When YouTube Overtakes Life

Last year, Desh decided to invite two feminists Roxane Gay and Christina Hoff Sommers. Gay and Sommers have very different approaches to feminism; when Gay was asked before the event about why she would share the stage with Sommers “Gay called Sommers a “white supremacist,” a claim for which there doesn’t appear to be any evidence (Sommers is Jewish and says she is a registered Democrat, for what it’s worth).” The event itself, and its aftermath on social media, proved how difficult it is to have a meaningful conversation in public about difficult questions. As Desh tells it, “the crowd was largely responsible. “Imagine a terrible, terrible YouTube comments section — but live,” he says. “People had already picked their sides when they came into it, we could hardly get words in, and people were chanting and yelling and screaming.”” Singal traces the ways that the various participants simply could not engage in an adult conversation without devolving into chants, boastings, and insults that mimicked a YouTube comments section.

One point of consensus among all the participants in this fracas seems to be that Desh was a bit blindsided by the intensity of what the mini-tour had wrought, both in its run-up and during the events themselves. “He reminded me of the Dev Patel character in Best Exotic Marigold Hotel — charming, enthusiastic, idealistic but a bit overwhelmed by events,” said Sommers. “He had a great success bringing the physicist Michio Kaku to Australia. He had imagined that a large appreciative audience would gather to hear two feminist writer-professors with very different ideas discuss their differences — and perhaps find some common ground. That turned out to be impossible.” That’s certainly true, and it’s also interesting, when listening to the event itself, to note the way its very structure and atmosphere, rather than nurturing real conversation, dumbed it down in, well, exactly the way Desh said it did in his analogy to terrible YouTube comments.

The best example came in a discussion of campus rape toward the end of the Sydney event. Sommers was explaining,

What worries me the most is that, to the extent that we have a serious problem, which no one here is denying, there’s actually a good study — it was in The New England Journal of Medicine — about how you could cut the numbers and how you could get it down of just untoward behavior and too much … and what they found was that girls are most vulnerable freshman year, and it has to do with sort of binge drinking and drunken parties and fraternities and all the things you could [The audience boos] … So they found they could cut the numbers substantially, and this was peer-reviewed, careful research. And the young women would take a course, and they would learn more about [More, louder boos] — Exactly! Everyone’s — Showing somebody how not to be a victim is not victimizing them. [Loud, angry jeering]

“Surely we can have a class that shows young men how not to victimize,” Gay responded, eliciting raucous cheers. A minute later, she reiterated that idea: “Really, all of these problems could be solved by men learning to not rape.” More cheers and applause followed.

I’m familiar with the study in question — I covered it when it came out. It was a sophisticated, carefully constructed approach centered on helping young women “assess risk from acquaintances, overcome emotional barriers in acknowledging danger, and engage in effective verbal and physical self-defense.” Yes, some of the tools might come in handy in alcohol-soaked situations, but that wasn’t really the focus. Rather, it was more on the risk of acquaintance rape and on a message any progressive feminist would agree with: Young women should be empowered to be outspoken in asserting their boundaries when they feel those boundaries are being threatened, but they’re all too often socialized to be polite or pliant instead. The program seemed to work. Young women who went through it were significantly less likely to face an attempted or completed sexual assault than those who were simply given a standard-issue sexual-assault-prevention pamphlet. Again, the available evidence suggests that young women who would have been sexually assaulted in the absence of this program weren’t, because of it.

But in Sydney, on a stage ostensibly dedicated to fostering meaningful conversation, everyone, the audience included, quickly manned the appropriate battlements, eager to show they were on the right side. For Sommers, it was about binge drinking and out-of-control campus culture, conservative bogeymen. For Gay, that was victim blaming, a liberal one. In a quiet bar or restaurant, with the journal in front of them and someone explaining exactly what the study found, it’s highly unlikely that either woman would have responded to it with anything but interest and enthusiasm and possibly some mild disagreement over the specifics. It prevented assaults, and everyone agrees young women should be taught to speak up when they’re made uncomfortable. But here, in a charged public setting where, not unlike Twitter, every utterance was met with immediate audience feedback, there was no room for that. Instead, the debate was dumbed down, almost immediately, to a hero-vs.-villain caricature: There was Roxane Gay, who is Good because she wants men to stop raping, versus Christina Hoff Sommers, who is Bad because she, on the other hand, blames women for being raped. As though Gay doesn’t want young women to speak up and say, “I don’t feel comfortable — please leave my room right now.” As though Sommers doesn’t want men to stop raping.