What Else Might You Have Been Wrong About, Miss Filipovic?

Admitting You're Wrong Requires Actually Admitting You're Wrong

I was having such a good day off. My day job is going well, the Phoxjaw piece was doing well, I was ready to start work on something new and different outside the culture war space. But then, because we exist in the imagination of a cruel god, I saw a piece so infuriating that it basically derailed everything. The piece in question is the Atlantic’s I Was Wrong About Trigger Warnings by none other than Jill Filipovic. If nothing else, gives us a glimpse at the coming backlash to the past 10ish years of internet culture and how nobody responsible will actually have to answer for it.

As a woman

I feel as if I have to go into an overview of what is ultimately the overlap of several different both cultural and subcultural movements as well as the evolution of the internet over the past 15ish years, because otherwise I don’t think the criticisms of Filipovic’s piece make much sense. I believe she’s counting on that, because without an understanding of the history of both Filipovic and the forces she’s talking about it’s easier for her to launder whatever move she’s trying to make. Devoid of context it’s easy for her to look reasonable, and I think that’s her hope, the public’s memory is short even when it’s paying attention. And of course the people who benefit most from the internet’s credulity and short attention span have always been liars, and Filipovic is certainly a liar.

Jill Filipovic belongs to and is one of the most prominent names in a class of Feminist writers that came to mainstream prominence over the past 15 years or so. For lack of a better term, I’ve seen this referred to as Jezebel Feminism in reference to the website that was the flagship for this ideology and that’s what I’m going to use for this piece. I’d characterize it by its' hyper fixation on representation, pop culture, and most centrally, victimization by society as one of, if not the central feminine experience. Filipovic gives away her worldview within the first sentences of the piece “Violence is, unfortunately and inevitably, central to feminist writing. Rape, domestic violence, racist violence, misogyny—these events indelibly shape women’s lives, whether we experience them directly or adjust our behavior in fear of them.” writes Filipovic. Femininity itself is defined as being a subject of violence, and Filipovic and her ilk laser focused in on that like the bottom of the barrel scraping true crime obsessives they are, but lacked the integrity to embrace. This focus on victimization is inevitably used to justify protectionist interventions, both formal and informal. Because they are so pop culture focused their gaze falls on art and it is artistic expression and free speech must be undermined, because they can be used to harm women. Due process and all of western jurisprudence must be undermined, because it can fail women. The constant problematizing of art and artists, the endless calls for censorship and internet vigilante campaigns endemic of the current climate flow directly from the political vision of Filipovic and her contemporaries. The nightmare Title IX star chambers are the wet dreams of these people, and the blueprint for their approaching vision of the future.

Filipovic, among others like Jessica Valenti, Amanda Marcotte, and The Honorable DJ Jazzy Jude Ellison Sady Doyle Bin Salman Esquire IV built this style into the monolith it is today. If we were to erect a Mount Rushmore to the neo-puritan crusaders that have turned the entire culture into a hellscape, Filipovic should be on it if she isn’t swapped one of the other 30 interchangeable feminist pearl clutchers. The Jezebel Feminist is insistent that Women must always win, anything less is violence, when they win it’s because they are strong and stunning and genius, and when they lose it’s because the patriarchy, and they were exploited or tricked, and the rules must be changed because there is simply no rule or principle more valuable or important than Women’s success or safety.

I’m going to do my best to refrain from an exhaustive oral history or deep theoretical dive into this movement, partially for brevity, partially because it’s rhetorical quicksand, but suffice to say that these writers, and their worldview over the course of 15 years has been very successful, politically, culturally and monetarily. To their credit they made Feminism cool in a way it just hadn’t been, their focus on celebrity and pop culture made it accessible and interesting to people outside of Women’s studies curriculum. They took on a radical punk, confrontational affect steeped in Riot Grrrl that wrapped their ideas in a counter cultural sheen. They also rejected their foremothers repulsion to pornography, correctly understanding that whacking off was as much of a third rail to their feminism as the temperance movement had been to previous feminist waves. They deep down were still Dworkinites, but they talked like Paglias.

