I’ve been meaning to blog about the professionally outraged for a while now. With great regularity, a social issue with strong opinions on either side will raise its head in the media, and the whole world goes berserk. Well, for ‘whole world’ read people in the media who follow each other on Twitter. I am one of these people, and I have been outraged with the best of them. But I’m starting to feel uncomfortable.
I’m not talking about things like the case of Paul Chambers, and the blowing up Robin Hood airport tweet. That was a huge waste of civic funds, and bad law delivered by lawgivers who don’t seem to know what’s happening in modern society. It motivated someone to create the #IamSpartacus hashtag, which although inspired, does not compensate for what Paul Chambers has been put through. I’m not even talking about the Danny Dyer ‘cut your ex’s face’ story. Perhaps because the story happened in an earlier period in Twitter’s history, at a lower point on last year’s steep curve of user numbers, this one was memorable for the anger it generated.
No, I’m talking about the increasingly rapid turnover of issues that people are happy to leap up and down and shriek about. Welcome back, demented whack-a-moles. The latest is Kenny Tong, who will surely get a TV series or book deal off the back of what’s being said about him now. All the outrage about his tweets will simply give him more publicity. I had never heard of him until the current tweetrage. Yesterday it was the anti-Naomi Wolf teeshirts. The day before it was Naomi Wolf herself saying rape accusers should be identified. Before that it was comedian Frankie Boyle being un PC and going beyond someone’s line on what you are and are not allowed to laugh at. A couple of months ago it was Stephen Fry saying things about women’s sexuality. For a while now it has been aspects of the Assange rape case, where the shouting quotient has been especially intense. (For example, there’s a messianic tone to that last link that doesn’t sit right for me.) Months ago it was someone’s blog post about the second Sex and the City movie saying it was shite and being rude about the women characters, [sorry can't find it] and the massed feminist counterblogs that ensued against the author, saying she was a misogynist.
All the above subjects happen to involve what could loosely be called women’s issues, on the surface anyway. Everyone has a different idea of what women are and would like to be and should be, if you believe in shoulds. But is there such a thing as a women’s issue, without men being involved in some way or another as well? Sometimes the debate, even if the issues are fundamental, just looks like one big self-perpetuating troll, a herd of sacred cows driven this way and that according to the prevailing winds of the day. The trouble is, the shouting has all got so shouty that all it serves to do is confirm orthodoxies, especially feminist ones.
I started my own mini-foamfest on Twitter a week or so ago, by saying that I wished the bloggers who constantly rant about the Daily Mail would deal out equal criticism to the Guardian. This was too much for some of the professionally outraged to take, and I was half-accused of being a BNP supporter. There are people who seem to spend their entire blogging lives attacking the Mail and I see little purpose to it other than making themselves feel better.
Nothing wrong with that, you might say, but I also see something more sinister in here amid the sanctimony, a whiff of ‘us and them’, a kind of liberati snobbery disguised as being a Good Person. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in the heart of middle England listening to ‘Daily Mail’ type views on a daily basis, that I’m fairly inured to forcefully expressed non-PC opinions. People have them. Sometimes they’re not very nice. The hysterical bullying from some PC folk is, at times, just as not very nice. But it’s ok because the people doing it identify as left wing, making them, of course, er, right.
I think my psychotherapy training has made me better at seeing both sides of an argument, even if I don’t agree with one, or even either of them. I’m more interested in the person and why they said whatever they said. As I peer into the great blue unknown that is 2011, it is up to me to decide whether to spend this year trying to become a professional contrarian, expressing manufactured (or even genuine) outrage with the best of them, or not. It will certainly gain me Twitter followers. The thing is, I grew up listening to a lot of screeching on a very regular basis, and it doesn’t solve many problems, believe me.
Quiet Riot Girl
January 9, 2011
Nice post I agree with most of what you say.
