Here’s Lionel Shriver’s nasty essay about Christine Blasey Ford. Whether or not Kavanaugh assaulted her, how does it help to call her “mousey” & suggest that she should have gotten over it sooner? Somehow @JonHaidt & @glukianoff make a less rancorous argument about fragility....https://twitter.com/HeatherEHeying/status/1052057322543955969 …
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Agreed. Shriver makes her case with strong language demonstrating the very power that the victim-narrative robs women of. Aspiring to overcome trauma and be empowered isn’t nasty. It’s healthy.
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I agree with your last paragraph, but my point is that it’s possible to make such an argument without being as nasty as he was.
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I am *not* trying to add fuel to fires here, and this conversation seems to be going well, but I wonder, Nick, if that's a typo in your last tweet, or if you assumed Shriver is male (bc "Lionel")? If so: does it change your read on the piece, knowing it was written by a woman?
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No idea of Lionel’s sex, & it matters not one bit to me. I’m broadly in support of her argument, but not her tone
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I think if you actually agree with her argument, you might find your way to understanding why she'd be a little miffed in this climate. It matters that a certain movement is portraying women as weak and in need of protection. THAT'S the argument.
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I still don’t understand why she needs to come down so hard on Ford. Look at it this way: wouldn’t her broad argument find a more receptive audience with a more modulated tone?
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Perhaps, but that's "tone policing" (and I hate you for making use that language
) and I think the underlying message in the "tone" is that women aren't so fragile. Ford, after all, has a PhD (as does my wife) and a couple of masters. -
What’s wrong with tone policing? It’s handmaid to civility.
End of conversation
New conversation -
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Shriver describes Ford like a product of safetyism, but Ford is much older than the iGen folks Haidt and Lukianoff talk about. I wonder why that is.
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... because maybe Ford isn’t a good example of safetyism? It also occurs to me that
@laurakipnis has made these arguments too, but absent Schriver’s rancor. -
I'll chime in that I don't like the "safetyism" reduction. Just got back and still have to read the piece, but my comment was on what Heather quoted, and the issues that popped into my head from that was much broader than that. I see safetyism as a component of a problem 1/2
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that puts emotionalism at the fore, women as essentially emotional - all in some kind of neo-Victorian celebration. It rationalizes/honors those women law students who can't take learning about rape law, or be expected to do well if cold-called in Socratic method classes. 2/2
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I’m in total agreement here, but this is different than Schriver’s take on Blasey Ford. This subtle line is crucial to a society that’s both resilient & humans.
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The line between a ‘trauma’ and an ‘incident’ is gonna vary wildly for individuals. That matters. But I feel Shriver is saying we need a norm for that line regardless, so we can see when an individual’s trauma might not be representative of a collective one.
End of conversation
New conversation -
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I think the difference in tone is largely an effect of the fact that Shriver is a woman who’s also publicly demonstrated her own nuanced capacity for empathy via her fiction writing. It gives her license which Haidt and Lukianoff don’t/can’t have.
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