It’s hard to understate how nearly total the victory this strain of Feminism had in the culture. Jezebel Feminism dominated the discourse, it dominated pop culture, every creative industry was either directly controlled by it or had to pay lip service to the new, increasingly powerful feminist wing of culture. Within a few years nearly every institution, from the Democratic Party to newsrooms, colleges to fortune 500 companies adopted most, if not all of the gender ideology pushed by this school of writers. This rapid embrace strangely never caused any of them to question if what they were pushing was actually as counter cultural or challenging as they postured. In the same way they never seem to consider that for a culture that they insist is indifferent or actively in favor of sexual violence towards women, the mere whiff of an accusation of sexual misconduct is maybe the only thing uniquely able to destroy someone completely and make them radioactive with unparalleled success.

On just a personal level many of these writers have enjoyed an nearly unending stream of success and upward mobility. The websites they founded did incredibly well for a time, some still do. Book deals, staff jobs and consistent writing invitations at some of the most prestigious institutions in journalism followed. They would grow to wield a great deal of political power, they were incredibly popular among college educated white women and as college educated white women became an increasingly important electorate (and marketing demographic), they would shape policy, talking points, they quickly became consent manufacturers. These women were rabid Clintonites, and the 2016 election was really their first big moment in the sun, working as part PR and part cudgel for their favored Democratic candidate. It’s hard to say they were ever capital J journalists, but the line between activism and journalism started to evaporate. Famously Jessica Valenti and Reverend A$AP Jude Ellison Sady Doyle Jr. directly and secretly conspired with the Clinton campaign to AstroTurf the narrative of misogynist “Bernie Bro” voters in order to discredit the Sanders Campaign as it gained momentum and blurred that line even more. The election of Donald Trump, as much as the Jezebel sphere acted as if it was a nuclear level tragedy, was the best thing that ever happened to them. A Clinton victory would’ve proved things were better than they thought, but their worldview became even more popular in opposition to Trumpism. The #MeToo movement would follow less than a year into the Trump presidency, sparked by investigation into long time Clinton friend Harvey Weinstein. This created a never ending torrent of what was essentially the kind of celebrity gossip that had always been popular in the new form of stories of alleged female abuse and trauma, providing even more misery for the Jezebel Feminists to mine and repurpose to push further draconian public humiliation spectacles and protectionist laws. When your entire worldview and career is based around trauma mongering, it behooves you to find as much trauma as possible, and when you can’t find it, create it, and they were the 95 Bulls in that regard.

I recently picked up Laura Kipnis’ excellent and maddening Unwanted Advances and she puts it fairly succinctly that the idea that Women are under constant threat from men and must be protected from the world is neither new nor politically radical, in fact it’s the backbone of a lot of patriarchal thinking. The idea that fictional depictions of violence against women encourages real life violence against women is not far downstream from concept that Grand Theft Auto causes school shootings from the early 2000s, it’s simply wrapped in a tad more “intellectualism”. To some extent, these kinds of arguments have always existed, Rock N Roll causes teenage delinquency etc, these are basic moral hygiene arguments that have been made ad nauseam. What is new however, is these arguments being made by people both ostensibly on the left and relatively young, some of them artists themselves. There was a period of time where protecting people from “dangerous” art was the providence of conservatives and suburban housewives, but now, under the stewardship of the Jezebel Feminists, this kind of begging for protectionism and pearl clutching has started to come from young leftists who just a generation go would’ve rejected this overly parental approach to art and culture as encroaching on freedom of expression.

It’s also a strangely schizophrenic ideology that struggles with any form of internal consistency. Fictional violence towards women, sexual or otherwise, in say Game of Thrones, is to be endlessly examined and condemned as endorsement of real world violence and a betrayal of the author and cultures desire to hurt women, but True Crime is bigger than ever and remains fairly free of criticism (though they do use cases to bolster their points about how in danger women are), as does pornography for the most part. Further the solutions proposed for male violence generally run completely counter to any concept of fairness within a liberal society and subtly reinvent oppressive practices of the past. If I came out and said that it is simply too dangerous for women to go to concerts alone, that they cannot be expected to protect themselves and are too easily manipulated by Men into compromising situations and that they need to be kept in special sections under the eyes of chaperones I’d be told to fuck off and go back to Saudi Arabia. Yet that is something that is currently being advocated by Female politicians in Europe in response to the dubious accusations against Rammstein. Often these Feminists find themselves arguing for the very kind of protectionist policies that at their core would not be out of place in the vision of the world laid out by the Christian Patriarchs they position themselves in stark defiance of, the only real difference is they want Liberal Women as the administrators.

