Calling out name-and-shame tactics on ‘the dirty normal’

Aaron Sorkin, in a recent speech to new graduates at his alma mater, said this:

[M]ake no mistake about it, you are dumb. You’re a group of incredibly well-educated dumb people. I was there. We all were there. You’re barely functional. There are some screw-ups headed your way. I wish I could tell you that there was a trick to avoiding the screw-ups, but the screw-ups, they’re a-coming for ya. It’s a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.

This is excellent advice.  The screw-ups are painful as hell but you live through them and learn from them, if you’re lucky.  My job, as I see it, is to help people live through the dumb years and survive their screw-ups without accumulating lifelong consequences like unplanned pregnancy, blood borne viruses, and infertility from untreated infections.

New technologies have created new kinds of consequences.  Fifteen years ago, we all used dialup and cellphones didn’t have cameras, so we didn’t have to worry about teenagers taking naked self-pics and videos and sending them to others or posting them online. It’s hard to see the harm if it’s all consensual and confidential, but there’s the rub: things change quickly in teenage relationships, and something bestowed in trust may be forwarded in anger or just plain old adolescent cruelty.

For digital natives, kids who’ve grown up online, there’s another more subtle kind of consequence to consider.  I’m born in 1981 and my generation got lucky: we posted our juvenile shit under opaque nicknames on OpenDiary, Friendster and MySpace — sites that, if not defunct, certainly don’t appear in Google search listings. Someone born in 1991 probably has all their highschool classmates on Facebook, and they’ve been posting their teenage wit and wisdom under their real names; not just on Facebook but on all the other sites that use Facebook accounts for login.

Five years from now, their employers will be searching their names and turning up comments they made at 16yo.  It’s a problem serious enough that online privacy experts have proposed letting people scrub their results from Google or even change their names at thirty — to escape from all the ill-advised stuff they said in their teenage years and twenties.  Any educator who isn’t thinking about this kind of problem for young people isn’t paying attention.

Suddenly, a wild tray of cupcakes!

I actually looked this image up at work (after asking my colleagues’ permission, of course) during a discussion about how we talk about genital diversity and female circumcision.

It’s one thing to tell people in a session that everyone’s bits are different, but nobody ever believes you; they still secretly fear ‘mine aren’t normal’.  The most effective form of reassurance is to show them that everyone is different and therefore difference is the norm.  As an educator, when you take this approach, you need to be prepared, because everyone has a reaction.  Here’s Dawn French reacting to one of those cupcakes:

 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=brscNmUURCI]

 

Good educators let their participants react, and just as genitals are diverse, so are reactions.  In an educational session, we’d normally cover this material in single-gender groups, because boys can overdo the hilarity and say hurtful stuff to get a laugh out of their mates.  (Pro-tip, straight guys: the evolutionary purpose of sexist humour is signalling to girls that you’re not ready for sex.)  Even in female-only groups, however, participants can react in ways others find hurtful or that jar against our personal values and politics.

In an earlier post I talked about Habermas’ concept of ideal speech situations.  Thinkers like Paolo Friere and Ron Labonte suggest the goal of an educator is to create this kind of discursive environment so that the group itself can discuss and redress problematic remarks.

This calls for active facilitation on the educator’s part to create spaces where participants can gather their thoughts, consider their feelings, give an honest response, and be heard.  The strategy is to get participants thinking about how different ways of expressing their reactions impact differently on others around them. Then you’re having a discussion about the values and attitudes and cultural norms that surfaced in that unguarded moment of reaction, and that is a million times more useful than using your power as an educator to shame and silence someone.

The shame researcher Brene Brown has argued you can’t use shame to get someone to change their behaviour.  She defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging.”  Shame is affective and bodily but also social, concerned with the thought of our flaws being visible to others and them judging us. Understandably, in this light, intensified shame and anxiety about surveillance are two of the lifelong consequences of growing up online.

Imagine, now, that the Vulva Cupcakes discussion happens far, far away from the active facilitation of a sex education session: in the comments on an image visible to all on Facebook.  As it happens, you don’t have to imagine, because it did happen there, and the Director of Student Wellness Programs at Smith College in Northampton, Emily Nagoski Ph.D., helpfully reprinted it in a post on her personal blog about sexual health,’The Dirty Normal’.

