Andrew Sullivan’s Gripe About the WAM!-Twitter Collaboration Is Chock-Full of Nonsense. Nov 21, 2014, 5:51pm Imani Gandy. Andrew Sullivan's hysterical claim that WAM! Is in cahoots with Twitter to stifle the speech of the poor oppressed straight white male is just the latest example of his frequent failure to fact-check. Posted on Nov 10 2014 @ 2:42pm Nov 21 2014 @ 1:58pm Author Andrew Sullivan Categories Keepers, The Dish Tags Harassment, Premium, Twitter Blog at WordPress.com. Send to Email Address Your Name Your Email Address. Longtime columnist and blogger Andrew Sullivan resigns from New York magazine. Sullivan did not directly state his reason for leaving but said on Twitter that it was 'pretty self-evident'.
Andrew Sullivan, the premier gay writer at The New York Times, was about to speak on “The Emasculation of Gay Politics.” He would take questions afterward “about any public issue,” the man who introduced him announced. The chuckling audience knew what that meant. They had come to this June 7 lecture not just because of Sullivan and his topic but because of the scandal that surrounds him.
It all began in April, when Sullivan published a mocking account of his recent visit to San Francisco. “The streets were dotted with the usual hairy-backed homos,” he had snarked. “I saw one hirsute fellow dressed from head to toe in flamingo motifs.” Wandering into a gay bar, he recoiled: “Rarely have I seen such a scary crowd. Gay life in the rest of the U.S. is increasingly suburban, mainstream, assimilable. Here in the belly of the beast, Village People look-alikes predominate, and sex is still central to the culture. . . . I’d go nuts if I had to live here full time.”
This was classic Sullivan, right down to the contempt for what he calls the “libidinal pathology” of gay sexual culture. He considers gay marriage the only healthy alternative to “a life of meaningless promiscuity followed by eternal damnation.” He has hectored gay men for their obsession with “manic muscle factories,” and written at length about the need for “responsibility” in the age of AIDS. But thanks to the outing squad, we now know that this gay moralist is guilty of the same sins he disses others for committing.
Using the screen name RawMuscleGlutes, Sullivan posted on a site for bare backers (the heroic term for gay men who have sex without condoms). He was seeking partners for unsafe anal and oral intercourse. Sullivan revealed that he was HIV-positive and stated his preference for men who are “poz,” but he also indicated an interest in “bi scenes,” groups, parties, orgies, and “gang bangs.” This hardly fit the gay ideal Sullivan had created in his book Virtually Normal. In fact, RawMuscleGlutes is just the sort of “pathological” creature who raises Sullivan’s wrath. Hypocrisy has always been a rationale for outing, and it’s the justification for a group of gay journalists who teamed up with the tabs to expose him.
After word of Sullivan’s online escapades lit up a gay chat room last month, David Ehrenstein, a chronicler of the Hollywood closet, passed the dish around. A judicious item appeared in Michael Musto’s Village Voice column, and the story soon spread to Page Six of the New York Post. But the main mover was Michelangelo Signorile, the self-proclaimed inventor of outing. (See sidebar, “Sexual Squealing.”) In a lengthy exposé that ran in the local gay paper LGNY, he skewered Sullivan for engaging in “a classic ‘do as I say, not as I do’ argument.” Signorile’s timing couldn’t have been better. Every June some gay shock-horror grips the tabloids in time for Pride Week. This year’s scandal is Sullivan’s sex life.
For an openly gay writer, Sullivan has a very high profile, with columns in the Times and The New Republic (where he was once the editor). This gadfly gay conservative is no stranger to controversy, but he knows how to turn adversity to his advantage. At the Times lecture, he made the most of his latest brush with martyrdom. Despite the advisory against questions about his private life, Sullivan repeatedly alluded to the bare-backing furor in his remarks. It was like watching a pumped-up Saint Sebastian shoot the arrows while posing as their target.
After exhorting his audience to reject the “gay victim” myth, Sullivan cast himself as a victim of the left. “They are exactly the same as the far right,” he said. “They’ll try and get you by any means they can.” Never mind that his tormentors bear about the same relationship to the left as Geraldo Rivera does. Never mind the hardcore lavender lefties who have defended Sullivan’s right to sexual privacy. “In finding him a sinner,” writes The Nation‘s Richard Kim, “we don’t challenge the moralizing, normalizing values that Sullivan espouses. We just relocate ourselves, temporarily, on the other end of the finger.”