However what the Jezebel Feminists would truly pioneer was the internet outrage machine. As social media transformed web 1.0, reaction would be the new primary form of interaction driving the medium and it was arguably the Jezebel Feminists that discovered and thrived off this new status quo. The internet became a place where you could make money through advertising, that money was driven through traffic, and the best way to get traffic was angry clicks and the Jezebel squad knew how to push that button. The new internet economy was one that rewarded outrage and they were masters of instigation. Their ability and joy in finding misogyny in really everything engendered angry responses from the people they were calling sexist for liking certain movies or the people who clocked and rejected their censorious tendencies when the internet had at least then promised a free speech haven. There were also bad actors in there but when everyone who disagrees with you is painted as “sexists” or “nazis” (by design) it becomes increasingly more difficult to distinguish.

The Jezebel crowd were also world class cry bullies, intentionally being as inflammatory and backlash provoking as possible and then bringing out the crocodile tears when they got what they were trying to provoke, saying that the response they looked for, and heavily profited from, was harassment and abuse. Sometimes, to be fair, it was, but just as often it was just people telling them they were full of shit. Constantly picking fights and then playing the victim when they got push back from the people who wouldn’t bend the knee. Someone puts out an article, it’s shared everywhere driving clicks, the other side reacts, sharing it further, driving clicks, rinse lather repeat. It was the Bill O’Reilly playbook, updated for the digital age. It would create an entire ecosystem of liberal and conservative pundits on places like youtube and twitter locked in a Tom and Jerry loop of attack and grievance, action and reaction, and it would make a lot of those pundits rich and powerful, it’s just as much the movement that built The Daily Wire as it is the one that built Salon. While onlookers conscripted themselves into the culture war, Social Justice Warriors and Based Chuds locked in combat to constantly signal to everyone else their positions, driving more clicks and polarizing more and more people. It would turn the young people of the internet generation into a constantly aggrieved, constantly victimized, constantly screaming self destructive mass just like TV’s 24 hour cable news cycle had done to their parents.

A Trigger Full of Promises

Of all the woke world concepts, trigger warnings, at least in theory, are probably the thing with which I have the least of an issue. Content warnings are to some extent, standard within the creative industries: movies, tv shows, video games all have ratings with at least some description of objectionable content that may exist within. The internet adopted a fairly ubiquitous and uncontroversial practice of trying to avoid spoiling new movies and books and I feel that this is somewhat in that vein. If I were a teacher covering a fairly miserable or distressing topic I don’t think I’d have any problem giving my class a heads up that the coming lesson was gonna feature certain things, and if you need to take a break, please do so while we push through. I’d rather have someone remove themselves ahead of time than complain. Obviously life is full of awful things that will hit you without warning, I don’t see any reason why disclosing that when possible, voluntarily at least is an issue. I believe that people are responsible for maintaining their own comfort, especially with regards to what they consume, so trigger warnings ideally, simply provide information. Again, I think they should be voluntary, and there are situations in which I think their inclusion would deeply ruin a piece of art (off the top of my head Bridge To Terebithia is a book that, while distressing, really only works if you’re blindsided by it) but for the most part, trigger warnings feel pretty inoffensive on their face. You have every right to determine what content you’ll tolerate.

The problem set in when Trigger Warnings were deployed by people in order to influence what content OTHER people will be allowed to tolerate. The internet rapidly transformed from a place where people tried to be as callous and offensive as possible and getting offended was equivalent to losing, to a place where offense was actively avoided. It’s why so many people who act virtuous on the internet have past histories of being edge lords, it’s easy to point to them as hypocrites, but they are simply following the evolving reward structure. People suddenly cared, very deeply, about each other on the internet, at least in the growing non anonymous corners of social media, and wanted to show they cared, declaring you were upset went from something that was derided, to something that was embraced. There was a great deal of positive attention paid to people who said they were upset in an attempt to soothe them, and it was now rewarded to be the person who cared the most about those people being upset. As the internet made us more isolated and lonely, people wanted to feel cared for, and they wanted to show they cared. It’s easy to be cynical about all of this and see it as a very stupid time, but really, people do, I think truly deep down, care about their fellow man, and a great deal of the problems from this era of the internet come down to excesses from very good, humane intentions and the ways empathy can be weaponized. People are good, and maybe that’s the problem.

