How we make others feel about themselves

[ETA: proofreading]

Let’s take as the text for today a comment reflecting a fandom phenomenon that crosses my electronic path roughly every ten days or so — often randomly, but more often when I say something someone disagrees with. Note that I am not complaining that this happens — at the beginning it used to shock me, but now I understand that becoming the target for this sort of thing is part of the cost of doing business in the social media world if you ever say anything beyond the largely uncontroversial. And you wouldn’t believe the utter triviality of some of the things people find controversial. My fascination with cuticles, for instance. Which does indeed point to something. Is that saying something about me, as Richard Armitage would have us believe?

Background: You may remember that a little while back, I had the audacity to disagree with Richard Armitage that it was a good idea to ask people to change their language on Twitter, not on his behalf, but on the behalf of mums and children. I didn’t expect that a lot of people would agree with me, but for reasons that have to do with the effect of Armitage’s presence in our fandom, I did feel the need to say it. (Note: the statement I made about me there. I’ll come back to it.)

The comment above was one of the responses I got — not the worst or the most violent or vicious, but one that’s fairly typical for what I see when this kind of thing happens, not an outlier but a typical “enraged” comment. You’re seeing a screenshot of a chunk of the message that I get when a new commentator appears on the blog. I’ve erased the screen name out of sympathy for the commentator because s/he uses it elsewhere, and I have omitted the part of the message that gives his/her email and IP address in order to protect his/her privacy.

Now: I don’t object to concrete disagreement. Commentators did disagree with me on that post — there were over a hundred comments. As far as I know, beyond a few likes on tumblr and Twitter, no one jumped to support me elsewhere in the blogosphere — which is why I found another comment that I was “crushing everyone with my eloquence” amusing. I got probably a dozen affirmative expressions all together and Armitage got more than a thousand favorites on his tweet. I get it. It’s not like I’m ever going to make much headway with my position on the dangers of fan-on-fan policing or Armitage-on-fan policing — too many people agree with the general disposition of his comments on this point or at least are not convinced by my repeated outlining of the effects this sort of thing has. Most people don’t seriously consider the possibility that they might be the object of policing — after all, they are not doing anything they consider to be troublesome.

Although this comment doesn’t quite qualify for the category of “bullying” in my book (it might, in terms of the non-profit Armitage follows), as a personal attack on me, it does transgress the comments policy. I didn’t publish it for that reason. Sometimes I am tempted to let people see more of the backside of the blog, but I hesitate to let this sort of thing through moderation because I suspect that in least some cases the statement is made at a point of acute emotional reaction, and the speaker might feel some remorse if s/he thought about it a few days later. I know how much things lie on my spirit that I regret having said, sometimes for years. It’s also hard on the mood of the people who are regular readers, some of whom identify with me and my struggles. I largely don’t unsay things on this blog, but I sometimes allow anonymous commentators not to reveal what they’ve actually said.

This particular commentator apparently really wanted to be seen on the blog, however, because s/he left the comment three times, in progressive stages of anger. (Moderation doesn’t allow that, incidentally, so I didn’t actively block the comment — indeed, in case this is a mystery to anyone, I can’t see a comment before it’s made, so yes, I do see everything that people want to say to me, I just don’t let the entire readership of the blog see those things. That’s what a blog is — a moderated discussion forum in response to things the blogger says). Thus I feel no qualms in giving him/her the attention now that s/he apparently sought at the time. The commentator is also not a native speaker of English and s/he gradually eliminated grammatical errors from his/her English as the comments progressed and s/he got frustrated that the software wasn’t letting him/her through.

Here’s the text in its final form:

Allowing for the problems of the non-native speaker with English idiom, this is what I understood him/her to be saying:

“For G-d’s sake, what kind of human being are you? An unloved and envious woman. Why not find a cliff to jump off of? … Do this for the sake of humanity!”

I interpreted the commentator to be imploring me rhetorically on behalf of the deity to say what kind of human I am. S/he then answers the question him/herself by asserting that I am “unloved” (I am not sure if this means “someone without a lover,” or “someone whom no one loves” — it seems to me from the context in which we find ourselves — a fan blog devoted to a particular celebrity on whom I am severely crushed — that it could be either or both) and “envious” (of what the speaker does not say). The commentator makes a suggestion as a solution to those “problems”: the proposal that I should jump off a cliff (hypothetically speaking, this is a metaphor for the wish that I should severely injure or kill myself in doing so). I should harm myself “for humanity,” which might mean “in order to do the world the favor of ridding itself of my presence,” or perhaps something like “out of humanity,” i.e., in order to be kind to the world, or at least the segment of it that has read my blog.

On one level, the speaker is responding to something I said — my vehement disagreement with something Richard Armitage tweeted.

What does that speaker’s reaction to me (how I “made him/her feel about him/herself”) say about me?

Of course what I say says something about me. If I take the trouble to write about something, you may assume that I care about it enough to spend the time doing it, and that, while I am interested in what others have to say about it, I am not going simply to cave in if someone disagrees with me. I have a relatively high tolerance for controversy that does not degrade into personal attack, and an aversion to personal attack. I have, I suspect, an extreme need for openness about my reactions to things. Some of that has something to do with the original purpose of this blog — it only works as a writing tool for me when I am speaking from the heart. I am also heavily invested in this fandom after five years and when I see something that troubles me that doesn’t fall under my own personal rules about what I say or don’t say about fans or Richard Armitage (chief concept: “apart from actual crimes, let every fan have his/her own conscience” and/or “disagreement and difference of opinion are fine, but let’s try not to police each other”), I think about it for a while and if I still feel strongly, I speak out.