The Times lecture was an excellent occasion to sample Sullivan’s contradictions. He has always depended on the amnesia of his audience to cover his tracks. You might never know from his libertarian stance that he opposes abortion rights, or from his embrace of civil rights that he published excerpts from Charles Murray’s racist tract, The Bell Curve, on his watch at The New Republic. Tonight, Sullivan pleaded for gay solidarity (“We need each other’s support; we do not need to tear each other down”) and then complained that all the major gay organizations are run by women. He endorsed antidiscrimination laws, though he once declared that after gays win the right to marry and serve in the military, “we should throw a big party and close down the gay rights movement for good.” He rhapsodized about leather bars, though he once called joints that cater to such fetishes “abattoirs of AIDS.” And in the evening’s most bizarre moment, he urged his audience to reject hate-crime laws and arm themselves instead. To support his point, he cited Martin Luther King as an advocate of armed self-defense. This is the sort of reckless reasoning that has made Sullivan a star.
Reporters who visited his Web site at the height of the scandal were greeted with the following comment: If you “want a quote from me about the details of my sex life, feel free to use the following: ‘It is none of your business.’ ” Sullivan is right about that. His sex life is not the issue. The real scandal is why he is America’s most prominent gay writer.
Not long ago, it was impossible to imagine a gay columnist at America’s paper of record. The Times was legendary for its cold shoulder to gay activists, and its city room was considered hell on homosexual reporters. But the paper has changed dramatically. Gay men rank among its most influential staffers, and its coverage has been instrumental in the progress of gay rights. So it wasn’t entirely a surprise when a gay writer was given a prime slot at the Times magazine in 1998. But why this gay writer?
Andrew Sullivan Substack
Imagine Ward Connerly, the black opponent of affirmative action—or a scathing antifeminist like Katie Roiphe—getting a column on race or women’s issues in the Times. Yet when it comes to gays, the more “politically incorrect” you are—and the more cutting toward queer culture—the farther you get in the liberal media.
Consider Camille Paglia, the attack dyke who graces the virtual pages of Salon. Not many people hold Matthew Shepard responsible for the torture he suffered, but Paglia has. Not many columnists refer to fragile men as “sissies,” but Paglia does. Not many people still think gay men are shaped by “some protracted childhood trauma [that] has overwhelmed nature’s pleasure-giving hormonal promptings,” but Paglia believes precisely that. Her pronouncement is the premise of Christian corrective therapy. Yet her throwback persona is precisely what makes her a draw. Like Sullivan, Paglia relies on gay-culture bashing to certify herself as an independent thinker. And like Sullivan, she thrives on the sexual backlash.
These gayocons stand outside the tradition of queer humanism that runs from Oscar Wilde and E.M. Forster to James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, and Allen Ginsberg. The moral core of this lineage—its compassion, its critique of power, its respect for the sexual—still informs queer culture. It is gay liberation. But this sensibility is barely visible in the liberal media. (You have to read the radical press to find the real thing.) What has emerged instead reflects the uneasiness that remains about gay coverage, even as genteel acceptance has replaced active abhorrence. No matter how secure we may feel, the fact is that gay people live in a halfway house at best. We are out on parole.
The anxieties created by this uncertain status are felt by gays and straights alike. They are expressed in the Sullivan-Paglia persona. These writers have the moral flexibility, the self-satisfaction, and the style—charm laced with cruelty—that the times demand.
Why are attack queers so appealing to straight liberals? The fact is that launching an attack on gay “orthodoxies” is the surest route to celebrity for a homosexual thinker. Anyone who breaks with the movement is called courageous; anyone who mocks queer mores is seen as a true individual. In reality, writers like Paglia and Sullivan are reassuring rogues, affirming the biases that straights dare not admit they hold. Revulsion at gay sexuality remains imbedded in the liberal mind. Attack queers speak to that hidden loathing, expressing their audience’s forbidden feelings. They are as nasty as straight liberals wanna be.
None of this would be an issue if the liberal media presented a full range of gay and lesbian writing. Sullivan’s secret sex life wouldn’t be such a story if he weren’t the head house-homo. But the same system that empowers him also limits the number of queer voices in the mainstream media. Voltaire once said about experimenting with homosexuality, “Once, a philosopher; twice, a pervert.” So it is in the liberal press: Once a queer columnist has been hired, the quota is filled; to bring on a second or a third risks being too close for comfort.
On the road to freedom, every step is a transition. The time may come when it isn’t necessary for openly gay writers to devour their own in order to find a place in the sun. But before that can occur, liberals will have to examine the reasons why they take such delight in attack queers. As things stand, it’s easier for editors to close ranks around the designated deviant than to consider the reasons for his rise. And easier for activists to attack the king of the mountain than to ask why the slope is so steep.