Your Daily Mail v Guardian rant spurred me on to create ‘Guardian Watch’ http://www.graunwatch.wordpress.com so it was good from my point of view!
I think you are referring to the Lindy West article on Sex In The City 2 – but I think you have misremembered how that twitterstorm blew up. The kneejerk feminist posts were nearly all in favour of Lindy West, supporting her basic idea that the film was horrendous and anti-women.
Feminists called the film mysoginist, not Lindy.
It was only me and one or two others who actually critiqued Lindy West’s article and pointed out the anti-women stance of her referring to Samantha as ‘a prostitute’ with a ‘withered vagina’ -which I think she meant to do ironically. But really meant it. You know that ‘double bluff’. In fact it may have been only me! I will go back and check.
As for the general feminist blogosphere ranting yes it is part of an orthodoxy and yes it is very shouty. But it has very deep roots it is not just reactions ‘on twitter’ it is people who are part of the feminist ‘movement’ using the internet very effectively to maintain their domination of gender discourse, I believe. They also meet in real life and have conferences and lobby parliament and change laws! I hate arguing with feminists online because I look like I am just as bad as them. But I am not going to give up.
I get called ‘contrarian’ all the time but it is just a word and I think what it really means is ‘someone who dares to go against the tide’. I hope you do decide to take on these people in 2011. I don’t want to be alone!
taniaglyde
January 9, 2011
Thanks for the Lindy West info – I could not remember her name and my googling came to nothing. Ok, now I remember. The Samantha character really got it in the neck from various places. And of course she had to get cancer as well, as punishment!
I do take your point about depth of reactions – it’s just that Twitter is a boiling saucepan of stuff where it’s very quick and easy to see what people are saying. This said, not one person has RT’d this post!
I’m not saying contrarian is bad. It depends on the context. For example, a negative interpretation is when a columnist is paid to wait until everyone else has had their say and then say the opposite, to sound clever and insightful. More positively, it’s someone who takes on orthodoxies and sacred cows.
Very glad I inspired you! I just wanted to see some balance in all the critiques of the press.
otherthingshzle
April 8, 2011
Hi, what a great post :)
Yes a certain group of people have, for a while now, been using “Daily Mail reader” as a byword for fascist (or reactionary, Imperialist etcetc). The problem with using the same word/phrase over and over like this, is that it stops them from actually thinking about anything.
For the infuriating bloggers I sometimes waste a spare minute reading, this isn’t a problem at all. Thinking for themselves, and outside their lefty box, would be too painful. Yet paradoxically, it is staggering how much mental effort they put into defending their entrenched (cliquey) views, the futile hours you can spend arguing with them..
And yes they are a herd of sheep. Another way of not thinking for onesself is to take onboard the moral rubbish one is most commonly exposed from the media/friends, and swallow it whole. Hence the whole snowball effect of fervent new-left stuff that riddles the pages of the rubbishy rag called the Guardian.
That’s a fair few alliterations, even for me…Like you I don’t necessarily agree with much of what appears in the Mail or any other newspaper. I just watch befuddled as people abdicate their responsibility to think for themselves about the world around them
Henry
taniaglyde
April 8, 2011
Hi Henry, thanks for your comment. I’m getting increasingly concerned by the prevalence of ‘I’m Such A Good Person’ journalism. By extension, this also says ‘We are such good people, not like those nasty people over there.’
otherthingshzle
April 8, 2011
Yes indeed – also witness the witch-hunt behaviour that went on after Jan Moir wrote an unpleasant article about Stephen Gately.
OK so not her finest hour. But the torrent of abuse that rained down on her – a kind of mob behaviour that Twitter’s format encourages from time to time – was awful. Even Stephen Fry was very approving of a rather hateful blog post directed at her. All of a sudden the mob were behaving worse than Moir herself, all the while thinking themselves the righteous ones. Only a few commentators saw what was happening clearly
I guess it’s more fun being in the “right” crowd than taking a considered approach
cheers