This resulted in a dynamic that is called, for lack of a better term, “The Oppression Olympics”. The internet’s primary reward in the age of social media is attention, and attention was often awarded to the people who claimed victimhood the loudest. Trigger Warnings expanded from warnings of what would be considered “universally” distressing subject matter: violence, sexual assault, etc. to closer to micro phobias like say “spiders” or “blood” or things that you had to take several large leaps in order to get to the offense, for instance mentioning food could result in accusations of triggering eating disorders. If someone did not anticipate every possible triggering thing in every post they made, they risked a call out, to be painted as wanting to do harm and trigger people, or worse, not caring, all of which could result in massive attacks. At no point did anyone interject that if the mere mention of say bugs or food causes you to be triggered that you’re the one who likely needs to change. The onus moved from the reader to avoid triggering content, to the creator to constantly be monitoring for and removing triggering content. Words or ideas could trigger you, being triggered made you unsafe, and very quickly, words and ideas became unsafe, and those who trafficked in those words became aggressors.

Not wanting to draw the ire of a generation of kids who were now hyper vigilant to look for anything that could cause offense, most institutions, from artists to professors simply caved. Anything offensive that managed to slip through the self censorship risked outright censorship through academic sanctions, internet dog piles, or social media content moderation that continually favored the outraged over any sort of commitment to free expression, lest they risk losing advertisers. Kipnis’ own story in Unwanted Advances shows exactly the kind of nightmare the crime of uttering speech that offends these people can unleash, to say nothing of the stories she covers of the hell those accused of actual wrongdoing have had to endure as Jezebel protectionism has slithered it’s tentacles into everything.

All of this has played out very publicly, especially for a generation raised on the internet, over the past decade or so as the these conflicts have expanded from small blog skirmishes to nearly an all encompassing culture war. But the problem is that the energy needed to enforce woke worlds vision is primarily based around outrage, and outrage is a finite resource. Things are shifting, the tumblr and 4chan kids drafted into cultural combat have now spent a decade on the frontlines and are exhausted and what was supposed to be a new, fresh crop of recruits are already emotionally fried nihilists from growing up submerged constantly online in the same culture war. Attitudes are shifting. And as tides change, rats start looking to jump ship.

War is Piece

Which finally brings us to Filipovic’s piece “I Was Wrong About Trigger Warnings”. When you really drill into it, there’s not a whole lot new here to anyone paying attention. Jill gives a brief (and incomplete, more on that later) history of her interactions with trigger warnings, their rise in her early day of blogging, her embracing of them. She believed it was helping people, so she went along with it. She starts weaving in data about how miserable young people are, and wondering if perhaps it’s because the protectionist culture of trigger warnings has robbed a generation of resilience, like she’s the first person to ever that thought and not something that’s been constantly brought up and warned about since the ideology emerged.

“In giving greater weight to claims of individual hurt and victimization, have we inadvertently raised a generation that has fewer tools to manage hardship and transform adversity into agency?” Jill ponders, as if that’s not what every critic of this stuff was warning about a decade ago before they were shouted down as bigots by the Jezebel squad. Telling these kids they were being thin skinned, or just outright wrong about being unsafe was denying their lived experience (despite the fact crime has dropped continuously for the last 30 years), and denying lived experience was literal violence.

To be clear all science shows trigger warnings do nothing to help people psychologically, they may even be harmful. This idea had been floating around in research since at least 2019, with some psychologists even speaking out as early as 2016, others were correctly wary of it even before the data came along just on philosophical grounds. There was never any real data to indicate trigger warnings were helpful. They were adopted simply because the most histrionic corners of the internet (see: tumblr) decided it was a moral imperative and willed it into existence while the rest of the world acquiesced. The Jezebel Feminists went along with it, not because it was true, not because it was helpful, but because it fit their framework of being under constant threat and was a useful cudgel to silence and go after their enemies with, just like Steinem did with repressed memories decades before.

