The Weaponization of Stereotype Threat in Activism
I have been told that women are allowed make mistakes. That they may have made a mistake with me, but the whole network activism should not stop because of one mistake. The presumption is that all the other victims are guilty. If people knew the level of abuse involved, this would make the gossip about the victims redundant. The group in Berlin know that the accusation are false, and this says something about them, but people do not want to listen. The international group of women are only targeting British men. The network activists in Berlin take the greatest sense of pride and agency in knowing they can harass, sexually assault and drug British men. Who is going to believe one isolated man over ‘the voice women’? All they have to do is smear his character. They boasted to me that ‘stereotype threat’ can make people do things they do not want to do. Harassment and abuse, if directed by science over months and years, can provoke the desired response. The reaction can be recorded and used to smear the victim and retrospectively justify the harassment to vanilla feminists. Stereotype threat is just one of many parts of the campaign developed from social psychology.
The social sciences often analyse how a certain group is disadvantaged or harmed by a phenomenon in society. The research usually aims to offer solutions to alleviate the problem, or correct privileges, depending on which way you want to look at it. Network activism is tapping into that research to target certain groups. The aim is to disadvantage them and cause them harm, with the claim to correct privilege. Network activists can raise armies thousands strong, armies that can be organised to replicate scientific results. Most well-meaning members has know idea of the science behind the activism, nor the aims of the core group. These people are outraged by a smear campaign online and willing to follow instructions of anonymous group chat administrators. The women in Berlin target British men, and they know they are innocent. This is why ‘stereotype threat’ is needed and this why it works on their victims. So what is stereotype threat and how is it being weaponised by network activists.
Stereotype threat describes a social problem. The performance of social groups that are negatively stereotyped in certain areas are negatively effected by that stereotype. This is true even when their preparation, skill and talent are just the same as other groups that tend to do better. This first came to the attention of psychologists by a rather cruel experiment run by a schoolteacher the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated. Mrs. Jane Eliot wanted to give her students an idea of why Luther King was so important and why everyone was so concerned about his death. This experiment became known as ‘The blue-eyed kids and the brown eyed kids’. The children were handed out collars indicative of the child’s eye colour. Then she tells the kids on one day a series of stereotypes about brown eyed kids, e.g. that their not nice, that they are smelly. The next day she says the exact same thing about blue eyed kids. Cameras follows the pupils around and you can see how students react, both pupils react negatively to the negative stereotypes, both groups suffered the same. The children became depressed and their attempts to solve puzzles were effected by the stereotypes.
Since then, there have been many studies tracking this effect in different areas. When a group was told that the test was measure natural athletic ability, the African American subjects did better than the white American subjects. When another group was told that the test measures sport strategic intelligence, the white American subjects performed better than the African American subjects. In maths test the performance of women can suffer from stereotype threat. The women go into the test with a proven ability in pervious exams, so they are equally prepared as the men. However, they perform a full standard deviation in score lower, a deviation of around 15 out of 100-point score.
It is difficult to know why this happens. Some argues that the results were to be expected because the difference would not surface until a really difficult test demonstrated the natural differences. So the challenge was develop a better experiment. Claude decided to give the women a simple instruction before the maths test was taken. The women were told that although they might have heard that women do not perform as well as men on advanced tests, but this test was different. Women always perform as well as men in the test. The women then performed just as well as men in the test. This suggests that the fear that one’s performance will confirm the stereotype is true.
This presents some viable solutions to the problem. First, the power of stereotypes can be undermined generally. One study showed that teaching people to think that abilities are changeable rather than fixed improved the performance of everyone, but the vulnerable groups more. Second, particular negative stereotypes can be undermined incrementally and at the most relevant moments. If just reminding someone of a stereotype subtly, just the once, can have such a huge impact, if there are many cues in the environment, the stereotype threat can be devastating.
In a sense, stereotype threat is particularly cruel because it only effects people who are particularly concerned about the stereotype. Women who do not care about maths are unaffected by the negative stereotype. Indeed, in another study by Claude Steele, the impact of the negative stereotype of a racist white male could be predicted by the level to which the men had previously expressed their ant-racists opinions. Even when he does not accept the stereotype being cast, just one cue to remind him of the stereotype can effect his behaviour. They might disregard the stereotype but the belief about their abilities can still be affected. However, Claude Steely found that the strength of cues in the environment is what determines the impact.
Stereotype threat is being weaponized by feminist and employed as form of network activism. Large numbers of women can be enrolled to harass the victim in the workplace, in bars and coffee shops, in language classes in libraries, and even the girlfriend is a set up. Each person plays a role in a little bit of street theatre. They are provided with a script, with certain key lines and a sedge way for the lines which is appropriate to the setting. These scenes are coordinated so that what is said by the girlfriend in one place is reinforced by those harassing him at work. In this way, the network activism swarms round victim. The negative stereotype that he is threatened with opens a chasm between his actual real self and the negative stereotype being cast around him. There is no opportunity to be received as the person he is, and no matter what he says or does to prove the stereotype wrong his real self is suffocated.
