Hoist By Their Own Petard

No lie, I had to look up what a 'petard' was. Apparently it's a kind of explosive. Thanks, Assassin's Creed, for teaching me all about pre-Renaissance weaponry! 

A lifetime ago, it seems, I wrote about Bahar Mustafa. I wrote about how using hateful language, even if you think you're 'punching up', is still going to come back to bite you because of the rules you set forth, because you've thrown away context in favour of outrage, because you're more worried about scoring Good Person Points than you are talking to someone you disagree with.

And here we go again. I find myself growing more and more accustomed to the phrase "I told you so."

I'll be addressing some points from an article from The Daily Beast, but first a brief musical interlude.

 

Such a catchy song. I think the whole point of it is that it's ironic that a song about irony dredges up example after example of things that aren't ironic but instead just suck.

So the gist of the article is that there are women, ostensibly comedians, being banned from Facebook (and Twitter, Instagram, etc) for such benign, harmless phrases such as "men are trash," "men are scum," and "all men are ugly." And yes, this is bad. People shouldn't be banned for writing harmless (but stupid) things like that. This is not a Good Thing.

But, to quote Tony Stark, this is the end of the path you have started us on. When you've spent the last few years attacking, flagging, and reporting everything as harmful and hateful, you shouldn't be surprised when all of the sudden your particular favoured target is now considered 'protected' and your speech is stifled. After all, Facebook is a private company, right? They're not the government and therefore not bound by the First Amendment, right? You're not crying over your freeze peach, are you?

No, of course not. Because it's Different When I Do It™, right? Because your faceless, featureless, monolith of groupthinking physical traits are morally superiour to the other faceless, featureless, monolith of groupthinking physical traits.

In the wake of the #MeToo movement, countless women have taken to Facebook to express their frustration and disappointment with men and have been promptly shut down or silenced, banned from the platform for periods ranging from one to seven days.

See, I want to respond to this. And there's such an obvious comeback, but the kindergarten-level #NotAllMen is what I'd receive in return, not any introspection about judging people by their actions and character and not by their genitals.

Kayla Avery, a comedian in Boston said she’s been banned close to 10 times by Facebook and is currently serving out the end of her third 30-day ban.

I'm not sure who Kayla Avery is. Google just shows me someone convicted of murder. Maybe if I add "comedian" to the search something will...

Oh... she seems nice.

The post features screenshots provided by Sanni where Facebook does not deem comments calling her the N-word hate speech.

You know, this one time I stumbled across a profile that was full of sexualized images of young boys. I reported that profile. This is what I got in return. 

It's almost like Facebook just sucks at moderation in general.

As ProPublica revealed in an investigation in June, white men are listed as a protected group by the platform.

A Facebook spokesperson clarified that this is because all genders, races, and religions are all protected characteristics under Facebook’s current policy.

Like it or not, whether you even knew it or not, this is what you were asking for. You wanted all manner of protected classes. Did you think Facebook, one of the world's biggest companies (and a fat financial target for litigation) would open itself up to a discrimination suit by a hungry lawyer by not making a certain group or other a 'protected class'?

Female comedians have speculated that it’s internalized misogyny on the behalf of Facebook’s content moderation team that leads to punishment such as banning to be doled out unequally. Several have tried posting “women are scum,” had their friends report the posts, and subsequently suffered zero consequences.

"Speculation and anecdotal evidence have led us to believe that they're putting chemicals in the water that are turnin' the friggin frogs gay!" Come on, now. 

One issue with the way Facebook moderators currently review posts is that many “problematic” posts are viewed individually, without context because of privacy concerns. Facebook moderators also aren’t able to view personal or demographic information about the original poster. This means that they sometimes don’t know whether a piece of content was posted by a black queer woman or a white straight male.

2015: Fuck your context, you're _____ and that's problematic!
2017: MUH CONTECKST!

In the past, ironic misandry has been a popular way for women to deal with living in a world where they’re exposed to frequent abuse at the hands of powerful men. Yet, if a woman takes to Facebook to vent about how she “wants to imprison men and milk them for their male tears,” she could quickly lose access to her account.

But wouldn't ironic misandry normalize misandric statements, and therefore allow them to creep into the mainstream? You don't want that, do you?

Do you?

...has become a favored tactic of the alt-right, Gamergate, and movements known for their coordinated harassment...

B4? That's B4, right? I'VE GOT BINGO!

“I get cold feet to post stuff, especially if I try to share something that’s going on that I want to bring attention to. because I feel like I’m going to get in trouble somehow,” she said. “Sharing anything is nerve racking. It’s like, ‘What’s ok? What’s not ok? What’s going to cross the line this time?’ It makes me feel crazy, like Facebook is gaslighting us.”