Research: Ben Silverbush
Well, you could see this coming. Twitter announced last Thursday that it was teaming up with a left-feminist activist group to investigate gender-based harassment on the social networking site:
A group called Women, Action, and the Media, which advocates for better representation of women, is testing a new reporting process for gender-based harassment. The group developed a tool for reporting harassment and will forward confirmed reports to Twitter. “If it checks out, we’ll escalate it to Twitter right away (24 hours max, hopefully much less than that) and work to get you a speedy resolution,” says the group, which abbreviates itself as WAM. “But please note: we’re not Twitter, and we can’t make decisions for them.”
I wondered what exactly this small non-profit believes in. You can check them out here or check their agenda from the statements in the video above. Their core objective is what they call “gender justice in media.” That means that they are interested in far more than curbing online harassment. They want gender quotas for all media businesses, equal representation for women in, say, video-games, gender parity in employment in journalism and in the stories themselves. They are outraged by the following:
Less than 1 in 100 of classical pieces performed in concert in 2009-2010 were written by a female composer (and 1 in 15 was written by Beethoven!). Women make up 2% of the standard repertoire of pieces (Repertoire Report 2009-2010).
Less Beethoven – more, er, women! The crudeness of their identity politics is of a piece with their analysis. Instead of seeing the web as opening up vast vistas for all sorts of voices to be heard, they seem to believe it is rigged against female voices, or that women are not strong or capable enough of forging their own brands, voices, websites and fighting back against ideas they abhor with wit and energy and passion and freedom. Instead, WAM’s goal is to police and punish others for their alleged sexism – along the well-worn lines of contemporary and controlling left-feminism. Here’s the mindset behind the project:
Andrew Sullivan Asian American Black
“I see this as a free speech issue,” Friedman said. She said she knew some would see the work WAM does as “censorship,” but that a completely open and unmoderated platform imposes its own form of censorship. It effectively prevents women, especially queer women and women of color, from getting to speak on the service.
How exactly? Does Twitter prevent women of color from using the service? Or is it simply that WAM believes that women cannot possibly handle the rough-and-tumble of uninhibited online speech? And WAM’s intent with Twitter is not merely to highlight physical threats, abuse or stalking. They are quite upfront about casting a much wider net against those insufficiently committed to “gender justice in media”:
Andrew O Sullivan Twitter
“We’ll be escalating [harassment reports] even if they don’t fit Twitter’s exact abuse guidelines,” Friedman said. WAM intends to “cast a wider net” and see what Twitter’s moderators address.
I can find no reason to oppose a stronger effort by Twitter to prevent individual users from stalking or harassing others – but if merely saying nasty things about someone can be seen as harassment, then where on earth does this well-intentioned censorship end? Is it designed to censor only misogyny and not racism? What about blasphemy? Are the only suspects in this brave new Twitterverse the “straight, white males” disparaged as a group in the video above? And yet, among those liberals who might worry about policing free speech in this way – let alone handing over the censorship tools to a radical activist group bent on social transformation – it’s hard to find anyone anywhere who has any qualms. Jesse Singal wonders if it’s enough to keep the trolls at bay:
There are two ways to look at this.
One is that it’s good that Twitter, in the wake of what the Verge calls “high-profile threats against game critic Anita Sarkeesian and other women” working in the gaming world, is working with an outside organization to potentially beef up its very ineffective harassment-reporting tools. The other, more cynical response is that this could be a useful way for Twitter to make it look like it’s doing something about online harassment without actually doing very much at all. After all, given Twitter’s massive resources, why should it need to outsource this job to someone else?
Marcotte is hopeful that this will help stem the tide of troll bile:
There’s reason to think that WAM!’s involvement will do some good. As anyone who has reported abuse on Twitter can tell you, pretty much anything is better than the current system. And a woman’s group might also be much better at sussing out what is and isn’t sexist harassment than the mostly-male staff at Twitter. But WAM! also has experience in this sort of thing. Last summer, the group decided to run a campaign shaming Facebook over the proliferation of pro-rape and other anti-woman hate groups that escaped censure by declaring themselves “humor” pages. Facebook responded by cracking down on this kind of content. Twitter has wisely chosen to work with WAM! directly rather than go through that sort of public shaming, and hopefully this collaboration will be mutually beneficial.
Mutually beneficial? Does she mean that WAM can get to advance their broader ideas about policing the speech of white straight males by this legitimizing alliance with Twitter?
Somehow, I suspect the culture wars online just got a little more frayed. Because Twitter has empowered leftist feminists to have a censorship field day.
(Update: Follow-up post here. A long reader dissent here.)