So here’s this Gawker piece about Fred Armisen that accuses him of being a bad boyfriend. (A point he readily concedes, as it happens.) I don’t want to get into some useless, wearying discussion of celebrity and privacy. I don’t get why this is news; of course Gawker has the right to run unsubstantiated rumors. I wish I trusted the average reader to take such rumors with a grain of salt, and I absolutely don’t trust that they do. That’s life.
It’s the commenters on the piece that really depress me: dozens of them are equating the shitty things Armisen is accused of (being manipulative, losing interest with a romantic partner, using his celebrity to sleep with many different women) with the forbidden, illegal, terrible crimes of rape or physical abuse. People saying that Armisen is like Jian Ghomeshi, who’s accused of categorically different things; talking about emotional abuse as indistinguishable from physical abuse; speaking as though someone starting a relationship with someone without being fully committed to that relationship is similar to rape; treating “creepy” as indistinguishable from criminal. I note this mostly because it’s become so ubiquitous: social progressives erasing the distinction between social behaviors that we find ugly or wrong from those we find worthy of legal and professional punishment.
That slippage — treating behaviors that are mean, or nasty, or otherwise undesirable as the equivalent of behaviors that are and should be criminal, such as sexual coercion or physical violence — is not only politically and morally wrong. It’s a sure-fire political disaster. By constantly expanding the number of behaviors that they treat as markers of existential evil, some liberals are steadily making those accusations meaningless. It’s a lesson people seem to refuse to learn: when you abandon the word “sexist” and just use the word “misogynist,” when you call every ugly comment about race a matter of white supremacy rather than of ignorant bigotry, when you revert to the language of abuse and rape for every bad behavior in a relationship — people inevitably stop taking your complaints seriously. Outrage is a finite resource, and we should spend it wisely. When you ring the bell every time, sooner or later people stop listening. I am not saying that is how it should be. I’m saying that’s how it is.
A political movement that cannot distinguish between Jian Ghomeshi and Fred Armisen is a political movement that cannot possibly win. It’s one that’s hurtling towards a terrible backlash that will make the world a less just place.
Yet again, we see the same basic dynamic in the world of social justice liberalism: total indifference towards the actual impact of these ideas outside of the enclave. Just total and utter indifference about whether these social and argumentative tactics actually make the world a better place. And that indifference is born from incentives. You get social credit, within the liberal enclave, for ratcheting up. You never get social credit for ratcheting down. If my sister was thinking of dating Fred Armisen, I’d be concerned. If he’s guilty of these anonymous accusations, then he’s a huge jerk. But we live in a society where prominent politicians use terms like “legitimate rape” and where just getting people to acknowledge that domestic abuse is a problem is hard enough, and treating jerky behavior as the same as those behaviors is a terrible tactical mistake. It’s time to stop acting like the whole world believes the same thing as your Williamsburg food co-op, guys. At some point you have to separate your effects from your intent.
