Trolling abused victims in a major publication
A recent book claiming to deal with network shaming circuitously describes the abuses of an activist network. The Shame Machine trolls the victims of a particular feminist shame machine that organises offline violence. This violence includes physical, sexual, and psychological abuse.
On the cover of the book there is a depiction of a conveyer belt of brightly coloured flowers passing through a machine. As they exit the machine the flowers are bent over. Their heads are lowered in shame, as if they had been brought to the brink of death, but also bent over bowing in contrition to a superior power. The first three chapters confirm our expectation that the book will deal with the moral problems of public shaming. The first chapters deal with fat-shaming, addiction-shaming, poverty-shaming, and body odour shaming. By this point, Cathy O’Neil has shown her credentials as a caring person exposing the unfair treatment of vulnerable groups in society. We are well primed for the central section on network shaming.
O’Neil argues that when shame machines target men, they are punching up the social ladder. Her examples are exemplary- one of the most powerfully Hollywood producers, a long-established editor at a prestigious American newspaper, a Governor of New York, a governor campaigning for the Democratic nominee for president. Most of us will never meet such powerful people and thus her discussion bears little resemblance to the widespread phenomenon of network shaming. Recent estimates show that one in three people have experienced online harassment. In fact, some of the examples have nothing to with network shaming. The last example, of a Governor, is from the 1960’s, before the internet existed. The example of Harvey Weinstein has nothing to do with network shaming and everything to do with the courage of the women and journalists that took this powerful serial abuser on. This all begs the question, what is O’Neil really talking about?
O’Neil is concern trolling men who she knows are victims of a particular campaign of network shaming. Concern trolling is where the shamer defends herself by claiming they are worried about the victim’s health. So, “the shamer both denies and defends the tactic” p33. Network harassment is associated with physical and psychological effects, including disrupted sleep, lower self-esteem, depression, anxiety, self-harms, suicidal ideation, and in some cases even suicide. Speaking with the moral credentials that she established in the book’s first section, in the second section O’Neil concern trolls the victims of a feminist network shaming which her book exemplifies:
Many take a stand in one area really working at it, while utterly relaxing in another… when it comes to shame we can be simultaneously gentle and merciless, fighting against one stigma while defending the other. (p125-6)
O’Neil takes a stand against fat-shaming, addiction-shaming, and poverty-shaming, separating out complex issues, while neglecting the problems with networked shaming when directed at men. It does not get much better than concern trolling the victims of network shaming in a book that is supposed to raise concerns about network shaming. Men do not find genuine concern, but they do find most of the elements of the harassment they suffer. Only the abuses are displaced or described circuitously, and they are not condemned. O’Neil makes her position clear on network shaming: every man is guilty. Any claims to victimization by men are only the result of ‘cognitive dissonance’.
Instead of confronting their shame, their cognitive dissonance forces them to repress potentially painful probes into racism and instead ask a simple question? Am I a good person? An affirmative answer provides a measure of emotional peace, but it’s a fragile one, because of all those unanswered questions about race, and the doubts they stir.
There are two things that need noting. First, the logic of this argument is absurd. Any accusation is, by definition, unpleasant. Any accusation is a way of the world telling you that you are not as good as you think you are. Every denial of an accusation could be disregarded as another example of cognitive dissonance. Any accusation might provoke shame. So any claim to inoccence, of any accusation, can be taken to prove someone is guilty and ashamed, According to O’Neill. While the one example of a woman represents unfair treatment, all other examples are of powerful men claiming to victimized and later proven guilty. If a man claims to be innocent, then he is guilty.
Secondly, what O’Neill is describing is the damage of a smear campaign when the target is innocent. No matter what the victim says or does online shaming does irreparable damage because of the doubts they stir. After all, how do you prove that you are not racist? How do you prove you are nto mysogynist? The activists insist that participating in their network is the only way. They might justify their campaign with some qoute or clip, garnered illegally from emails and mobile phones. O’Neil compares this activism with criminal investigation:
In many ways, though, the process can resemble a crowdsourced criminal investigation. Amateur sleuths sift through a backlog of social media posting- or they train software to do the job… they can raise armies of followers to target the offenders.