In fact, Nagoski reprinted all the comments longer than “LOL”, complete with the commenters’ full names and links back to their Facebook profiles.

I’m not linking to the post or her site, for reasons I hope will become obvious.

Comments on the post are closed, so I expressed my concern to Nagoski via Twitter (@enagoski) where she said she was ‘giving CREDIT’ and disagreed that it violated any practice norm, whether from research, journalism or health education.

The ‘giving credit’ explanation is dishonest on its face: you don’t give people ‘credit’ for things you disagree with.

And I am staggered that someone can earn so many qualifications and yet remain so ignorant and unreflective about practice ethics. When you’re a sex educator, publishing the names and Facebook profile links for young people who say dumb shit about sex is perpetuating the kind of lifelong consequences we do our jobs to prevent.

Including the names adds nothing to the post — other than gender, which could easily be specified in brackets beside the comments.  It’s this lack of any other benefit that leaves me convinced Nagoski’s purpose is to name and shame.

This is not like quoting someone who’s placed themselves in public life, like a politician or another blogger; this is more like overhearing someone saying something stupid in a public place, and because you happen to know their name, you quote and name them on your blog.

When users of well-moderated online communities like Reddit.com post the stupid things others say on Facebook, there’s an incredibly clear norm against identifying them by name.  There is a sub-Reddit devoted entirely to the stupid stuff our friends and acquaintances say on Facebook: it’s called r/FacePalm (hurr hurr).  Here’s an image I picked at random.  Notice the redactions?

Here’s what the moderators say about identification:

  • Completely black out all personal info. This includes but is not limited to profile pictures, first and last names, links to other profiles, location data, and anything else that could be personally identifiable.
  • Do not post links to profiles or any other personal info. This will get you banned immediately.

Unfortunately there’s no moderator to appeal to, in this case, other than Nagoski herself, who has not proved receptive.  I can only call upon her to redact the names and Facebook profile links on her post.  If you agree with my concerns, you could perhaps (politely, please) add your voice to mine and express them on Twitter (@enagoski).

Doctors for the Family — but not evidence

If a doctor wants to abide by his or her conscience on the question of gay marriage, I’m fine with that.

If the same doctor claims to speak for the evidence on the health and social impacts of homosexuality, but instead speaks from his or her moral beliefs and distorts the evidence to do so, then I have a problem.

The Herald-Sun reports today that Prof Kuruvilla George, Victoria’s Deputy Chief Psychiatrist and Government-appointed member of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, joined a list of signatories to a Senate Inquiry submission by “Doctors for the Family” opposing theMarriage Equality Amendment Bill 2010.

The submission was made after Prof George’s appointment to the Commission and makes his tenure there impossible;  lawful sexual activity is one of the attributes the Commission was created to protect.

Disagreeing about gay marriage isn’t the problem — it’s how the Doctors for “the” (sic) Family went about it.  They explicitly argue their case on health grounds, saying they were created to “highlight the health aspects of marriage and family and ensure a healthy future for our children.”  Their terms are medical, rather than moral.

“We submit that the evidence is clear that children who grow up in a family with a mother and father do better in all parameters than children without.”

The source they cite is a report by a Law professor from a study commissioned by the Australian Christian Lobby.  This is not medical evidence;  nor is it free of bias;  nor is it accurate about the current state of the evidence, which shows that children raised by same sex parents do as well as (and sometimes better than) children of opposite sex parents.

The submission goes on to refer to ominous “health consequences of that behaviour [i.e. homosexuality] for children”, but the footnote turns out to refer to HIV and syphilis infection.  These are vanishingly uncommon among children, and they are the consequences of epidemics of HIV and syphilis, not homosexuality.

These are not complicated moral questions: they’re matters of fact.  In giving health advice a doctor has a professional and legal duty to be informed and unbiased.  In claiming to speak as doctors and to offer advice about public and children’s health, these citizens have created that expectation and then signally failed to fulfil it.

The Australian Medical Association has firmly refuted the claims and the ABC is reporting the Minister for Mental Health, Mary Wooldridge, has asked Prof George for an immediate explanation. Attorney-General Robert Clark, who appointed Prof George to the Commission, needs to do the same.

