition to ask ITV to cancel the show (called Dapper Laughs: On The Pull, just in case you weren't cringing hard enough to rupture something before), in light of which (coupled with its star's attempt to release a charity single to help the homeless while mocking them backfiring spectacularly) the channel announced a few days ago that the show would indeed not be returning, and Daniel O'Reilly, the real name of the man starring in the videos, appeared on a news show saying that he had retired the character going on the recent public reaction to it.

To which I say, fair enough. In the interests of full disclosure, I signed the petition. I end up signing a fair number of petitions opposing the oppression of various societal groups. The thing is, I've seen people around the usual places (Facebook, Twitter, The World Away From A Keyboard) saying that they don't see what the harm was in Dapper Laughs' TV show considering his creator has since said that his character was a deliberate stereotype, and that the censorship of comedy like this is a mark of encroaching social fascism on the part of the PC Brigade (or their Internet counterpart, Social Justice Warriors). I think this raises some general points, so as I'm sure you've been missing I'm going to launch into some conceptual rant stuff.


Signifying Nothing [link]

I think the core issue here is whether the depiction of a behaviour should be judged in the same way that the behaviour itself is. This is the basic problem of creative censorship, which has a lively history going back at least as far, for example, as the Marquis de Sade, whose output delights in trying to disgust the reader in pretty much any way it can think of. I don't want to go into detail, but pretty much any remotely taboo behaviour you can think of is probably described in gory detail somewhere in there.

Semiotics (from Greek sēmeîon, "sign") is the study of the relationship between symbols and meanings. With an opener as woolly as that you can probably imagine it covers a huge amount of thought, so any single-sentence description will be extremely cursory at best. The reference in the first part of the title is to Ferdinand de Saussure's take on this by dividing language (in whatever form) into symbols and what they mean, which translated literally from the French is signifier and signified. (I don't think that’s a very helpful translation, as we aren't nearly so happy to mess around with participles as French is. Oh well.) This doesn't seem like such a revolutionary concept when stated as basically as that (and especially after the intervening hundred years or so of sociological work that you've probably been passively exposed to even if you don't take an interest in it).

The important part is the idea that symbol and meaning are separable. This is something that is actually fairly uncomfortable considering the fact that we consider meaning as expressed through language as something fixed by default. You give someone your word with the implication that it's trustworthy. You quote someone in their own words in order to express what they mean as fully as you can. A large swathe of the Abrahamic religions is that fundamental truths about the world are expressed in the word of God. Misquoting or quote mining is a particularly big deal because using someone's own words against them feels like an unnatural and vicious thing.

But it's true. While we frequently think of language as primarily a means of self-expression, it's really at root a means of communication (just as we like to think of ourselves as individual actors rather than single members of society - not that either pair can't be true at the same time, of course). If you have a language spoken by one person, and no-one else has the capacity to learn it natively, that language is considered dead in the water from a linguistic viewpoint. Language is in this way the only perfect democracy that we are ever likely to see - if you say a word has one meaning, and every other speaker of your dialect says another, then after you the word's meaning will have changed, as it has changed on countless other words before (random example - soon used to mean immediately until people used it enough that it got worn down to the current meaning).

What's this got to do with Dapper Laughs? Well, consider the material released under that name as a set of symbols (yeah, let's overanalyse it to death, I presume if you've got this far you've got nothing more exciting on). We see depictions of various kinds of misogyny without comment, and then are told outside the material that it's satire. The thing is, without being explicitly told that what we're watching is satire, I don't think it's at all apparent that it is, which is the problem - the usual expectation of satire is that it takes a particular behaviour or mindset and exposes its flaws by engaging with it, twisting it until it snaps under its own weight. So, for instance, Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal gradually shows that it's satirical as its horrifying suggestion for how to reduce the overpopulation of the Irish poor and their food shortage (hint: both would be resolved at once) is discussed completely deadpan, with no apparent thought given to the implications of the suggestion other than the logistical problems it would cause, and how they could be solved. We could suggest Voltaire's Candide or Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (even Blackadder Goes Forth, considering what year it is) as other examples where the overblown barbarity, pettiness and stupidity of the characters towards the protagonist and each other is never explicitly challenged by the narrative or the narrator, but the infuriatingly placid tone with which they are described suggests a deep sense of outrage (which in Catch-22 is openly expressed by Yossarian and in Blackadder by Captain Blackadder himself, though both are treated as though they are the ones with the problem). In the case of Sade, the impression I get is that beyond simply wanting to goad a reaction out of the reader (trolling is a art, after all) he's playing with the idea of the Enlightenment making reason overcome the so-called natural order of things by his characters thinking up and indulging in such "unnatural" acts, as well as, like Voltaire in Candide, trying to get the reader to show some critical engagement with the ideas presented (a mix of the socially progressive and the usual shock fodder) rather than simply swallowing vapidly optimistic rhetoric wholesale.