The judiciary and the executioners are one and the same, and they are all anonymous and unaccountable. As long as they target men, O’Neil claims, they are punching up at injustice. As the activists explained to me, it is not just this or that man who is the problem- sexism is structural in a patriarchy. Every man you meet is either a girl’s father, a woman’s boss, a landlord, a husband. Thus, revenge can be reaped on any man on behalf of the women who cannot do it for themselves. I did not enjoy the irony that I was one of the few men not fulfilling any of these patriarchal roles when I ws targeted. I was a vulnerable as a foreigner with no family in Germany, 5 years alienated from old friends, earning under minimum wage, stuttering in a foreign language in a place where no other foreigners worked, while I worked on my PhD thesis. I had even given up the colonial privilege of teaching English as a foreign language to immerse myself in the local language and meet some locals. In no way does this small international group of women punch up at their British victims in Berlin.
The group does not wait until someone happens to have their phone ready to record a wrong committed in order to shame them. Rather they proactively frame their target. They understand the power of a short video taken out of context. O’Neil claims this is done with the best intentions, “to banish racism from society, to respect women, or to defend the rights of people to assert their gender identity.”. The abuse serves the narcissism of activists who celebrate their moral righteousness over others, believing that might is right. These groups proactively harass and abuse a victim until he reacts in predictable way that can be used to smear him. The punishment thus precedes any wrongdoing. The way people react to being sexually harassed, coerced, drugged, robbed or sexually assaulted can appear aggressive or excessive when the prior abuse is not known. Let me give you some examples of how even a lefty post-structuralist Marxist like me can be accused by the social justice activists. These all feature in O’Neil’s description of network shaming.
For over a year a colleague at a bar where I worked would harass me. I was told I could bar, but I was supportive of this colleague who it seemed, to most of us, had mental health issues. One aspect of the harassment was repeating what the British had done to Berlin. I accepted how terrible it was, and how horrible it must have been to climb out of the underground tunnels into the rubble of utter destruction, and to see the canals covered with bodies. She left little to the imagination. However, this was repeated over and over, interspersed with flattery and friendship. I thought if I rejected her advances while killing her with kindness, I would prove myself a friend. I invited her and another colleague to my flat for dinner with my girlfriend. My colleague suddenly started to talk about the state of Berlin after Britain had bombed it again and how that effects a city. I snapped, saying, “so what? What has that to do with anything”. I meant to say, why do you keep going on at me about that. It took a year to bait me into that reaction. Soon after this she showed me a voice recorder, so that I would retrospectively understand what she had done to me.
Other women made attempts to sleep with me to prove that I cheated on my girlfriend. I had been warned about this. However, when I rejected the angry feminists, I was told I hated German women. I was sexually harassed for over a year. For other victims this campaign might also occur on dating apps but I had never been on dating app in my life, and I was not cheating on my girlfriend. It was not until 2 years after I had been harassed and sexually that I tried dating apps. Predictably I met some of the unsavoury characters that drug British men on dates. After an incidence of drugging, I wrote a message on my tinder profile meant for my harassers. I listed a few things I found attractive, among them, a good sense of humour. I made a joke about realising women had options and they might end up going back to the bar for the barman. I had been told they have sex with the barman who spikes the target for them, and to tell everyone there that he hates German women, but I did say that on my profile. I took the message down quickly, but it was to late. This message was used to stigmatize me around bars in Berlin for hating German women, and not being a victim of a violent campaign.
O’Neil gives the example of ‘permit Kate’ who was pilloried online for calling the cops on her black neighbours. I wondered if there was more to this neighbour feud. This struck a chord with me because this is now replicated in scripted harassments. To cut a long story short, the group set the victim up in a flat share situation. It is arranged that some of his mail is sent to the flat above, where it is opened and put through the victim’s letterbox weeks later. Then she starts running washing machine/tumble dryer through the wee hours and banging kitchen pots together. I politely asked her to keep it down in the wee hours. Her husband threatened to batter me and kill me by throwing me out the window of the stair well. He would wait to follow me into the house at night to scare me. Only then did I report this to the police. This was a family of Indian descent living in Glasgow and I have been tarred as a racist.
