The Trouble with Sydney - Born That Way?

There was a kerfluffle recently over a new ad campaign for American Eagle Jeans that featured Sydney Sweeney, a young model and actress who for some reason has become MAGA's sweetheart.  Not long before, terminally online right-wing guys were drooling over pictures of her cleavage and crowing that the Woke Left doesn't like pretty white girls -- take that, libtards!  Or this.  Or something.  These were the same guys who threw tantrums because M&Ms were no longer sexy enough to please them, and complaining because liberal co-eds didn't want to date them.  (Why did they want liberal women to date them anyway?  Social media are full of "conservative" males denouncing liberal women as fat lesbians with tattoos and piercings and blue or pink hair who will never get a man; or as stuck-up hot bitches who think they're too good for a regular guy.  But this is all just the mirror image of doughy gay guys who complain that some hot guy wouldn't breed* them, and I digress.) 

The ads' slogan was "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans," with Sweeney chiming in "My jeans are blue."  Cute, but dumb - but then this is the world of advertising.  I remember amusing myself with the genes / jeans homonym as in the 70s, when I was younger and dumber though not cuter.  American Eagle had every reason to expect that the youth market would giggle and embrace the slogan and shell out for AE's not-made-in-America products. It got off to a promising start, with Donald Trump endorsing it after he was told that Sweeney is a registered Republican, and American Eagle stocks taking off.

But then things changed.  There were many complaints that the ads promoted eugenics and white privilege (Sweeney is blonde and blue-eyed), which you'd ordinarily expect would help sales.  But then sales fell off and foot traffic in American Eagle stores declined - not drastically, but noticeably.  The business press suggested that AE might want to dial it back.  Certain MAGA celebrities and media denounced the Woke Mob for discrimination against white people and the sacred Free Enterprise system, though they were happy enough when they could claim that America had rejected Gender Ideology and forced businesses to stop using trans celebrities in their marketing.  Boycotts for me but not for thee.  All very predictable.

What had surprised me, though, was the objection to "eugenics."  Everybody knows that eugenics is bad.  But liberals and progressives generally love biological determinism, invoking genes and chromosomes and DNA and evolution.  They love to claim that this or that cultural phenomenon is "in our DNA."  In its day, before the Nazis ruined it for everybody, eugenics was as popular on the left as on the right.  (See Andre Pichot's The Pure Society [Verso, 2000].)   Sydney Sweeney probably does have good genes, though that's not as much of an achievement as people think.  So do any number of non-white celebrities adored for their looks. Maybe the American Eagle ads were a handy opportunity to push back against resurgent racism in American Society, but I don't think the people who objected were thinking strategically.  

The idea that the masses should be swayed by "influencers" seems to span the political spectrum.  Toward the left end it has the form that we should be able to see images of People Who Look Like Us in the media.  They generally don't look like us, but we should be able to dream that plastic, focus-grouped celebrities are us, or at least are our friends and will inclusively accept us and give us a sense of belonging.  I agree that there should be variety in the types of people's bodies depicted in media, but it's not enough, and I don't think that mass media can be engineered to give everybody a sense of belonging.  Sometimes it's good not to belong.  Sometimes you have to stand alone against public condemnation and even feel like an outcast.  There are no easy solutions to really important problems; or sometimes a easy solution is painful in some way.  But American Eagle isn't standing on principle, it's just interested in making money, and will change its sales pitch as it finds necessary.

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* Don't get me started on the use of "breed" among gay men to refer to penetration.  At least not today.

"I Do Not Remember It," Said O'Brien

For those who are too young to remember the Reagan/Bush years or those who are old enough but  have mercifully/conveniently forgotten them, an easy, enjoyable way to brush up is to read Molly Ivins's collections of her journalism and commentary from those days.  I recently reread Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? (Random House, 1991), and today I'm halfway through You Got to Dance With Them That Brung You (Random House, 1998).  As you can see, I'm out of sequence, but it's okay because of these passages I found.