In short, satire is generally expected to pass comment on its target by, well, satirising it. Dapper Laughs doesn't seem to have any sort of ironic distance from the behaviour he's purportedly satirising. The joke seems to be on the women who are being abused; this kind of behaviour is actually so pervasive that but for the camera I don't think many people would be able to tell that this wasn't just some guy walking around and being a tosser. It's true that it's frequently quite hard to tell the difference between the extreme forms of any behaviour or mindset and its satirical imitation, but I'd argue that the lack of any sort of implied distance between the writer and the character kind of makes any claims to ironic imitation fall flat. In the absence of a symbol with an established meaning, the remaining semiotic text remains ambiguous and so open to the simplest interpretation via Occam's Razor, that the guy wandering around and acting like a tosser is, in fact, a tosser.


Noise Pollution [link]

If that was the whole of my problem with Dapper Laughs, I probably wouldn't be writing this post, and I suspect that a lot of people wouldn’t have signed the petition. Whatever the anti-PC Brigade Brigade say, those of us who objected to Dapper Laughs' show didn’t just not have a sense of humour. The tipping point as suggested in the body of the petition (i.e. that ITV should #canceldapper) was that the previous questionably-satire was put on national television.

Depiction doesn't equal endorsement. It's just a bit of fun, what's the problem? Why do you have to overanalyse everything? If you don't like it, then don't watch it. Language is communication - that means the things you and other people say affect every other person that speaks or is exposed to your language. If I habitually went in for spuriously gratuitous physics analogies, I'd compare it to the fact that every object in the universe exerts a gravitational pull (however small) on every other one. Just because you decide not to consume a particular piece of media doesn't mean it won't be able to affect you or people around you.

One really useful term I've come across since taking an active interest in Internet social justice is the idea of microaggressions. These are small things that make people of a particular non-privileged group feel unwelcome that might sound petty if complained about individually, but which when they occur hundreds of times a day build up a distinctly unhealthy atmosphere. I've mentioned the phenomenon of people using the word gay as a general-purpose insult: people usually protest that they themselves aren't homophobic, or that they think of it as a different word that happens to sound and be spelt the same way, but it nonetheless contributes to the overriding impression that gay equals bad.

If we want it to become socially agreed upon that cat-calling and casual objectification of women in general is unacceptable (that is, that it's not okay to consider women as anything less than people first and foremost with their own agency and autonomy, rather than a collection of publicly owned body parts) anything that promotes the latter should be challenged. Challenged, not banned, note, because we didn't storm into the ITV headquarters (wherever that is, or whether it actually exists as a single physical building) with pitchforks and flaming copies of The Female Eunuch Gender Trouble and demand that Dapper Laughs be cancelled/his head on a plate/both on pain of torching the place. We signed a petition. Online. I think I was sitting in my dressing gown and with a mug of tea at the time. We asked them to cancel Dapper Laughs' show and stated our reasons (it contributes to the idea that dehumanising women is a source of comedy and therefore acceptable) in enough numbers that ITV listened and did so, because as a commercial TV company they depend on the good opinion of their viewers (or, as some have suggested, because the show was bombing in the ratings and they saw an opportunity to take some credit anyway).


In Conclusion…

Depiction doesn't equal endorsement, fine. It does equal normalisation, though, and there are things that we as a society seem finally to be deciding shouldn't be normal. Transgressive humour (à la George Carlin, Jimmy Carr, Eddie Murphy and Frankie Boyle when still good) incorporates the abnormality of its subject matter as part of its humour. Dapper Laughs doesn't seem to have been incorporating anything in particular into his act. He's just been being a complete tosser.

(Hmm, now tosser doesn't sound like a word anymore. I imagine for anyone outside of demotic UK English it probably didn't to start with. Oh well. I'm thinking next time might be a music thing, but I don't know. See yous then!)

