I recently spent around three months in Lincoln, Nebraska. When I moved there for the summer, I didn’t know anyone and my friends recommended that I use Tinder. I met a lot of people and one of them was an economics and gender studies major. I asked her what she was planning to do with her degree, she told me that in the short run she was going to be a bartender and “capitalize on the male gaze.” I was impressed. It was probably the best joke I had heard on Tinder. I told her so, and she became angry and called me a scrawny misogynist.
In her defense, I am undoubtedly scrawny. I would like to blame genetics, but I am forced to admit that I just don’t like working out. However, I have never thought of myself as a misogynist. To be completely honest, I wasn’t totally sure what a misogynist was until I had to prove that I wasn’t one. I was certainly aware that it was a bad thing to be and that it involved gender, but I couldn’t have distinguished it from sexism till I was classified as one. I am now under the impression that the distinction between simple prejudice and actual hate. But even better educated I was still confused; I didn’t think that my approval of her joke implied or expressed either prejudice or hate and I hadn’t been impressed by the joke because it was funny and she was a woman, only because I thought it was funny.
I dislike being confused. The more certain I am that I do not have the correct answer, the more I need to know it. While this has served me very well in school, it can be a problem with people who generally want their secrets to remain secret. But Tinder, being anonymous, seemed like a low-risk place to push for an answer. I was careful. My words were chosen thoughtfully. I also apologized for any possible insult (real or otherwise) dand explained my intent. She apologized and explained that she had thought I thought her being a bartender was funny, and that she couldn’t do it because she was a woman. “Ah,” I said to myself, “that makes sense.”
It didn’t make sense. I would like to now apologize for some minor sexism. I am far more likely to let women get away with such utter nonsense than men and I am considering working on that. I would also like to apologize for being scrawny, not to you or to her, but to myself. I can and should and probably won’t do better. I will not apologize for what I said. Nothing I said was offensive or unclear enough to be read as offensive.
The situation I found myself in is a precarious one. It is hard to argue that I did not mean to hurt someone with words said in passing because those words leave behind no evidence of their formation except what I remember. This is problematic because I cannot only lie to others, but to myself, rendering any evidence that exists without accompanying action impotent. The only action is the words themselves and one party says they are harmless while another claims otherwise. If she is right, you should care because there is a larger problem of prejudice that is well documented. This problem has been documented in wage gaps as well as in speech both public and private. Because prejudice is a beast too large and pervasive to deal with in one fell swoop, it must be handled one case at a time. Changing a culture is impossible but changing individuals is simply difficult. The hope is that by changing enough people, the culture is at least rendered mostly harmless. If she was right, then my words are dangerous, not because they are dangerous to her, but because they are part of a larger attitude that is universally dangerous.
But if I am right, something else is at stake. I am not responsible for any possible result of my actions simply because that is beyond my control. I am certainly responsible for intent. Others may influence and shape my intent, but only I can dictate and decide it. Because I am the ultimate shaper of my intent, I can be held responsible for it (if it can be proved), regardless of the actions I take or their results. I can also be held responsible for any reasonable outcome of my actions. This is not a new idea; children are judged less harshly because they know less about the world so what constitutes a reasonable outcome is limited. The insane are similarly given leeway because we allow that the world they inhabit and draw conclusions from may be fundamentally different from our own. But for a legally sane adult, this still covers a lot of ground.
If every possible interpretation is on the table and I can be held to it, my language loses all meaning. This is even more problematic if the possible interpretations include things that make people angry and make them feel threatened. If my goal is to enjoy dialog and to take part in rigorous and difficult conversations that attempt to achieve some measure of truth through careful thought without causing harm to those around me, I cannot be blamed for irrational and baseless interpretations. To hold me responsible for the entire gamut of possibilities forces me to make a choice; I can either speak with meaning in an attempt at understanding, or I can say nothing of value and hollow out my language of all value but be loved by all.
It is a very dangerous desire to be so loved. I remember a picture book that told the story of the emperor’s new clothes. I remember the pastels where the emperor walked proudly down the street in nothing but his skin and the people had to approve, except for the child who told him he was naked and that all his subjects were liars. We should be far more worried by the people than the emperor. The emperor, naked or not, is still emperor, and the extent of the nonsense he plays out is a testament to the power he holds over his people. The peasants are the ones who need to be loved by the man with no clothes and so they say words that have no value. When they say those words they forever damage their credibility and the credibility of anything they may say in the future. What would have happened if the child had not spoken? Would the emperor’s new clothes have become the new craze? Would the entire populace have started to walk through the streets naked, cutting their bare feet on the cobblestones and shivering in the wind? Would they have had any choice? After all, to do otherwise would be to criticize the choices of the man in charge.
If my words on Tinder had been truly hateful or prejudiced than the right thing would have been to tell me so. I believe I did the right things afterward. I attempted to step back and weigh the evidence. I corrected my bias towards myself by assuming I was wrong. I discovered that I was ignorant and tried to remedy my failing. But if my words were not hateful or prejudiced, if I am right and she is wrong and her reaction was out of line, for the exact same reason that they were necessary if I was wrong. If misogyny is truly as large a problem as it seems to be, misusing the word threatens to reduce it to a fleeting insult and not a representation of the larger issue it needs to be. If I had called her actions into question, not as I did by tiptoeing and with careful apologies, but like the child who simply called a naked man naked, how would that have played out? Would she have tried to look in herself for fault as I did and more importantly, because there is only one of her and countless possible observers, how would you have judged me? Would I have become the misogynist in your eyes at that moment? Is there any scenario where I can be the child and not the peasant?