Describing Berkeley, where she'd taught a journalism class, she wrote:

Diversity is such a political buzzword these days that you can forget what it actually means until you spend time in Berkeley. A stroll across campus or along a Berkeley street is like some PC lesson in multiethnic, multicultural diversity. Black, brown, Japanese, white, Chinese; ashrams, sari shops, Tina Turner Buddhists chanting ram-rom-om, bagel shops run by Pakistanis, croissant shops run by Vietnamese, the Black Muslim Bakery; gay and lesbian knitting classes, Little League teams that look like a junior division of the United Nations, Saint Joseph-the-Worker Elementary School featuring Roman Catholics of every nation, skaters with turquoise hair and rings in their noses; God Hill, where all the theological seminaries are clustered.

This was originally published in 1997, but it should sound familiar today.  I realized after I'd read it that, while it sounds like a pleasant environment to me, conservatives would find it revolting. This passage could almost be used as a diagnostic for what Corey Robin calls "the reactionary mind." To be sure, not all conservatives would be repulsed, and some liberals would feel at least a twinge of repugnance; some others might say delicately that they understand why some people might feel that way.  But it is surely a litmus test for the GOP base.

To be fair, though, those who desire cultural purity would also object to mongrel Berkeley as Ivins described it, and they aren't all white Republicans.  They turn up among American Indians, for example, and I wince whenever my Mexican friends claim to be 100% hecho en Mexico, especially since a 100% Mexican is most likely a mongrel, just like a 100% American. You find it among LGBTQ people, like the gay men's baseball team that wanted to exclude bisexual men.  These are people who might not think of themselves as conservative in the same sense as Donald Trump or William F. Buckley, but they have a very important trait in common with them.

Someone on Twitter asked me if I wanted to see America become "darker."  Yes, I said without hesitation.  He (or someone else -- there was a chorus of them and I didn't bother to try to tell them apart) asked if I didn't agree that a "browner" America was at odds with freedom.  I replied that I didn't think so, but that history seems to show that a whiter America is at odds with freedom.

Next passage from Ivins, following directly on the first:

The right wing, ever behind the cultural curve, is now accusing the left of fostering “identity politics,” which means a pernicious harping on one’s ethnic heritage. Berkeley is well beyond identity politics. For one thing, everyone seems to have more than one affiliation. Japanese Hispanics, gay Lubavitchers, Finnish acupuncturists, Irish-African-Americans (that’s quite a Saint Paddy’s Day party). I am told by administrators at UC-Berkeley that the student body is 60 percent “other.” Mostly you have to guess. Samoan? Goan? Aztec? At faculty parties I brag that I have a student from Nebraska whose mother makes casseroles with Cheez Whiz.

Conservative?  Even more so!  This sort of blurring boundaries bothers the Right a great deal. (Though not, as I noted above, only the hard core GOP base; panic over porous boundaries turns up in groups that would ordinarily be counted as anti-conservative, even Left.)  Race-mixing, confusing genders, the failure to maintain and protect borders or boundaries is according to them the kind of degeneracy that brought down the Roman Empire.  If you want to believe that differences are "natural," whether because a deity laid them down or because they're in our DNA, it's unnerving to find people prancing insouciantly past the boundaries you thought were immutable and impenetrable.  Unnerving, but not any kind of natural law that needs to be respected.

Trouble Ahead, Trouble Behind

There's been a flurry of attention over the weekend to a "welcome" letter sent to incoming freshmen by the University of Chicago, advising them that the institution's

commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.

This set off a predictable storm of praise and criticism.  I'm going to focus on the criticism, though I might return to the praise another time.  (Or maybe I don't need to: John Scalzi wrote a pretty good post about it.)  I've written here before at length about "safe spaces," and will try not to repeat myself too much today.  But the criticism that I've seen has mostly been dreadful: intellectually and morally dishonest.