Geek/Nerd Culture Considered Harmful

(This is a conversation I've had quite a few times. I thought it might be useful to be able to get it down here better fleshed out.

I wrote most of this post before the 2014 Isla Vista killings. I think this tragic event gives this topic a particular relevance, which is why I'm publishing it ahead of schedule, but I think it's been a matter that we as an Internet have needed to examine much more closely for a long time.

Content warning: Some NSFW language.)

I'm aware that using the above title on the Internet is basically signing my own death warrant, but hear me out. I'm not arguing that the terms geek/nerd should be abolished, or disapproving of people identifying with them - identity policing is the last thing that I want to do. My intention is to explore why being occasionally labelled as such by other people makes me feel uncomfortable, and it has to do mainly with the societal attitudes towards such groups.


Origin Story [link]

I doubt it's really necessary for me to explain what geek/nerd culture is for a lot of my audience, but anyway. Basically, after being ostracised and victimised apparently from 80s films onwards, people interested in non sport-related, recreationally intellectual pursuits appear now to have been declared okay by mainstream culture. Partly as a symbol of this, such groups have reclaimed the taunts geek and nerd (there's supposed to be a distinction between the two, but I've never heard a satisfactory or consistent one) as a badge of empowerment. You know, I have no problem with that. I have a lot of sympathy with it, in fact: as a dyspraxic kid (it turns out) I run like someone whose legs have gone to sleep. When I dance it looks like someone's hanging a marionette. As you might have dimly picked up from my ramblings I liked to read and did okay at classwork. If the places I was at had a Homecoming King and Queen (staying in the 80s stereotype zone for the minute) I probably wouldn't have been in the running. I don't mean to imply that my life at school was an unending montage of having my lunch money stolen and being swirlied (I had some great friends that I keep in contact with to this day), but I feel like I was always a little odd until I got to university. And then I decided that normal is a setting on a washing machine and I don't have to interact with people I don't want to interact with. Score!

I don't mean to relate all this to get sympathy from you, dear reader. I've heard some completely horrifying stories about being driven to the verge of suicide by complete arseholes and the people who should have stopped that happening being too overstretched or too uninterested to help. What I mean to say is, I'm not attacking people who are unashamedly in the demographic that geek/nerd traditionally covers, partly because, I'll freely admit, I'm largely there myself.

I feel like in my case the whole mild social ostracism thing was useful to a certain extent - it taught me (a fairly introverted, anti-social person when all's said and done - I'm pretty sure my spirit guide would be a cat) how to get the hell over myself and muck in, as it's termed. Which is useful. It taught me how to tell when no-one's interested in what I've got to say, which is also useful (still working at that one, as you might have noticed...). I could go on, but you get the picture. And I don't mean to come off like I'm saying bullying is character building or any of that toxic bullshit - what I mean is that in my case I feel like I got at least something positive out of the whole experience. I wasn't particularly happy at the time, but then I'm not exactly a little ray of sunshine anyway.

Eech, this is rapidly descending into a LiveJournal entry or something...


Geek Social Fallacies [link]

Anyway, there are some residual problems in a community born of social exclusion, that many more insightful people than me have gone into. There is the danger of having a persistent outsider and victim mentality, meaning that tolerance is extended what I would argue is too far in some cases (humouring people whose behaviour is selfish and harmful long past the point where elsewhere people would have called them on it) and the culture is seen as some kind of secret club that you have really have to have suffered and/or learnt your stuff to get into (viz the appalling treatment of women and girls that show an interest in fields that are deemed to belong to "real" geeks/nerds). As a musician I see just the same types of snobbery and insularity (think of hipsters using their music tastes as an assault weapon), but I think there's an additional, slightly unsavoury element at work that acts to preserve a kind of infantile sense of entitlement.

And again, I don't mean to tar everyone who identifies as geek/nerd with the same brush. But I imagine you can think of a few examples yourself of what I'm talking about. I think it's partly because as a movement it's fairly young (as is the Internet). There are a lot of people who engage in flame wars, thinking that if you shout loudest it makes your opinion more valid. Look at the abhorrently full bloom that the word misandry has come to after taking root in the bowels of the Internet, and geek/nerd culture in particular. (A great quote I saw recently - "In a debate you are entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts.") With this sudden onrush of completely democratic free speech (let's try and keep Net Neutrality a thing, shall we?) anyone can pretty much say what they like about anything, and it's a big enough Internet that there'll be someone who agrees with them. There have always been conspiracy theorists, creationists, climate change deniers, Scientologists, people who like The Eagles (That Last One Was A Joke BTW), but the advent of the Internet has meant that previously isolated and disparate subcultures can clump together like a reverse amoeba. And you know what, for the most part that's really great. (I can write and you can read my ponderous meanderings from anywhere in the world for free! Which is good, because I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to pay to be subjected to this stuff...)

