Je ne devinais pas les traumas subis
The Guardian on the Ligue du LOL’s campaign of bullying women and Other races:
The group, believed to have had about 30 members, is said to have spread pornographic memes online and doctored photos to humiliate its victims.
What group members claim started as dubious humour in private exchanges, however, appears to have soon degenerated and spread on to the wider web mostly through Twitter.
Even “humour” in private exchanges doesn’t have to involve, say, pornographic memes and doctored photos. There are other ways to be funny and even other ways to gossip about people’s flaws.
They’re posting lengthy apologies / explanations on Twitter, saying they didn’t realize how nasty it all was for the people they did it to.
Doucet wrote on Twitter: “I was a member of the Ligue du LOL for two years. I left the group six years ago … in the small world that was then Twitter, I saw that certain people were regularly targeted but I never guessed the depth of the trauma suffered…
Hervaud wrote a long message on Twitter apologising for “condescending” tweets he had posted on Friday when the scandal first broke, and said he offered “sincere if belated apologies to those he had hurt”. He said the Ligue “never aimed to coordinate hateful campaigns targeting anyone. But it doesn’t serve to minimise or deny the evidence. The permanent spirit of mockery and cynicism of the group obviously influenced the actions of certain more borderline members, notably those covered by anonymity, who, by the snowball effect inspired other internet users outside the group.” He admitted some of the victim statements had “literally twisted my stomach”.
…
In an apology published on Twitter, Glad said he had “created a monster that escaped”.
“The object of the group was not to harass women, just to amuse ourselves. But quickly, our way of amusing ourselves became very problematic and we didn’t realise this. We thought that everyone visible on the internet, by a blog, or Twitter account or something else, deserved to be mocked,” Glad wrote. He added that he didn’t realise that this could “become a hell for the people targeted”.
Well why the fuck not? How fucking stupid or callous do you have to be to fail to realize that?
And I don’t really believe it anyway. If it’s true it just means they’re callous self-centered shits, but it probably isn’t true and they’re just trying to save themselves. The reality is they probably knew perfectly well and didn’t care even the tiniest little bit, because they were having fun and that’s all that mattered to them.
Capucine Piot, a former journalist now in marketing, said she had been the victim of several “mocking” photomontages and videos criticising her appearance. “It was very hard for a developing young woman. After reading so much dirt about myself … I was convinced I was worthless,” she tweeted.
Other victims have remained anonymous. “Those guys, they thought they were making jokes but they were ruining our lives,” said one. France’s minister for digital affairs, Mounir Mahjoubi, described the men behind the Facebook group as “losers”.
“It is a group of guys high on their power at being able to make fun of other people. Except that their mockery had an effect in real life,” he said.
Of course it did, and saying they didn’t realize it would be unpleasant for the people they did it to is just horseshit.
This is sophistry. People are generally presumed to intend the logical consequences of their actions. If the way you like to “amuse yourself” is to do things that a reasonable person would find harassing, I don’t want to hear about how you had your spiritual fingers crossed while you did it.
Not necessarily. But it is an admission on their part of a total inability to empathise. And ability to empathise is arguably what distinguishes the ‘higher primates’ and other mammalian species like dogs from the rest of the vertebrates.
People lacking empathetic ability in the appropriate historical circumstances make excellent concentration camp guards, stormtroopers, fascist sympathisers and such.
Why? Is just being a social person, someone who interacts via the modern media, deserving of mockery? I realize I do few of these things myself. I use e-mail and post here, and that’s about it, but that doesn’t mean I think people who do the things I don’t do deserve to be mocked. I don’t do them because I’m not interested in them, not because I’m a higher being. And, pardon me, but these journalists were also visible, so why not just mock themselves?
The idea that they didn’t realize it was hurtful actually does seem believable. I think when you don’t consider other people but yourself, and you think you’re just having fun, you do not have the ability to recognize other people’s pain, or that your fun may be hurtful. That’s sociopathic, but it seems to be common. And I don’t know how men can simultaneously believe that women are hypersensitive to everything, and that this sort of crap won’t hurt them. It’s BS, but it’s possible they didn’t realize they were hurting anyone. That’s mostly because they didn’t really care, though. They have no sense of the other as a person who can be hurt; they don’t think about the person behind that screen, or something. I don’t know, but I do know I’m sick to death of assholes who lack empathy and think they have the right, perhaps even the duty, to mock everyone else.
Omar:
and iknklast:
Both are possible, but I don’t buy it. The most charitable I can be is that they might have assumed that the people they targeted wouldn’t find out. But even imagining that doing it in secret wouldn’t cause harm is a bit of a stretch. After all, presumably the participants were the ones involved in hiring and professionally criticising young journalists. Can they really claim to believe that their actions would have no impact on their victims’ lives, even if they never found out about it?