I'll begin by saying that I have reservations about Chicago's rejection of "the creation of intellectual 'safe spaces' where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own."  As long as they're not explicitly called "safe spaces," such places are normal in intellectual circles.  I think that much of the panic about Creationism and Intelligent Design represents a desire to establish classrooms as just such "safe spaces," but for the Good Guys.  In practice, of course, certain ideas and perspectives are ruled out in advance in every classroom, if only because teaching the conflicts takes a lot of time.  But the phobic reaction of many secularists to religious ideas (or what they believe to be religious ideas) suggests that something else is going on, something less exalted, something like the very narrow-mindedness, fear of difference, and authoritarianism such people fondly assume themselves to be free of.  Roy Edroso posted on Tuesday about an antigay bigot's dismissal of "the 'born-this-way' myth," and rather quickly got tangled in his own rhetoric.  (I quit reading the comments after one regular jeered, inaccurately, at the Bible as a supposedly 4,000 year old work of Middle Eastern shepherds; they only got worse after that.)  Of course it's simply not debatable in Edroso's safe space whether sexual orientation is inborn, any more than the reverse is true in David French's safe space; and rationality quickly goes out the window if you question it.  But there are good reasons to question it, starting with the fact that the science doesn't work.  A reader wrote that despite everything, the idea that he was born gay has an emotional appeal.  I'm not sure what the appeal of the belief is, but whatever it is, it's emotional not rational.

But I digress.  I suppose I should do some investigation of whatever science is involved with emotional triggers, but a cursory look indicates that there isn't much, and what there is doesn't really conflict with the University of Chicago's stance as set out in their letter.  The people who are attacking Chicago seem to be using "trigger warning" extremely loosely at best.  This piece at the Huffington Post, for example, by their "Deputy Healthy Living Editor" (a title that alone inspires absolute confidence), relies on innuendo rather than reason:

In other words, students who may be susceptible to mental health issues, like post-traumatic stress disorder or panic disorders, are undeserving of a warning that a lecture or guest speaker may aggravate those issues or traumatic experiences.

Actually, no.  It could be argued that the letter itself is a trigger warning, that a liberal-arts education may "aggravate those issues or traumatic experiences."  But the writer offers no real evidence that such aggravation can be avoided by trigger warnings.  She claims that "research clearly shows that atmospheres that promote negative stereotypes can act as barriers to treatment, furthering stigma and causing additional psychological trauma."  The page she links to, however, doesn't really address what she says it does and doesn't support her argument (I'll be generous and call it that, though it's stretching the word absurdly to do so).  Later she writes:

Trigger warnings are potentially lifesaving for people who have dealt with traumas like sexual assault, hate crimes or violence. Eliminating these advisories and zones on campus suggests that someone should have to listen to someone who questions their humanity or experience.

No links there, and no evidence to back it up.  The inflationary rhetoric ("potentially lifesaving") doesn't help, and is no substitute for evidence.  As she then admits: "There is not much research on the effectiveness of advisories, but some experts do recommend that professors at least alert students of the content if it could be triggering."  Let me repeat that: There is not much research on the effectiveness of advisories; "some experts" recommend them anyway, but some experts can always be found to recommend anything you like.

Again:

Nearly 30 percent of students in 2014 reported experiencing a psychological health issue that negatively influenced their academic performance. Sexual assault ― which can lead to PTSD, among other conditions ― is also a prevalent issue. Approximately one in five women and one in 16 men will be sexually assaulted while in college.

And:

Research from the National Alliance on Mental Illness shows more than 60 percent of college students who dropped out did so because of a mental health issue, which includes cases like PTSD and trauma.

I've seen similar sloppy use of numbers in other posts about this matter.  Are trigger warnings needed by all those 30 percent of students?  Probably not.  "Psychological health issue" casts a very wide net. Sexual assault can "lead to PTSD" -- I don't doubt that, but how often does it do so, and how often will trigger warnings in class be "effective"?  How many of the "more than 60 percent of college students who dropped out because of a mental health issue" -- also a very wide net -- were actually affected by PTSD and trauma?  But 60 percent is a nice big number, very impressive if you don't care about anything but making an impression.  It's a very irresponsible piece of work, this article, and it's typical of the complaints and attacks I've been seeing about the U of Chicago today.