Cold feet? Almost like this sort of thing has a chilling effect on free speech? Oh my, that does sound like a problem I sure wish someone had tried to warn us about this for the last few years. 

Ok, I'm done picking at The Daily Beast for now. Look, this sucks. It does. I don't want people banned from social media for writing something dumb. If that were the norm, I'd have been banned from Blogger by now, for sure. But this is what you've been pushing us towards. This is the end of the path you started us on, and now we're stuck here. Social media companies have tried so hard to kowtow to your demands that they overreached and now you've been hit, too.

I'm sorry, I truly am. But you had this coming, and so many of us tried to warn you.

'Cuz We Are Living in a Post-Context World, and I Am A Post-Context Girl

Context is a wonderful thing. Context is what paints a picture around a very small thing and gives it meaning. It's a very important thing; without context, that very small thing is open to being wildly misinterpreted.

These are all obvious things, so why am I bringing them up? 

Context.

A couple of weeks ago, the big news going around was that Rose McGowan, well known for playing the least popular sister on Charmed, a less popular series 'inspired' by The Craft (seriously, Piper was best girl on Charmed anyway), posted a scathing invective against the marketing campaign for X-Men: Apocalypse, scolding the studio for portraying 'casual violence against women' and not being able to 'manage to put any women directors on your slate for the next two years' and including a quote from a friend's 9-year-old that said 'Dad, why is that monster man committing violence against a woman?'

The classic Claremont Grip. 

The Casualness Angle
Some minor spoilers for X-Men: Apocalypse here, and some context, as well.

Mystique is very strong, very agile, and a very skilled fighter. She's shown, throughout the six X-Men films she appears in, incapacitating men much larger than her with ease, being generally fearless, and (thanks to her mutant powers) an expert at infiltration and espionage. Mystique is, in short, not one to mess with. She's a major player in the X-films universe, and a persistent villain in the comics.

Apocalypse is two steps shy of being a god. Hulk and Thor would probably have trouble standing up to him, as he completely walks over the X-Men, even overpowering Charles Xavier in his own mind. In short, Apocalypse is the biggest threat the X-Men have ever faced in a movie, so much so that even the MCU's Avengers team couldn't have taken him down either. The fact that he has Mystique in a classic Claremont Grip on the billboard isn't showing 'casual violence against women'; it's showing that an insanely powerful supervillain has the upper hand over one of the main stars of the movie, who is also an extremely capable combatant. It speaks volumes to her combat prowess that she was able to get close enough for Apocalypse to lay hands on her, considering Google searches for "Marvel Apocalypse" and "Marvel Apocalypse choke" turn up very few results for choke-holds.

The one exception being Apocalypse choking The Hulk out. From behind. With tentacles.

Or possibly cables.
But saying "Apocalypse Hulk tentacle asphyxiation"
really ought to help our position in the search rankings. 

The Marketing Angle
There is a meme floating around showing images from Deadpool with Angel Dust choking out defenseless Weasel and very defended Colossus, juxtaposed with Apocalypse strangling Mystique, and Deadpool wondering why two of those images are fine and one isn't.

Dammit, Wade, it's "you're". 

The obvious retort that I've seen has some merit, in that Angel Dust wasn't strangling anyone on the billboards for Deadpool. But if we take that a step further, there were five billboards that I saw for X-Men: Apocalypse: 

one with Magneto hovering menacingly with metal objects;

one with Storm shooting lightning from her hands;

one with Psylocke in a threatening pose;

one with Jean holding Scott's head as he fires his optic blasts;

and one with Apocalypse holding Mystique by the throat.

That's five billboards: four featuring one of the previously well-marketed female characters, one controlling the actions of a male character, two being generally awesome, and one in an inferior position to a god-like being. Deadpool's billboards... had no female representation.

[Nerdvoice] Actually, Salem, the billboard that was a satire of a typical Valentine's Day chick-flick had a picture of Morena Baccarin. [/nerdvoice] -- Erin

The 9-Year-Old Angle
Do 9-year-olds speak like Gender Studies majors, or do Gender Studies majors speak like 9-year-olds? I can never keep track of this stuff anymore. Either way, a 9-year-old didn't say that. Or maybe a 9-year-old had been fed that shit like Sunday School and was parroting it. 

My point here is that context is everything, and Rose McGowan is just another in a very, very long line of people that attack without context, whether they genuinely don't know the context or purposefully ignore it. This is no different than people that were against theBatgirl cover last year, where context (the fact that Barbara was once victimized when she was shot and paralyzed by The Joker, but has since faced him and overcome her fears to beat him) was also ignored, or any one of a number of huge public outcries. 

I'm rapidly losing the ability to give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to whether or not they're just ignoring context to try and gain attention over something. Rose, you're free to point out stuff you might find 'problematic', but I'm also free to point out that you're willfully ignoring context to make a point.