The flat where the victim is framed for being a racist is also in the catchment area of a particular mental health practice. A young psychiatric nurse talks down the harassment and sexual assault, and the student consultant tells you nothing happened in Berlin and writes the man off as delusional. I wrote a letter of complaint, and it was ignored for months. Eventually the clinical director apologised profusely and said he would investigate. The investigation did not happen after a year, so I wrote an MP and I started this Substack. Long story short, I did not get a second opinion until two years later. After one meeting, I was taken to mental hospital on an emergency detention. I was released the next day with the warning, with my father as witness, ‘I hope you will not have to see a psychiatrist again, but just remember that if you attack the system, the system will attack you’. With that, he shook my hands and I was released. That week I worried if I should publish a Substack about what had happened. Could they really just detain me under the mental health act? I posted the Substack, and ten days later I went to my GP to pick up a sick note for work, and I was detained in hospital again. Noone could explain why. O’Neil talks about being taken to a mental hospital and feeling understood and accepted there, because people understand the shame of being mentally ill.
The initial mental health practice shares the private sessions with the Telegram group chat so that the man can be humiliated in bars and at work. They also bate the victim into discussing family so that they can use this to drive a wedge between mother and son. At this time, my mother was suffering with extreme anxiety. Women in the family had always encouraged her to seek help. Then her mother died, and then her childhood friend died of cancer. She had helped care for both towards the end. Then Covid lockdown started. She felt persecuted by my dad and threatened to leave him, and for the first time I was not taking her side. In fact, I thought she was ill and needed help. I wanted to bring other family members in to mediate. This group hurt my mother with words taken from a therapy session, knowing she would take a defensive reaction and they could offer an alternative narrative. They claimed I was suffering from shame at what I had done in Berlin. The group essentially attacked my family and pretended they were taking the side of my mother. This caused arguments between me and my mother. O’Neil would have been writing her book around this time and she describes such arguments in the context of incels. Young boys who suddenly change character after finding the manosphere and chastised their mother with sexist opinions. Clearly claiming to be harassed and drugged by feminists can be framed as sexist. Part of the problem was my withdrawal from my mother and the loss of my out-going and loving character. My mother suffers from father absence because of an alcoholic father who worked away a lot. When I returned from Berlin I discovered at this time that she does not react well to feelings of rejection. However, my withdrawal was the result of being sexually harassed, sexually assaulted, housed and drugged in Berlin. Whole families are the victims of this ‘activism’.
O’Neil also talks about the hikikomori in Japan, where hundreds of thousands of young people have retreated from Japanese society, taking refuge in the bedrooms of their parents’ homes. She demonstrates as little genuine concern for them as she did for incels. She is concern trolling the victims of what I call Gone Girl Feminists. Predictably, as the victims cannot find a flat that is not set up to harass them, they return home where they can at least enjoy fresh water. In Glasgow it was made difficult to leave the flats where I was harassed. It was told that the vacant flats advertised were always still being renovated, despite these adverts claiming the flat was available immediately. I could not get a flat in the whole of Glasgow after 9 months of trying. Over three years of almost constant searching, I was only offered two flats. So, I took the second which was in a town outside Glasgow that I had never seen. However, this was another flat that people could access and tamper with my water supply. So, I kept going back to my parents and this worked for a while. The victims of this feminist group are forced into situation that is similar to the hikikomori. So how does Japan deal with these failures? Companies offer to break through the door and drag them out, pushing them into the van and rushing them away. I did not resist my medical confinement, but the effect was still rather similar:
forcibly removed a young man from his room, plunked him into a psychiatric hospital for 50 days, and from there transferred him to a lockdown dormitory.
The advice given to combat trolls online is simple- do not give them ammunition. However, if you are targeted for cheating on your girlfriend, when you have not cheated on your girlfriend, there is no ammunition in the first place. After months or years of harassment, there is no end. You might be trolled online and by well-meaning, or naïve, journalists, but it makes no difference. The drugging does the damage. One public philosopher seems to suggest that while the group might have made a mistake with me, women are allowed to make a mistake and the group should not allow me to ‘win’. However, the women in Berlin boasted in the bar how they can get the desired reaction from any man, regardless of how long it takes. They know they are targeting innocent men, and they do not care. The campaign is designed to make this an insignificant variable. All the time that I was rejecting them, rejecting their politics, and refusing to drug men at the bar for them, they knew I was innocent. I had rejected them for months. All that time they knew what they could, and would, do to me for saying no. This is what gives them a kick. This, at least, gave them a sense of power. I was one of only a few men vulnerable enough for this small group to target. This group is of made up of women of low income, low status, low self-esteem. I have learned that in most cases, these women are suffering from father absence, abusive religious fathers, fat shaming, or some kind of trauma. They are taking vengeance on the world by targeting empathetic people who have enough love left over to pass on to others. As saddening as their experience is, society needs to be defended from their kind of network activism.