My personal pet theory/hope is that as the Internet matures we might grow out of the flame war thing. I mean, I can think of few things more pointless than two people yelling at each other via keyboard for protracted periods of time over a topic that they have opposite views on. I personally find that instead of "YOU'RE WRONG" "NO U" it's more useful to go "I think this" "I think this" "Why do you think that?" "Have you considered this?" (the latter two delivered as genuine questions rather than thinly-veiled put-downs). We already seem to be getting over trolls gradually (I've been seeing a lot more "Obvious troll is obvious" posts in the past few years than people taking the flamebait), so who knows what could go down.


Boxing Matches [link]

But this is aside from my main objection to the current societal presentation of geek/nerd culture. When trying to articulate my point, I've find it useful to draw an analogy with the second wave of feminism. Whoa there. I said an analogy, meaning that in certain aspects I feel the comparison is useful, not that I'm equating the systematic violent and dehumanising oppression of women that has been a mainstay of our society since time immemorial with a group of people with unashamedly intellectual interests getting victimised in childhood and adolescence. I'd like to make that very clear right now.

The aspect I'm comparing is the idea that society accepts members of a formerly marginalised demographic on the condition that they adhere to a particular set of norms. So for instance around the time of the second wave (what most people think of as feminism - broadly, the first wave was women getting the vote, the second was the social and theoretical developments of this, and the third wave the movement's growth away from the idea of one homogeneous way to "do" feminism) it becomes acceptable (well, more acceptable) for a woman to have a career and to take a more active role in her social (including romantic and/or sexual) interactions. However, many have noted that this is still prescribing roles for women, just different ones. The woman is told be tougher than the men to show her dominance, use her sexuality like a weapon, play down any traditionally feminine aspects that can be seen as weakness. And all the while there's this nasty undercurrent of "Isn't it sweet/hot, she's all dressed up like a man, swearing like a man, she thinks she can throw her weight around with the grown-ups".

This isn't even to remotely begin on the fact that a lot of this empowerment mostly left out any woman who wasn't straight, white, middle class and cisgender. My point is, while it was a definite advancement on the submissive, patriarchal housewife box, it was still a box that women were crammed into - my definition of a box in this case is a set of expectations that a person with one attribute (in this case, being a woman) is compelled to meet, which have little to nothing to do with the attribute in itself. Failure to fit in this box incurs shame, mistrust and other sorts of societal foulness; one of the worst aspects of this is that it causes people who have the attribute to use how much they fit into this or another box (and it's very rare for someone to do so without contorting or amputating part of themselves) to attack each other with all the seething viciousness that comes from seeing a part of yourself you've been trained to hate in someone else.

See anything you recognise yet? I mentioned before the idea that one of the best ways to stop a society from becoming troublesome is for its ruling class to make sure that the lower and middle classes are at each other's throats - the classic divide and conquer strategy. If the whole of a society is working together, there isn't really a ruling class per se anymore, and those with interests (financial and otherwise) in avoiding this type of democracy have a variety of ways to accomplish this. The main one, as I just mentioned, is to make sure that there are robust social divisions in place - make sure that the income gap between rich and poor is as wide as possible, and education and healthcare are as expensive as possible. Spout rhetoric of inclusivity for those who try, while doing nothing to counter the institutional forms of bias against people from different backgrounds. If someone tries to call you on this, show them one or two token individuals who've "made good" from said underprivileged backgrounds, so that the rest feel that if they fail then the problem is with them, not with the broken society that they live in. Emphasise that some people are just "born" good at certain things that the ruling caste are trained extensively for from birth, just as a little extra kick in the teeth. After that, let human nature simmer with resentment and you and your descendants should be comfortably in control for a very long time.