I’ve come across this kind of thing twice in professional life, but the groups were so popular that I can only assume similar things existed in other places I’ve worked and nobody was stupid enough to let me find out about it. One of these groups was started by someone who wanted to post revenge porn of his ex-girlfriend, who – needless to say – worked not only at the same company but in the same team. By the time I found out about it, it had become indescribably toxic. Which, when you consider that it began with revenge porn, is saying something.
There is no way these people could have thought that their actions were not harmful. The fact that they tried to keep it secret was a big clue. Another was the fact that the person who eventually spilled the beans to me did so under dire injunctions of anonymity was another.
I’ll go as far as believing that groups can be set up for reasons that are relatively benign if completely unprofessional and that the groups can get out of hand. But if people continue to be members of that group and don’t blow the whistle, anonymously or otherwise, that’s not much of a defense.
latsot:
With all due respect, you are possibly quite right there. Also possibly quite wrong.
The Golden Rule of not doing to others what you would not like others to do to you has a great antiquity going back at least to Confucius (551–479 BC) and is arguably there in concept in the Code of Hammurabi (1754-1790 BC) as ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’
But this is based in turn on being able to imagine yourself into the person of your victim and taking on in your own imagination the feelings that victim might have. This naturally leads on after an event to remorse, which in turn may or may not be genuine. Ultimately, it is arguably about priorities eg thrill-seeking vs living by the rules.
Whatever its organic basis, ability to empathise is not evenly spread across the population of any particular country or region. Nor should we expect it to be.
https://www.thinkhumanism.com/the-golden-rule.html
@latsot #4
I buy it. Because I am that kind of person. I have a very hard time empathizing with others. I even have a hard time empathizing with my future self. I can only really empathize with people I am rather directly confronted with. But empathizing in an anticipating way, is nearly impossible for me except if the situation being anticipated has enough resemblies with a situation in the past. And even then I am wrong enough of the times.
And the problems is, I don’t see any way of becoming aware of this lack of empathie except by making this kind of mistakes.
@Omar,
I’m aware of wide-scale empathy fail, especially in the industries I tend to work in. I’m still not inclined to give these people the benefit of the doubt, though. In my experience, platforms like this tend to get very toxic very quickly indeed. A lot of the participation tends to be about trying to shock and/or impress other participants with increasingly outrageous content. That takes empathy too, of a sort. It requires at the least that the participants know that this sort of content would be unacceptable in wider society. That ought to be a clue that it is at least potentially harmful.
I’ll go as far as believing that participants might believe – because they haven’t thought about it – that this content will somehow never escape or change the attitudes of those watching for the worse. In other words, I don’t buy that these people are necessarily incapable of empathy (if that were the case, why do they feel the need to apologise now?) but I do potentially buy the idea that they were so far up their own arses that they didn’t bother to think about the consequences of their actions. Since the latter is the very least that all societies expect from their members, difficulties with empathy don’t really provide much of an excuse, at least when we’re talking about a fairly large group of people.
@Axxyaan:
That seems to me to be a quite extreme difficulty with empathy and not one shared by the majority of people. I know people who have a similar trait and I certainly accept that they at least might have difficulty in judging whether their actions were harmful in a situation like this. It’s up to other members of a group to recognise bad behaviour – whether intentional or not – and call it out in an appropriate way.
This was quite a large group, there are plenty of other groups like it, and these were journalists for goodness’ sake: people who are supposed to be trained to see the connections between people and things. I have a hard time believing that they all had an uncommon level of difficulty with empathy and that nobody felt that just maybe they shouldn’t all be talking about people in this way.
This was straight up bullying. Publishing porno memes of people has no other purpose than to shame the subject. It’s not light-hearted. Having difficulty understanding other people’s emotions is one thing: making memes and doctored photos is another. That’s a direct assault on the subject’s dignity. We all see the effect revenge porn and Facebook outing have on people. There’s no excuse for this. “We thought it would stay private”. Shitty, shitty misogyny.
I actually wasn’t giving them the benefit of the doubt. I referred to this as sociopathic behavior, and I do not feel the lack of knowing what they’re doing gives them a pass in anyway. I just think that many men are unable to recognize that “teasing” women and giving them this sort of crap is really harmful. And that is more serious, in my opinion, than men who think it is harmful. That is worse…because it means that there are people out there (which I know there are, because I grew up with them) that are unable to recognize the common humanity of other people and the pain and suffering their own behavior causes.
That’s why I think it’s important to recognize that possibility. This is a thornier problem to deal with than people who believe something is harmful but don’t give a damn. How do you work past this reality? I think we need to not see the recognition of this possibility as giving someone a pass, but as expressing the sheer horror that people like this are out there in positions of power. And I think we see it all the time in POTUS…he is so self-centered, so wrapped in his own world, that he probably doesn’t even see the harm he does others (I don’t think he’d care if he did, again, because of being wrapped in his own world view, and because he has the mindset of a bully).
