I’d suggest that we’re, in your point, conflating extreme behaviors which we can all agree are bad with far less harmful and far less problematic behaviors by calling it all “abuse”. You’re position requires there to be a wider concept that explains and explores the full range of behavior instead of making generalizations based on the worst forms.
It’s going to be tough to find people in any majority who actually believes that stalking, harassing and violently threatening people is “good”. I’ll stand by that, and you can get some big red flags from individuals who do think that way.
But the problem is that one particular, unexamined form of this larger issue consists of those individuals who go around employing “abuse” as a hammer to shut down conversation. I’ve seen enough Social Justice Warriors around the internet who go for the jugular in the face of any and all criticism. It’s immensely common to see two sides of an argument which both escalate quickly, mutually and co-dependently. Yet one side gets to claim a zero-sum identity as a “victim” and then demonize the other side as an “abuser” without anything even beginning to resemble critical engagement with the actual topic.
I don’t mean to excuse for absolutely poor behavior, but if we look at the far less extremes which employ the same discursive language of “victims” and “abusers” we can quickly see plenty of examples of all sorts of different contexts and outcomes. It’s that in our drive to protect people from the worst, we end up providing further flame to the fire insomuch that we’re handing more power, unilaterally, to one side over the other and then it just becomes an entirely destructive and confrontational paradigm. Why are trollies going for the rape threats? in part it is because it provides the “correct” reaction. As soon as women, as a whole, were told over and over again by the media that there is nothing worse than rape (which is pretty much true excepting far less common acts) and when they were, as a class, encouraged to go nuclear to combat rape threats, then you have the form of driving trollies.
To put it another way, if someone being trolled says that their well-being depended on a service animal you can bet that the driving trollies response would be threats against that service animal.
It’s not simple, but the way in which we’ve simplified this whole conversation, globally and especially domestically in the US, doesn’t help as much as people want to think. Violence of any sort is always contemptible and is always something to fight against, but we still have a somewhat early psychological experience with understanding cycles of violence. We’re just beginning to understand that violence (and especially things like violence amongst family/partners/friends) is most often reciprocal and a joint effort. We’re learning (and have been for awhile) that early life experiences of violence and abuse correlate to larger propensities of violence later in life.
The current trend of easily categorizing people into simplistic groups of “victims” and “abusers” is wishful thinking at best. And those who end up on extremes of violence are often covered far more completely under discourses of mental illness or various behavioral disorders.
In response to IMB,
I could possibly agree with your opinion, in general, but the specifics of the article do address the females who were victimized. I would argue that it’s highly unlikely that a female is going to threaten to rape another female. I imagine it’s not completely unheard of, but most definitely rare. Further, I’d suggest that females would rarely threaten to rape males.
I’d suggest that it’s, again, a limiting discourse on the specificity of rape which ignores other violence. Spend fifteen minutes paging through the Social Justice and the “anti-Social Justice” and you’ll find examples of violent threats and very nasty treatment all over the place. The number of times individuals of any position utter the words “you should kill yourself” or threaten harm to each other is mind-boggling.
But that also peeks at something that is far more of a core-concern than the outcomes: the origins.
At the core of all of this is anger. It’s people lashing out in anger as opposed to focusing those feelings on critical thought and productive discourse. Too often the current model of, say, gender discourse begins with an individual criticizing part of Social Justice Theory (such as suggesting that “Patriarchy” is a limited and obfuscating concept that takes away focus on economic/class issues in favor of the “easy” and zero-sum men/women categorization); this is met by the Social Justice-minded individual’s immediate leap toward such generalized and simplistic concept like calling them a “Misogynist”, “Rape Apologist”, “Abuser” or even the simple old go-to of “Bigot”. From there you have an escalation with the entirety of the genesis to be found within the fact that both individuals pretty much take the same zero-sum position: I’m right, you’re wrong and there’s nothing to discuss.
And so we end up with anger and threats of violence and everyone involved chooses the easy, simple but decidedly non-productive path of employing simplified and zero-sum discursive structures.
And looping back to orangedesperado, you provide (unintentionally!) a great example of how to obfuscate a term and employ it as a weapon. You provide the very accurate and objectively-correct concept of “Abuse”. `However, we’re almost never discussing “Abuse” in such a limited way. We employ the concept of “Abuser” in a wide-net to ascribe those extreme, “evil” tendencies as you describe to individuals who show no objective evidence of being anywhere close. We, of course, also employ such terms accurately and we certainly should continue to do so, but the sheer prevalence of some of these commonly-used-but-really-loaded labels isn’t moving us forward in a way where we’re actually addressing the issue because we’ve watered it down so very much.
In the end a lot of this makes me uneasy. Not because I dislike the idea of going after individuals who stalk and harass others but because we’re so casual when we employ those same labels and terms in regard to people who simply disagree (and often for legitimate and good-willed reasons).