This Way Up [link]

The way we fight this is by talking and thinking. Tempting as it is to ascribe it to the evils of one group, fascism and patriarchy are really just a known bug in the human mind. The Internet has meant we have more scope to talk than ever before, so that leaves the thinking part. My real problem with geek/nerd culture is how it turns enjoying thinking (how else do you show you enjoy something and get good at it other than when you're doing it for fun?) into a reductive, fetishised box. You know what? I don't think having an active and inquiring mind should be a labellable thing. If you like to read (or consume media) and analyse and talk about what you've read (or consumed), that should be encouraged if you want every person to be as functional a person and member of society as they can. It shouldn't mean that people will expect you to have no social skills, be unathletic, have (what you deem) childish interests and poor personal hygiene. The geeks/nerds of today are the intellectuals of yesterday, people who have the gall to have wide cultural interests (and yes, judging a demographic by the excesses of some of its members as if that's the group's failing rather than the individuals' is just another form of boxing - ask feminists) in a way that makes people feel insecure. If someone makes you feel insecure deliberately, they're an arsehole. If they're not doing it deliberately, then that might be an indication that the problem is at your end.

There are very few words that I don't use. As you might see from my writing style, I believe in using all the words you can to make your point; for me to blacklist one is a pretty big thing. The words I don't use are mostly slurs, racial, gendered, ableist etc. Another is the word pretentious. At root, the word means laying claim to what you have no right to (like a pretender to the throne). What the fuck gives you the right to tell people what they can and can't like if it isn't harming anyone? I've never yet heard a use of the word that hasn't been small people trying to make others feel small. If someone inadvertently makes you feel insecure, that sounds like it's your problem, not theirs. If you've been societally bullied into policing your own thinking as "pretentious", "geeky"/"nerdy" (the latter when used deprecatingly), then that's even worse. The rise of sites like I Fucking Love Science gives an indication of the worst side of people appropriating the external imagery of traditional geek/nerd culture without actually bothering to engage with the subject matter (as illustrated here), but I don't call that pretentious, I just call it a shame.


TL;DR Version...

Let me say again that I don't have a problem with people identifying as geeks/nerds. Someone's identity is their affair. I choose not to identify as such because I don't think intellectual interests should automatically mean you are a geek/nerd. When having intellectual interests is something to be apologised for or self-deprecatory about (the way society currently treats geek/nerd culture, see The Big Bang Theory) is when I have a problem. Having an active mind shouldn't be a divisive factor - while natural aptitude does affect predisposition to a certain skill, the majority seems to come from practice. All the people called geniuses that I've ever heard of worked really, really hard to get where they were, often from very early ages. Some people take that to mean no-one is ever a genius - why not take it to mean everyone can be?

(We'll be back to our regular scheduling next week. I'm probably going to look at boxing and entitlement in future posts, if you fancy sticking around.)

On Some Problems With Problematic Things

(This week I'm back on social justice and how we do it on the Internet - specifically, the practice of calling things "problematic", which probably only gets less hate than telling someone to "check their privilege".)

In one of my previous excursions into social justice territory, you may recall that I cited John Lennon and then put in a footnote (which, despite my undying love for parentheses, I make a point of not doing normally) saying that while I value and respect many of his contributions, there are aspects of his behaviour that I disapprove of strongly, and in fact if I met someone with only those latter qualities I would probably want nothing to do with them and warn people I cared about to do likewise. This is frequently described (online, at least) as a person or work being problematic.

As previously, it is very, very easy for me to misconstrue what my point is and to make large sections of the audience I hope to appeal to feel like I'm attacking them. My point this time is that I find the current usage of problematic on the Internet can be harmful, mainly to the people making the judgement call. (I'm not going to blanket defend people who are called problematic. That's their job. If I engage with them or their works, it's despite their problematic aspects, not ignoring them.)


Problematisation [link]

Let's examine the mechanism of declaring works or people problematic, so we've got a base to work from, and so I can make clear exactly what it is I'm critiquing - this being the Internet, many terms have many meanings to many people, and there's rarely much cause to declare one interpretation more authoritative than another. We come across a work (I'm going to use the less emotive strain of works rather than people) that we like. The writing, the execution, the characterisation, whatever - it appeals to us. We get that great feeling of meeting a new thing and thinking, "Yeah, this is pretty good". If it's a one-off thing like a film or a game or a book, we consider buying it. If it's a series, we consider getting more instalments by paying or subscribing. We might tell our friends and relations about this Cool New Thing we've found, and seek out other people who think the Cool New Thing is also Cool. This is one of the nicest things about the age we live in - there's a boatload of free or cheap stuff out there that we can sample and dive into, and we can meet and join communities formed around appreciating that same thing, all without even having to leave the house (whether this is ultimately a good thing or not isn't really what we're discussing just at the moment). This could also be a work we enjoyed when we were younger and have fond memories of.