Most bizarrely, Filipovic speaks as if she’s always embraced trigger warnings, while totally omitting HER OWN guardian op-ed from 2014 DECRYING THE RISE OF TRIGGER WARNINGS. Why is that? Because it doesn’t serve her point, this entire article is her trying to paint herself as a reasonable person who has seen the light and acknowledging her previous piece would just further highlight that she’s a hypocrite who has spent the past decade flip flopping on this very issue, like every other issue, based on what would best boost her personal brand. I know that 1984 references are hack at this point, but if this isn’t “Oceania was always at war with Eurasia” what is? This is gaslighting, the real kind, and absolutely nobody fucking cares, not Jill, not the Atlantic, certainly not any other journalist who could be bothered to check.

What Jill is really dancing around is a concept psychologically priming an entire generation into paralyzing hyper-sensitivity and her part in it. If the embrace of trigger warnings could have unintended psychological blowback, isn’t that possible of every other pop psych fad Filipovic and the Jezebel squad embraced? Couldn’t telling an entire generation that they were under constant threat of sexual violence and every piece of media endorsed it cause them to perceive sexual trauma where it objectively doesn’t exist just like trigger warnings did? Of course they won’t entertain that, because it would be giving up a powerful argument they’ve been investing in for a decade and a half plus now. The lived experience is the highest morality mantra has created a generation of kids who have convinced themselves they have the arguably non existent psychological phenomenon of Dissociative Identity Disorder or sudden onset Tourette’s syndrome based on social media. And that’s to speak nothing of the reckless embrace of certain drastic aspects of youth gender medicine and the backlash to it that is already cutting a swath through Queer communities. It all flows from the same source but Jill won’t confront that because it would undermine her brand and isn’t close enough to popular consensus among her circle yet in the way saying trigger warnings were bad is acceptable. But give it time, I’m sure a “I was wrong about youth gender medicine” is somewhere around the corner once approval for that opinion reaches 50.00001% while families have to deal with the real human cost of media’s hasty embrace of that pop psych ideology just like they’re dealing with the cost of the embrace of trigger warnings now by Jill’s own admission.

If this generation has been primed, Filipovic and her ilk deserves at least part of the blame for pushing that ideology, which she never actually takes any meaningful responsibility for. She talks about “replacing our culture of trauma” as if she wasn’t an architect of it, as if she hasn’t been cashing in on expanding the concept of trauma exponentially for the past 15 years. She may be looking to diversify, but she’s not going to stop collecting that check.

The whole piece is tied together with the same threads of identitarian victimhood Filipovic has been peddling for years. The sub heading is literally “Has the national obsession with trauma done real damage to teen girls?” which is rich coming from the intellectual school of “rape is everywhere.” She can’t even write a title without reverting back. The problem here is not the wide ranging cultural damage from the embracing Trigger Warnings, it’s that maybe it’s actually hurt women and girls, the only unacceptable casualty in the Jezebel Feminist world. A true examination, sincere reflection of something you actually regret involves at least some interrogation of what thought patterns got you to that point doesn’t it? So what the fuck exactly did Jill learn here? “A pop psych fad I embraced turned an entire generation so psychologically brittle they are constantly traumatized to the point of emotional paralysis. This happened in a vacuum and has absolutely no connection to any other belief I have. Oopsie Daisy”? There’s no point to this if you’re simply going to rely on the exact same framework that got you this problem for everything else. You’re not interrogating anything, you’re not actually admitting any wrong outside the surface, this is just spin.

Same Old Song And Dance

I’m all for apologies, but that’s not what this is, it’s simply another instance of hypocrites who will use any rhetorical tactic to get their way and jettison it the minute it stands in the way of what they want and don’t care about the consequences. Jill happily beat the #MeToo drum for years to tear down anyone and everyone until Joe Biden was accused and then suddenly it was actually we never meant believe all women, and then within went right on back to beating the #believeallwomen drum. I almost begrudgingly respect the sheer audacity to sweep Tara Reade under the rug and then go after Marilyn Manson talking about “which women we choose to believe”. Accusations of sexual misconduct disqualify you from making a movie or doing a concert, but are no hinderance to holding the highest office in the land if you’re someone Filipovic likes.