In the comments under John Scalzi's post, a pattern emerged: numerous people wrote about what they "thought" a safe space is, in their opinions.  (The same is true of "trigger warning."  Scalzi noticed what I had, that the U of Chicago letter was itself, effectively, a trigger warning, as are movie and television and other rating systems, according to the commonsense meaning of "trigger warning" these folks are working with.  I'm not sure, however, that they are the same thing.)  The trouble is that there is considerable disagreement about what a safe space (or a trigger warning) is or should be. As the therapist Walt Odets wrote (In the shadow of the epidemic: being HIV-negative in the age of AIDS [Duke UP, 1995]: 274f.):

In any well-run group, safety can only mean one thing: any expression of feelings or thoughts will be received and tolerated by the group, and an attempt will be made to honestly respond to it. This will be done without physical violence or undue emotional hurt to other members, and without abandonment of the group. This essential objective is most easily accomplished in a professionally facilitated therapy group, because the group leader will have the necessary skills to mediate and limit conflict to a safe and constructive level. When the idea of safety comes to mean, as it often does in poorly constructed therapy groups and many support groups, that members be polite and "non-judgmental" toward each other, then the prime therapeutic objectives are undermined. Interpersonal interaction -- as opposed to social form -- necessarily involves feelings and judgments about others, and unless they can be expressed and discussed truthfully, the group can provide neither insight nor the meaning that comes of bearing witness....

The function of a group is not to make members "feel better when they leave than when they came in," as one poorly supervised peer facilitator has routinely billed his weekly support group for San Francisco gay men. It is the function of a therapy group, like individual psychotherapy, to help people attain the insight that allows them to make themselves feel better.

As Odets's own complaint shows, though, his idea of safe space is not the only meaning in current use, even among professionals.  Whoever wrote the University of Chicago letter is evidently foggy about the meaning of the term, as of "trigger warning." When you factor in non-professionals, the sky is the limit.  (The same is true of other terms that have transitioned from jargon to mainstream discourse, like "microaggression.")  To me that's evidence that demands for trigger warnings and safe space tend to come from people who don't know what they're talking about.  It becomes pointless to argue about the "real" meaning of these terms when no one knows what they do mean, so one must look at what people think they mean by them, and what conditions and practices they are calling for.  The Huffington Post article, which is unfortunately typical of the critiques I've seen, indicates that there is some truth in the charge that advocates of "safe space" want to shut down intellectual freedom altogether (except for themselves of course).  They talk about "civility" (the word is in the U of Chicago letter, in fact) and "respect," but those qualities are conspicuously absent from their discourse.

But also from their opponents'.  As Scalzi tweeted (and quoted in his post), "The conservatives gloating about @uchicago's No' Safe Spaces' policy don't appear to think it will apply to them, too, the dear wee lads."  The reactions he got to that one from conservatives confirmed his point, though it was hardly news.  But that is one area where conservatives and non-conservatives stand together: Freedom of Speech for Me, But Not for Thee!

The HuffPost writer complains: "The problem with this interpretation of trigger warnings is that it presumes all participants have the same level of privilege."  "Privilege" is another of those wiggly, gaseous terms that gets misused a lot, I'm afraid.  I noticed when I first wrote about safe spaces that a lot of the discourse around them presumes levels of class privilege.  So, for instance, a young gay teacher-to-be denounced the word "gay" as "vulgar," and asserted that he wouldn't tolerate it in any class he taught.  Suppressing the "vulgar" means imposing a privileged, white middle-class standard of language.  Privilege isn't a simple linear scale of higher and lower, it's extremely complex and muddled: one can be privileged along one axis and de-privileged in another.  There's been a lot of criticism of the word "privilege" in some recent discussion, asserting that, say, working-poor whites in West Virginia don't have white privilege.  Of course they do, however much privilege they don't have.  But a college-educated person who presumes to lecture such people on their white privilege ignores his or her own privilege: privilege is always relative to your status and the status of the person you're dealing with.  If you want to communicate with and educate others, you will try to frame your message in such a way that they'll be able to hear it -- or to put it another way, speaking of white privilege to poor white trash sets off various triggers for them, and those who wave around "civility" and "respect" must be aware of and curb their own privilege first.