I was surrounded with examples of men and women cheating. The former fed into one stereotype for cheating cads and toxic men. The latter fed into another stereotype of childish men who think they are loved, while their woman cheats on him. The latter was closely linked to a mummy’s boy, but it was more developed as the stereotype of British men. They attacked the male British body type in the bar. The pointed to a study that was featured in the Guardian that depicted the body types that women from different countries found attractive. The British model was scrawny and unimpressive to the women instilling the negative stereotype. On another occasion they referred research on the average size of the penis by nationalities. On average, British men have a smaller penis than Germans and Americans. I was told how women can see this through many types of trousers, mine of course. In some contrived conversation they got on to tell me that one way women try to make the man feel more powerful is to pretend that it hurts when the man extract the penis too quickly. A week later my girlfriend did exactly this. This was coordinated between the two women to have the opposite effect on me. Later they boasted of knowing how women make men feel they have a small penis by playing with it only using open fingers, without making it into foreplay. My girlfriend also made subtle, but direct, unfavourable comparisons with her previous boyfriend.
The women in the bar explained why British men might be bad at sex. They were prude and had less sex. The more sex you had, the better you got at it. As other women in Berlin described it, these women could not hold up long term relationships or afford to go on dates. However, from their perspective, they had better sex lives than most women, and at least they were not deceiving themselves about men being monogenous. They felt that they had it better than women in a relationship with a job or a career, and better than the British. They said, they could tell I had had less sex because I had so few Facebook friends. When people hook up, they normally become Facebook friends. This should have been a source of embarrassment for me. They claimed it also explained why I was having problems with my girlfriend. I did talk to them about strange reactions from my girlfriend. They explained these reactions were classic examples manipulation used by women they know to sleep around.
My girlfriend told me that her friends said that she should become a nun because she spent so much time on her own and didn’t need men. This was a way to make me feel worthless, but the women at the bar said this might be an excuse to not have sex with me. My girlfriend would laugh at me when others were around. At the beginning, I just thought my German was embarrassing, but later it became worse. She would suddenly burst out laughing at me. When I raised it with her, she would say she could not remember. I would raised it with her the next day after and she said she could not remember. She was gas-lighting me. I told her her about me being harassed in the bar by the same women every shift. I confronted my girlfriend about her non-response knowing most girlfriends would not be happy to hear women forcing their boyfriend out of a job because they demanded attention or sex. I tried to help her by asking if she felt this or that. She always came back repeating what I had said. She was manipulating me. I called her out on this as well. She would sometimes repeat the same words I said straight back to me. The women at the bar could pint to negotiating strategies where women learned to do this to men. Later, my girlfriend came into the bar shared in-jokes with the women, it was clear that they were in it together.
Both my girlfriend and the two women at the bar used a related stereotype to make me prolong my exposure to abuse. The women at the bar qualified some harsh comment with, ‘is that OK? I am not sure what I can say to you because you are sensitive like a girl.’. Before we even knew each other, my colleague would ask, ‘have you ever thought about committing suicide?... Is this something only a German is asked I know Germans are known for being abrupt and asking awkward questions’. This made me feel obliged to answer. Another time she started talking about the book Quiet, which described introverts. She told me that my character and physiology fitted the architype of the hypersensitive type. When I started to confront my girlfriend about the non-response to what was happening the bar, the women in the bar told me how guys stereotypical befriend women to offloading on them, and women are fed up dealing with this. Obviously, this is all textbook gas-lighting, but that is another story. All these cues were to make me ashamed of being weak and to prevent me from talking about the harassment to friends and my girlfriend. I decided to soak it up even as it got worse and worse, in the end I became more sensitive as the harassment increased. I realised that it was all coordinated, but there is nothing you can do. There is no way out.
The problem is that the women use the empathy of the men against them. The women in the bar talked about the effect that the destruction of Berlin had on Berliners, and the long lasting effect of the mass sexual assaults. They talked at length at the effects of father absence and the high rate in Berlin. They talked about how women in Berlin feel ugly. The claimed the British hated the Germans, and they felt ugly as Germans. They talked of how Germans have been portrayed in Anglo-American films and how that has had an effect on them. One talked about the effect of their parent travelling round Germany to find out what all their family had done during the holocaust. They talked of their own mental health issues and that she had talked about me to her psychiatrist. In the end, you want convince the women that you do not hate Germans, that you do like German women, and that you liked them. You wanted the to know that you are not racist. You wanted them to know that they are smart and funny. You wanted them to know you think the bombing of Berlin was terrible. You wanted them to know that you are not rejecting them because they are ugly or horrible, but because you had a girlfriend. You wanted them to know that you are not a cheat. You try to kill them with kindness for months, until eventually you realise this has all been a coordinated and systematic attack.
The activist network understands that worries and fears can overwhelm people’s mind and completely change their behaviour, and they knew that the negative effect it has on the victim depends on the cues in his environment. They also know that Stereotype threat only works when people really do not want to conform to the negative stereotype. Stereotype threat is most effective, and indeed only necessary, when the man is not a cheating cad or a racist. The group therefore harasses and manipulates the victim every day at his workplace for 6-8 hours. In my case, this lasted for at least 1.5 years at which point I quit my job. The group sets him up in a flat share where he is harassed. Then in coffeeshops where he writes his PhD, and in the library. Then in all his daily German classes after work. Most importantly, he tries confiding in his girlfriend who is key to the campaign, and the first element they put in place. Everything and everyone reinforce the stereotype of a cheating man. Apart from customers at the bar, this is all the human contact I had. All the time that I was rejecting these women, rejecting their politics, and refusing to drug men in the bar for them, they knew what they were going to do to me in revenge for rejection. No doubt, to them, it proved that women who had a father, husband or boyfriend, and believed in them, was an idiot because everyman will cheat in the end.