Twitter feminism | TALKING BACK to restraining orders

A recent post on this blog commended NYU Journalism Prof. Katie Roiphe’s essay, “The Other Whisper Network: How Twitter feminism is bad for women,” published a few months ago in Harper’s. Certainly its observations about feminism’s “vicious energy and ugliness” are unimpeachable—and for their confrontational candor, remarkable.

It feels as if the feminist moment is, at times, providing cover for vindictiveness and personal vendettas and office politics and garden-variety disappointment, that what we think of as purely positive social change is also, for some, blood sport.

Prof. Roiphe’s reportage and commentary on America’s due process crisis, though, be they ever so laudable, are limited by classism. What Prof. Roiphe considers a “new” witch hunt has only newly spread into her social set, which includes prominent media figures like those who’ve recently been run out on a rail.

Who are the female members of the “other whisper network” who Prof. Roiphe says “fear varieties of retribution (Twitter rage, damage to their reputations, professional repercussions, and vitriol from friends) for speaking out” about “the weird energy behind [the #MeToo] movement”?

They’re her peers.

Whose due process rights, similarly, does her essay defend?

Those of her peers.

Her appreciation of the due process crisis is motivated by attacks on those who occupy high political posts, particularly in media, and who formerly enjoyed the immunity that only money and titles can confer. Her curiosity, furthermore, seems to extend little further than that.

Observations like this one are trenchant:

The need to differentiate between smaller offenses and assault is not interesting to a certain breed of Twitter feminist; it makes them impatient, suspicious. The deeper attitude toward due process is: don’t bother me with trifles!

Further symptomatic of the crisis, though, is that Prof. Roiphe’s own “deeper attitude” toward complaints by people of lesser pedigree and influence—for example, those who toil for a living and who have been the butt of outrageous “abuse” laws and their unscrupulous administration for decades and in the tens of millions—seems no different from Twitter feminists’. The path of her essay meanders some but nevertheless skirts the murky underbrush.

The social media “dialogue,” even if it were amended to meet Prof. Roiphe’s standards of decency and qualified judgment, would still be sophomoric chatter.

No less so is the one carried on among writers in the likes of The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, New York Magazine—and Harper’s.

The absurd quotation in the title of this post comes from a critique of an essay of Katie Roiphe’s published in Harper’s last month, which New York Magazine writer Jonathan Chait calls “alternatingly brilliant and incoherent.” Whatever the merits of that characterization (which will be considered in a future post), it could certainly be applied to Mr. Chait’s lopsided and out-of-touch perspectives.

[Roiphe’s] complaint about the tenor of discussion, and the way in which angry and extreme rhetoric crowds out more nuanced thought, has some merit. Social media has made this dynamic more acute—not only in feminism but across the political culture, which has grown more polarized into communities in which the most strident iteration of the community’s shared belief is assumed to be the most authentic.

A self-contradictory implication of what Mr. Chait noncommittally acknowledges as a valid criticism of extremist feminist rhetoric is that by influencing the political—and thus legal—culture, the feminist police have gotten around to tormenting the innocent. Actually, they got around to that a long time ago.

Mr. Chait fails to recognize that among the “feminist police” are the police, the ones with badges and truncheons and guns. Judges also qualify.

“What would the world look like if the kinds of militant, uncompromising views Roiphe is grappling with had controlling power?” he naively wonders. Well, it might look something like this:

That’s the title of a law journal monograph by Russ Bleemer published almost 25 years ago—whose subject was not then localized to a particular state and definitely is not today. It pointed up gross injustices in procedures that had been instituted in the 1970s with the best of intentions.

Many a revolution has started off persecuting only the wicked, only to veer off track later. Perhaps the troubling signs Roiphe detects are portents of a dark future.

Mr. Chait’s conclusion would be less speculative if he took his nose out of the The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker and opened his blinds.

*The concern of Mr. Chait’s article is to defend the #MeToo movement, whose revelations condense to “power corrupts.” Mr. Chait seems to feel that a corruptive influence by radical feminism is only an ominous possibility yet to be realized—which is a view that was last excusable in about…

TALKING BACK to restraining orders

THEY’RE NOT JUST ABUSED BUT ABUSIVE

Tag Twitter feminism

Katie Roiphe Rebukes the Trivialization of Due Process by Feminists but Is Scarcely Less Guilty of It Herself

New York Magazine Writer Jonathan Chait Says “the Feminist Police Haven’t Gotten Around Yet to Tormenting the Innocent”