But... there's a problem. Some corner of the work expresses attitudes that you don't agree with, whether actively promoting them or passively continuing them because it assumes that everyone thinks like that and it doesn't see anything wrong with them. You might notice them yourself (they might be tucked away in the corner of a later or earlier installment, or just not so noticeable from your first pass through) or you might have them pointed out to you by someone else (in Real Life or in an online community). In any case, there's this part of the work that you (or the person pointing it out to you) would really prefer wasn't there. So what do you do? To my mind there are a few options:

1. It Doesn't Matter

Simple, just ignore it. The rest of it's great, so why should one little bit of it (or one person's reading of it) spoil the fun for everyone involved? This is sadly quite a prevalent viewpoint, and it has some really ugly consequences. By ignoring the oppressive aspect of the work, or by arguing that the rest of the work being something that you enjoy or agree with somehow cancels the oppressive aspect out, you are legitimising it, and consequently undermining the voices of those at risk from it. Oppression doesn't need a culture of active oppressors to flourish - all it needs is a minority of active oppressors and an apathetic majority. You may remember that I said previously that the opposite of activism isn't oppression, it's apathy; this holds true here, and indeed, it's one of the clearest examples of this principle.

2. Lighten Up, It's Just an X

This is kind of an uglier extension of the previous, specifically in the scenario where an individual points out the oppressive aspect to a group. The group is presented with the choice of really examining this thing that they've previously accepted less critically, and just carrying on as they were by dismissing (and even vilifying) the complaining party and their concern. A handy rule of thumb is that if someone's dismissing a member of X group (or for bonus points, all members of X group) for being "thin skinned" about a particular topic, usually while the dismisser is not themselves a member of X group, this reaction is probably in play. The core fallacy for this is the assumption that everyone should read things in the same way that you do - basically, being unaware of your own various kinds of privilege. And again, checking your privilege requires quite a lot more effort than carrying on obliviously, so it is tempting in the early stages of social awareness just to ignore it or to dismiss the concept entirely. It involves accepting that other people have lives and struggles and experiences that you fundamentally can never fully understand, because your life and struggles and experiences are different from theirs. The act of dismissing someone's complaint about oppressive aspects of a work is akin to saying, "Actually, I know more about your life and how you should behave than you do, so shut up". If you don't see the problem even with the implicit expression of such a view, I imagine there's not a lot of point in you reading the rest of this entry or indeed blog.

3. Oh God, It's Ruined Forever!

This seems, on the surface of it, to be the most appropriate reaction to being made aware of the oppressive aspects of a work. If you recoiled in horror at the implicit statement at the end of the last paragraph, I imagine the thought of being inadvertently complicit in oppression makes you feel ill. It certainly does me. And indeed, depending on your life experience and views, the existence of particular oppressive aspects may be a deal breaker for you. I feel that a person's own Deal Breaking threshold is a really, really personal thing that shouldn't be treated as a negotiable quantity. All you're going to achieve by meeting a statement of, "I'm afraid X aspect of this work means I can't enjoy it or engage with it further" with "But, Y aspect is great!" or requiring an in-depth justification of why X aspect is a deal breaker is to jeopardise any standing you have with the person you're proselytising to. Have you ever seen a situation where someone was talked out of a long-held personal view in a single conversation? I know I haven't. I think you owe someone the respect of their convictions regardless of whether you think your view is better or in would make them happier. If the person is open to hearing about why you like X work or movement, then by all means tell them, but forcing your opinion on them (or interrogating theirs) in an effort to convert them is just really bloody rude.

4. Ugh, That Sucks

That said, I don't think complete disengagement should be the default option when encountering oppressive aspects. There, I said it. In saying this, I don't mean to invalidate people's right to disengage from a work that crosses their Deal Breaking threshold - what I do mean is that I think it's a shame for aspects of a work that you disagree with to mean that you automatically drop the work in question. I think the most responsible thing to say, if you still want to engage with the work at all, is, "That aspect does suck, majorly. I would prefer that it wasn't there, and if for you it means that you can't continue to engage with the work, then that's your decision which I will support. For me, though, the rest of the work is good enough that despite its problems I still feel able to enjoy it." Now, that might look quite similar to option one above ("It doesn't matter"), but to my mind the crucial distinction is that you aren't denying or making excuses for the problem's existence, nor are you dismissing the complaint or the right of the complainer to raise it.