But what does that speaker’s reaction to me (“how I made him/her feel about himself”) say about me? Given that it’s not that unusual of an occurrence that someone leaves a rage-filled, sometimes violent comment, in response to something I’ve written? That people who leave these comments are not crazy, but represent a significant subset of the fandom that is troubled enough by the blog to leave comments like that?

I would say: that there’s something about my writing (“how I make people feel about themselves”) that causes some readers to feel things intensely (even negative things). Something about what I write, or some things that I write, tends to provoke shame or ashamedness in some readers. It even makes some people feel so threatened that they lash out with threats or worse.

I can own that.

Someone’s suggested to me recently that that is my fault, that the emotional reactions of others to what I say are something I cause, and that anything that has happened to me as a result is something I deserve because I laid the road open to it.

Now, that’s certainly true in an absolute sense. If you’re not walking down a dark alley where someone might be waiting to rob a passerby, you won’t get robbed in that way. If I weren’t writing this blog, I wouldn’t get grief about what I wasn’t writing. That’s a tautology, incidentally, a truth so obvious that it doesn’t constitute an argument.

But think about that for a second. Is that really the world we want to live in? In which no one ever walks down a dark alley — in our case, no one ever says anything because of all of the reactions that someone might have — every instance of “how I make people feel about themselves”? More specifically, is that really the fandom we want to live in?

[As a Jew, I’m more a proponent of the silver rule than the golden rule, but even so, it’s not like that’s sufficient for the weight that is placed on it here. The political implications of that position are stunning — but we’re not talking about politics here. I’ll just point that it is a stance that inherently justifies the status quo of existing oppression.]

The artistic consequences of it are also troubling. If other people’s reactions to things we say truly bear on us in a meaningful sense, it should give an artist — any actor who plays any controversial role — pause. If we can assume that Richard Armitage is “making others feel things about themselves” when he plays Francis Dolarhyde — and I assume that is an essential goal of successful acting insofar as it plays with the question of empathy, to make people in the audience feel something about themselves — and that makes us disgusted, angry, rage-filled, frustrated, disappointed — what does what he is “making us feel about ourselves” say about him?

What does it say about Richard Armitage that some of these things he tweets make me angry with him and frustrated with myself for trying to support an open fandom? I suspect that people who disagree with me would ultimately undermine the statement they’re supporting — they would say that how Armitage “makes me feel about myself” does not say anything meaningful about him. They would attribute my reaction to me, either to my misunderstanding of what he meant, or to some flaw in my personality. Perhaps those who are especially angry at me would say that it’s evidence that I’m some kind of warped person because I disagree with him and my reaction is evidence of that — not, indeed, as his own tweet would imply, that he is asking something that if taken literally is not only nonsensical but damaging to the world of expression.

Those people would be right, incidentally, even as they contradicted Armitage’s apparent point in the tweet. As many people figure out around the age of eighteen, a fundamental step in attaining adulthood is realizing that one is responsible for one’s own emotions, reactions, and behavior. How Richard Armitage makes people feel about themselves may say something about him, his talent, or at least his desire to please, but it says a lot more about the people who are having the feelings. I blog in response to my feelings, but I don’t blame the feelings on him (except tongue-in-cheek) and I don’t refuse to accept the consequences of what I say.

I mention that because there’s another piece of this. Yes, I write this blog. But I write it about someone. So in terms of the causal relationship “how I make people feel about themselves” vs “what it says about me” — I’m not writing in a vacuum in which that relationship is direct. This blog is an example of that — I started writing it because Richard Armitage made me feel things about not just him, but also myself, hence the title. Most of my audience would not care, for instance, if I had something negative to say about macaroni and cheese. (No worries.) A few of us would, probably, but would anyone blame that reaction on my attitude toward starchy, fatty carbohydrate meals? No, we would say it was about their allegiance to the dish. So “how I make people feel about themselves” is not only about me and what I say, it is also about the other associations people have with one of the subjects about which I write: Richard Armitage. He “makes people feel a certain way about themselves,” which is why, if I criticize something he says, they are reacting not only to what I have said, but also to their own reactions to “how he makes them feel about themselves.” They are angry at me, but they are angry because I said something about him that affects their own emotional ties to him.

So there’s a segment of Armitage’s fans whom “he makes feel about themselves” so intensely that they feel justified in leaving the kind of comment I’ve reproduced above. (I’m not the only person who gets this, I assume — I know that some other bloggers are the recipient of this stuff as well.) When they perceive that I am threatening him, they feel threatened and they threaten in return. Or “he makes them feel about themselves” so intensely that they think it’s worthwhile to do other stuff, that does qualify as bullying, that may be illegal, that doesn’t need to be rehashed here.

Insofar as “how he makes people feel about themselves” apparently causes some fans to police or even bully other fans, are we really ready to claim that that “says something about him”? I think fans engaged in these behaviors are not protecting him, but rather their own identities, but since Armitage fans who police or bully do so ostensibly for his sake, does that say “a lot” or indeed anything about him?

I suspect most of us would say that it doesn’t.

~ by Servetus on April 26, 2015.