This piece isn’t a showing contrition, it’s just another smokescreen in a long history of smokescreens. When these Jezebel Feminists are wrong, they’re never confronted for it, they never face any consequences, partially because mainstream media is either too chummy or too gutless. When Connor Oberst was falsely accused of rape in 2014 in the comments section of xojane, one of the primary sites in Jezebel Feminist environment, sparking off a media firestorm that nearly destroyed him and his career, did these writers take any accountability, did they stop for a minute and go “holy shit how did we get this so wrong? How can we make sure this never happens again?” Of course not, Jezebel helped rake him over the coals for hiring a lawyer and attempting to use the legal system to prove his innocence, which again he was innocent and only able to prove it thanks to that legal system, the internet feminists would’ve kept treating him as guilty if he hadn’t. Morons like Marcotte went out of their way to run interference and remind everyone that it’s even more important to believe every accuser, no matter how monumentally they fucked this up. In the decade since they have only doubled down on this tactic.

Similarly to trigger warnings, the term “grooming” really enters the popular lexicon through its use by Jezebel Feminists. Originally describing a specific behavior by which pedophiles target and manipulate their victims, the Jezebel Feminists started using it to describe really any relationship with any age or power differential as they started to become obsessed with age gaps in celebrity relationships. Its point was simple, paint any man with an age differential with his partner as a pedophile (17 and 19? that’s grooming), even if they’re both consenting adults (24 and 35 year old? you bet that’s grooming.) and to infantilize women to further justify their unending quest to find new avenues of victimhood to justify more punishment and more intervention. The expanding of this definition so far away from its original definition ended up cross mutating and is now being used as the accusation de jour in the Right’s new moral panic who have used it to target basically any queer person who exists. Of course none of these feminists will ever have to reckon with their part in this, let alone acknowledge these kinds of consequences.

The entire history of the Jezebel Feminist movement is one of naked opportunism, of using any means to secure your ends, because nobody is ever going to hold you accountable for the fallout. Any worthwhile journalist would’ve resigned in shame for this kind of consistent hypocrisy, but fortunately for Filipovic and her ilk, you need to have an ounce of integrity to feel shame.

I believe in forgiveness, basically an infinite amount of it. I believe that people can change and should be allowed to do so. We’re never going to get out of this culture war without an armistice. We’ve got to look for a way forward and we will not find that in the constant relitigating of the past. As much as I loathe the Jezebel Feminists for being the anti-due process moral panic peddlers they are, I don’t want to see them punished forever. If history has shown anything, it’s that constantly punishing your enemy doesn’t work. People will only change when they feel it’s safe to and we’re going to have to learn to live with these people. But we can’t even start to figure out what comes next if they won’t admit they’re wrong or even grapple with the long term effects of their belief system.

Filipovic’s piece isn’t a mea culpa, it’s a rebrand, a cynical attempt to hedge against the coming backlash to the world she created, rather than go down with the ship. Jezebel Feminists have been lecturing the world for years now about how to apologize, and yet when they’re plainly wrong, Jill tries to slither out of it just like every man she’s ever criticized, just like she’s slithered out of every other talking point when it doesn’t suit her.

You’re going to start media shifting away from the social justice stuff they went all in on for the past decade, slowly, gradually, but they will shift as public opinion continues to sour on it. The media did the same thing with McMartin and the satanic panic, Oprah and Steinem kept their lucrative careers, TV anchors moved on to the next story, the clinicians who pushed the false memories kept practicing, not a single cop lost their job. Conversely, those who found themselves in the crosshairs of the frenzies these people whip up are the ones who pay the highest price and lost everything for everyone else’s recklessness.

It’ll be the same here, and we’ll keep doing this, again and again and again, because we refuse to learn anything, we bounce from moral panic to moral panic because ironically, the people who rail on and on about accountability are never actually accountable. Jill and the rest of her ilk will watch the flames from the high rise apartments, while regular people burn for all the things they got “wrong”.

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You can find me on instagram @jacktorrancefakeshisdeath and on twitter a @jtorrancesghost