Given his willingness to put scientifically unfounded personal beliefs ahead of the established evidence on homosexuality and same sex parentage, Prof George’s tenure as Deputy Chief Psychiatrist for Victoria and membership of the Commission are unsustainable and should be terminated.

Mark McCormack interviewed by Dean Beck & Lauren Rosewarne

I finished high school in 1999. Homophobia was rife, and being gay I took it all personally.  In first year uni I came out as gay, and went back to my old school to coach Year 9 debaters.  Now, 14-15yo teenage boys are pretty awful.  But they quickly figured out my sexuality — the Onion headline ‘Newly Out Gay Man Overdoes It’ could have been written about me — and the gay jokes ceased.  Every now and again they’d slip up, blush and say ‘Sorry’.  Gay was no longer some abstract anti-ideal; it had been personalised.

Continue reading “Mark McCormack interviewed by Dean Beck & Lauren Rosewarne”

The mini horror movie before bedtime

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the Grim Reaper ad first going to air, and I have a guest post at Croakey reflecting on its legacy.  For people working in the HIV sector, hating on the campaign (and its creator, S-aye-aye-mon Reynolds) is almost mandatory.  Like a lot of people, though, if I’m honest, I feel a certain nostalgic fondness for the ad itself, so I wanted to keep it reasonably even-handed while still acknowledging its downsides — as my colleague puts it, hiding the beetroot in the chocolate cake.*

Read the full post here

* Not a sexual metaphor (see recipe).

Farewell to Scott Abrahams

Scott Abrahams, outgoing CEO of Star Observer, makes this timely observation:

When someone in the community finds the courage to take a stand, we bitch about them, belittle them and hide behind the cloak of online anonymity to to take personal swipes at them. I know it is true — I’ve been on the receiving end of plenty of these attacks, and almost every community leader I know has been through the same cycle. They are disturbing, vicious, gutless attacks designed not to further debate, but to hurt and wound. And they do us no favours.

I agree, and I would love to know why we’ve reached this point. Any thoughts?  Thanks, Scott.

Prevention campaigns missing the mark with young gay men

Last week the NCHSR e-Newsletter landed in my inbox with a lead story on the sexual health needs of young gay men in Australia.

Results revealed that while younger gay men reported similar rates of unprotected anal intercourse as older gay men, their HIV/STI knowledge was lower and almost three out of ten had never been tested for HIV/STIs. Poor knowledge and low testing rates among younger gay men seem to be related to lack of exposure to HIV campaigns reported by almost a quarter. (emphasis in original)

This issue may sound familiar to long-time readers.  I have argued that Victorian prevention strategy between 1999-2009 has focused on men aged 30-49 and neglected young gay men, whose life interests and experiences differ in important ways.

Continue reading “Prevention campaigns missing the mark with young gay men”

Mardi Gras says ‘no banners’ to poly group

Remember how I wondered about the symbolism of removing ‘gay and lesbian‘ from the name of Sydney Mardi Gras?  I wondered if love is really such a universal virtue that we can all gather under its banner. Well, it now seems we can’t.

From today’s poly mardi gras float list:

**IMPORTANT PLEASE READ AND PASS ON**
I have just got off the phone from Victor from the Sydney Mardi Gras about our entry.
…
Victor was very clear that Sydney Mardi Gras does are not include us as part of the LGBTIQ community. He said that while we can express our support for the LGBTIQ community, we cannot have any signs that talk about polyamory or say things like “polyamory is ethical/natural etc”.
…
I have also had no reply to my email asking them exactly what the definition of queer is, and was told that we are not considered LGBTIQ even though our group is primarily composed of LGBTIQ members. When I pointed this out, he offered to “help me understand” the new Mardi Gras categories.

I am pretty angry and insulted about this, and let him know that we were already not considering participating because a large number of community members were upset at not being considered part of the LGBTIQ community.

I am inclined not to participate because of this. However, I obviously I need to represent the community on this, and I don’t know how everyone else feels. I have told him I will consult with other community members and touch base with him on Friday. We will need to have an entry form submitted by Monday if we are going to be in it, stating that we will not have messages about what polyamory is as part of our float.