Binary Chop [link]

You may have noticed that in the above schematic I've avoided using the term problematic beyond the opening description. This is because to my mind, it can end up promoting the third option above over all else. I've noticed that people sometimes describe works (or people) as "problematic" and just leave it at that. Does that mean that we should expect (and ideally prefer) works that are "unproblematic"? I contend that this is a dangerously reductive binary, and as we in the social justice sphere are familiar with in other contexts, enforcing binaries is Rarely A Good Thing. I contend that genuinely unproblematic works either cannot exist or are rare enough that seeking them out exclusively would reduce our cultural intake and participation to minuscule proportions.

Everyone has problems. It's not surprising to learn that everything has problems as well. Humans seem to be hard-wired to engage in splitting - that is, dividing arbitrary items or groups into a "good" and a "bad" pile, an "us" and a "them". Going back to Plato, we have the idea that objects in the world are merely imperfect reflections of an ideal - a doctrine that endeared him to early Christianity by its adaptability to the concept that people are an imperfect reflection of God or Christ (however at odds with the actual teachings of the Bible that may be). The splitting into an ideal and non-ideal is distressingly prevalent in modern society, too - think of the Madonna/whore dichotomy, or the almost equally foul insistence that only one body type is beautiful or desirable, even when it requires extensive modification (surgical or digital) even to approximate.

My beloved Derrida writes brilliantly on the idea that ideals can be helpful in inspiring us to be the best that we can be, so long as we accept that the pure ideal is unachievable, by definition. (One example of his is that you never really give a gift - you always want something back, even if it's just gratitude. Another is the ideal of justice - it's patently impossible to be perfectly just and impartial. But, the key point comes, that impossibility doesn't mean that the whole exercise is pointless.) Using the fact that an object falls short of an ideal as a tool to instil shame and guilt is a gross perversion of the idea of what an ideal is for in the first place. I'm sure you can draw oppression parallels with whatever group or organisation you're familiar with in this context.

This feeds into the deeply unfortunate prevalence of using "being right" as an offensive weapon (on which more in a separate post). It's a sadly frequent occurrence that someone will use the fact that a work is "problematic" without qualification or discussion to shame those who enjoy it. Now, this is a very delicate point with the distinct possibility of not being understood how I mean it to be. Calling people out on oppressive behaviour is a vital part of spreading awareness of social justice - as I mentioned earlier, the majority of complicity in oppression comes from being unaware of the full harmful effect an attitude can have. However (as I said before), I think that if we genuinely want to help people become aware of social justice, it's equally vital that the calling out come from a fundamentally positive place. Using things that people like being problematic as a method of point scoring to my mind seriously achieves less than nothing - it gives people a distorted, negative view of those engaged in social justice. We don't complain about stuff because we like complaining - we'd much prefer not to have to complain at all; we try to live as responsibly as we can, understanding that our words and actions weigh on the whole of the world and trusting people from other vantage points to tell us when we're pressing too heavily.


In Summary...

To round up, I agree with Mallory Ortberg (who is amazing, and if you like literariness, humour and social justice you should check out The Toast yesterday) that the term problematic is of questionable use when it's extended to the point of talismanic, unqualified demonisation. It seems to me that it enforces a kind of aggressive, reductive binary; it is my opinion that for our own benefit and for the benefit of the social justice movement, it is far more useful to accept that an "unproblematic" work or person is largely an inherently unattainable ideal, rather than an absolute standard against which other works and people must be put on trial.

That said, I'd like to reaffirm that this is not an excuse to dismiss complaints about certain aspects of people or works, or to dismiss the people that make the complaints. If someone finds that the oppressive aspect or aspects of a work or person are enough to make them want nothing further to do with the it/them, then that is their choice and we should respect it, as well, perhaps, as re-examining what it is in the work/person that stops us from doing likewise. The person in question does not owe us an explanation if they do not want to give one. In this way, hopefully, we can grow more considerate of each other than we perhaps always manage to be.

(It's been quite a month for soapboxes, even by my standards. Next week is some more music analysis. See you then!)