It was clear when posters went up that a talk at the University of Massachusetts Amherst this spring would spark a skirmish in the culture wars. Young conservative speakers arrived April 25 to poke fun at political agendas on the left, lobbing “social justice warrior” as an insult.
And, taking the bait, a few of those “warriors” fought back at Bowker Auditorium by attempting to shout down speakers. From its first minutes, “The Triggering: Has Political Correctness Gone Too Far?” brought lots of shouting and not much listening.
The raucous event could have been called “Hate Speech Meets Angry Speech and Holds a Funeral for Free Speech.” Speaker Milo Yiannopoulos, who bills himself as the “most fabulous supervillain on the internet,” opened by claiming that “feminism is cancer.” Fair warning, in other words, that this wasn’t to be a calm exchange of views.
But into this morality play stumbled two Hampshire College students. For them, life after hasn’t been the same.
As Valley Advocate staff writer Peter Vancini details in a story this week, an internet full of enemies of “social justice warriors” is having the last word by heaping abuse on one student who swore at and tried to silence speakers (while captured in a video since seen more than 2.3 million times). Also pilloried online is the student who organized the protest of the talk, then took to the web to complain about treatment she has been receiving.
Unwittingly, and unwisely, both allowed themselves to become stand-ins for left-leaning college students that people on the right love to mock.
But this is hardly sport. One of the students received a collage made of photos of a naked and decapitated woman. The student was threatened with being stabbed and raped. The other has been ridiculed for her size and called both “that thing” and “that humongous beast.” Both were inundated with gruesome messages and images.
The tone was set early, when audience members booed the president of the UMass College Republicans, which sponsored the event. The panel also included Christina Hoff Sommers, of the conservative American Enterprise, and Steven Crowder, a comedian whose motto, “Louder with Crowder,” captures his approach to debate. All three speakers are internet celebrities. Most in the audience understood this would be a night of political theater.
Sommers tried at one point to walk Yiannopoulos’ anti-woman rhetoric back, saying, “Contemporary, third-wave campus feminism is not cancer, but madness, utter madness.” No, he corrected her, it’s “cancer.”
It takes courage as a woman, not madness, to fight for equal treatment. What’s happened since the event offers a case in point. Speaking out on the web is known to be hazardous for women. One woman who knows that well is Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist blogger. She spoke at UMass last November after becoming famous for criticizing the male-dominated videogame culture – and then receiving death threats.
A 2014 Pew Research Center study Vancini cites found that more than one in four women aged 18 to 24 have been stalked online, becoming targets of “severe types of harassment at disproportionately high levels.”
The Hampshire students found, after consulting with lawyers, that the internet provides a lot of wiggle room for violent language that falls short of constituting death threats. But the hatred pouring in has been raw and unmistakable.
Maybe once, in a faraway land that used to be called the university, the Bowker event would have provided a chance for listeners to re-examine the rightness of their own views. That used to be a pursuit on campus. It happens by considering how other people see things.
It was wrong for people attending the event to try to silence speakers. Their actions drew angry responses from the speakers, particularly Yiannopoulos and Crowder, that escalated the confrontation.
But then again, those speakers had come to UMass to entertain. None of the combatants in this UMass scrum, it seems, came to reason.
And then, the trolls crawled out to sully the online reputations of two more women. Score the whole thing a setback for civil society.