It isn’t new to point out that what many gay marriage activists want is not just equality with heterosexuals, but sameness with them.  They claim to be fighting for ‘Equal Love’ but in fact they are fighting for one very specific configuration of love: the monogamous couple, married in the eyes of the law, promising forever together.  There is nothing queer or progressive or radical about it.

Poly relationships aren’t of necessity more equal, radical or progressive either, but as a practice they are unquestionably queer, mounting an embedded and practical critique of heterosexist norms of monogamous, dyadic romance.  It is profound hypocrisy for Mardi Gras to think it can police what kinds of consensual, adult, non-violent expressions of love are acceptable in its parade.

Update: HipPOLYta comments below that Mardi Gras didn’t recognise the poly group as queer and have allowed them into the parade on the condition their banners specify they are queer polyamorists.

Promising forever

This is part two of a series beginning with What are you looking for?

Once I opened the wardrobe in the bedroom of a guy I was going out with, looking for towels, and I found a list: ‘What I am looking for in a partner’.  He’d been reading that awful, stupid book, The Secret, which told him to tell the universe what he wanted and this would ‘call it’ into being.  So he made a checklist of all the things he was looking for:  tall, white, professionally employed, et cetera; and the horrifying thing is, I was a pretty close match.  The relationship blew apart pretty soon after that, not because of my chagrin at being typecast, but because we were completely incompatible — sexually, emotionally and in our values around relationships.

Ever since then, if I even get a whiff of a ‘checklist’, I run a mile.  Guys post their list on their Manhunt profiles, or in chat, they’ll ask “what are you looking for” in the expectation that we’ll swap lists and tick off all the items we have in common.  It is desperately boring.  It’s a mercantilist take on human relationships, like a buyer and a vendor meeting in a marketplace and negotiating over an exchange of goods.  Guys who partner up on these terms often treat them as a contract, and cry foul when their partner turns out to have undisclosed interests or dimensions: “He didn’t tell me he wasn’t over his ex!” 

Most importantly, they’re operating on what I have called a logic of sameness, which assumes the most important predictor of a good relationship is matching — either literal similarity between the partners (‘pets who look like their owners’ syndrome; partners who could be twins) or close fit between your partner and your checklist.

The former is called homophily and it’s an incredibly reliable pattern in studies of dating and relationships: people tend to partner up with people who are similar on salient characteristics like class and religion.  The latter is an ego thing: it’s the belief that ‘I design my life, and I will design (ahead of time) the kind of partner I want, and I will choose a person who fits the bill, and we will have the kind of relationship that matters to me’.  I meet these guys in their thirties, bewildered by never having had a relationship longer than a few weeks or months (if that), saying in their profile “looking for the one”, painting themselves as the Last True Romantic.

In those brief, abortive relationships they never manage to ‘get outside their heads’, to see the person in front of them, to perceive them as a stranger — to have an encounter with the Other.  They can only see their checklist and keep measuring him up against it.  If you ask the Last True Romantic to set aside the checklist and play it as it goes, he’ll bridle, refusing to ‘lower his standards’.  And there’s the truth of it.  His ‘standards’ are a shield, there to protect him from the radical uncertainty of trying (and often failing) to live in relationship with an other.  He wants a Long Term Relationship instantly, skipping over the steady, day-to-day negotiation of differences.  He can’t manage the day-to-day, he can only manage Forever.

It’s a powerful desire, fundamentally egocentric, and it’s the same desire that drives the demand for gay marriage.  But that’s a topic for another post.

What are you looking for?

Every so often I post a Facebook update in a series I call “the Wisdom of Manhunt” (or Grindr).  They’re just quotes from people’s profiles on gay chat sites that made me LOL or WTF (and sometimes both in equal measure).  I love it when someone says something spiteful, e.g. ageist or racist, in such a way that it makes them sound incredibly foolish.

These posts always get a reaction from my friends — a mix of catty, hilarious remarks and thoughtful conversation on the issues involved. Someone recently said ‘hey, you should post these on your blog’.  It has been done before, with the infamous Douchebags of Grindr.  I admit to chuckling at first, but pretty soon the posts came to seem pretty douche-y themselves; there’s no moral high ground in the business of public humiliation.

Continue reading “What are you looking for?”