And Even Thee's a Little Diverse

Along with my coworkers, I went to a training session on diversity on Thursday. Both of the presenters (a man and a woman) were gay, which may be why they spent so much time on sexual orientation and "gender." That wasn't such a good idea, because those issues were the ones they were most confused about. (Not only those, I admit: the male presenter claimed that Sunni and Shi'a are "ethnicities" as well as religious sects, which is like calling Roman Catholicism an ethnicity.)

First the presenter began by distinguishing between "sex" and "gender," and in good 1960s Second Wave Feminist fashion she defined these in terms of biology/physiology/external genitals ("sex") and behavior/dress/job appropriateness ("gender"). Having done so, though, she kept equivocating, especially about "gender." For example, she defined "gender identity" as a person's sense of whether they are male or female. But "male" and "female" are sexes, not genders; the proper words would be "masculine" and "feminine," but they aren't identities. I understand why "gender identity" is used this way, of course: "sexual identity" was already being used for a person's sense of their sexual orientation, though that's problematic too. Does it mean what someone knows inwardly about his or her desires, or does it mean one's publicly declared identity? The latter would mean that a closet case's "sexual identity" is heterosexual, because that's the mask he or she wears, so it seems an odd waste of the term.

Personally, I don't seem to have a "gender identity": I know that I'm male, but subjectively, inside myself, I don't feel that I'm either male or female. This makes me wonder about transsexuals: what does it mean, I wonder, to feel that one is the 'wrong' sex? The closest I could come to something like that is the shock I feel when I look in the mirror each morning and an old man looks back at me; but I've never much liked my own appearance, so it's not much of a change. (What am I rejecting in my reflection -- my "gender," my age, or my looks?) Nor do I feel masculine or feminine, though like many people I've often worried about how other people perceive me. Self-image is notoriously unreliable, but is that what's meant by "identity"? Sometimes it seems to be, and it should be obvious how problematic it would be to equate one's identity with one's sense of self: my "identity" is that of a fat person, but I'm actually skinny (or vice versa); I "identify" as a young person, but I'm 70 years old; everybody thinks I'm a manly man, but inside me is a little girl who wants to sit in Daddy's lap; and so on. These discrepancies are surely interesting psychology, but are they identities? What is an identity, anyway?

But back to "gender." The presenter stuck to the older sense of the word when she talked about transsexuals who get a sex change; they're not the same as the transgendered, who may not conform to local social norms about gender, and may seek to modify their bodies to some extent (just as the cisgendered do), but don't want to alter their genital organs. ("Sex" used to be used to refer to those organs: caught without clothing, he tried to conceal his sex.) But how far can you fail to fit the norm without being "transgendered"? After all, I fall short of masculine norms in various ways (such as my lack of interest in sports), but no one would call me transgendered. Does it count if you violate the norms but see them as part of normal variation? It often seems to me that the advocates of transgender equivocate between seeing it as an identity -- a label one applies to oneself -- and seeing it as a description that can be applied by others, at least as long the others are sympathetic. Joan of Arc, who cut her hair short and took up the military as a career, is often called transgendered nowadays, but she certainly never thought of herself that way.

It also seems to me that many (not all) transgendered people have a very conservative, restrictive view of gender: they are trans because they don't fit the norms, but they never question the norms. If a little boy plays with dolls, should adults assume he is transgendered? Or should they consider that little boys often like to play with dolls? I get nervous for children's sake when adults (who often have no expert knowledge at all, for what little that is worth) jump to conclusions about their future gender or sexuality on the basis of such crude stereotypes, which I'd thought had been challenged effectively but seem to be making a comeback -- and often among the same people who were supposed to be challenging them.