As for keeping it secret, well, the Masons are secret, too, but there is no evidence they are harming anyone. Guys seem to love secret clubs, guy clubs, clubs where they can keep to themselves and control who comes in. Making something secret seems to make it much more “special” – you are an insider, and everyone else is outside. So secret alone doesn’t mean they knew it was harmful. It does suggest that, at least superficially, but there are other explanations.
Anyway, I could be wrong, and I freely admit that, but I do think the possibility needs to be considered. People are dangerous if they are deliberately malignant; they are even more dangerous if they can’t see other people enough to realize they are harming them.
If anything, this is quite the opposite of an “inability to empathize”. The statement “We thought it would stay private” clearly shows that they knew full well the significance (and potential impact) of those exchanges.
@iknklast:
I’m fairly sure we’re mostly in agreement (and I didn’t think for a moment you were giving these people the benefit of the doubt).
A point:
I’m not sure that “empathy” is the proper yardstick. This is a matter of judging a group of people by their actions. It’s certainly possible (as you, Omar and Axxyaan said) that some of the people involved didn’t realise that their actions might be harmful. But that’s a long way from everyone in that entire group, not to mention the probable countless others in other such groups being similarly unaware. I’m not sure that the distinction between happy, active participants and people who refused to join or left when it got too bad or blew whistles is purely one of empathy. It seems more likely to be a matter of some people loving being part of the in group more than they care about the harm it might do to other people. Some might not be sufficiently self-aware to recognise that. I suspect some – if not most – are.
By the way, there is certainly evidence that secret man clubs that exclude women can do harm to women (and male non-members) through old-boys-network behaviour; the preferential selection of members for jobs and other positions outside the club, when women aren’t allowed in, seems harmful to me. I don’t know very much about the masons but I’d be amazed if that sort of thing didn’t happen in the masons and their exclusion of women seems at best a tacit acknowledgement of that.
@learie and @Theo:
Those are both less boring ways of saying what I tried to.
I find it very difficult to believe that creating pornographic memes that were plainly intended to humiliate and degrade colleagues and then sharing them with some of their other colleagues was a result of a lack of empathy. At least, I doubt that they believed they were acceptable to post to a general audience or to their bosses or to the people they depicted, which might have been one great big motherfucker of a clue.
It shows, at least, that they understood the impact on themselves if the beans were spilled, which shows that they were aware that what they were doing was unacceptable. I doubt many of those people could shrug off such potential objections as political correctness gone mad because this is not fucking fantasy land. Like I said, I think that behaviour – especially collective behaviour – is the yardstick here, rather than empathy, real or imagined.
No argument from me.
Damn it all, as if I hadn’t typed enough drivel here today.
Me:
You know, I knew as I was typing that that it didn’t say what I wanted it to say.
I think maybe we’re talking at cross-purposes, or introducing superfluous criteria, or something. I don’t think the choice is between understanding, in an emotional way, exactly how unpleasant mockery and degradation are to its objects, and not understanding that. I think it’s simpler than that.
The whole point of creating groups and Twitter mobs and discussion boards and sub-reddits to mock and degrade selected people – ooooooh let’s say women, just to pick a category totally at random – the whole point, I say, is because the targets won’t enjoy it if they find out about it. The whole point is to torture people. Doing it in a secret group may seem to defeat that purpose, but these are colleagues and probably in many cases people in a position to hire, promote, work with, etc – so the “secret” group is busily doing career harm to its targets, who just happen to be other journalists who have the bad taste to be female.
I think that too.
As someone who grew up in a Masonic household, I certainly will not argue with that! And another interesting thing about those groups is that female auxilaries frequently form, but they operate mostly as support to the men, and to the extent they operate as a group doing it’s own thing (i.e., the Eastern Star), they are required to accept men as members.
Women-only clubs have always been a bit suspicious to the patriarchy; they worry about what women are doing when they are doing it out of sight of men. Oops, maybe those coffee klatches are really plotting to overthrow the patriarchy!
And now I come to think of it, with all due respect, what the fuck?
I told a story about someone who started a revenge porn site and shared it with the team the victim – the only woman in that team – worked with. The rest of the team saw pictures and videos of her naked and performing various sex acts. They all contributed their opinions about her. About her looks, sexual performance and ability to write code.
She left the team before I became aware of this, I wonder why. I raised merry hell about this and sacked everyone involved, but doing that was one holy fuck of a slog that took several months. My bosses asked me whether I was *certain* I wanted to get rid of those people and suggested that I might want to deal with it in another way, which involved my not sacking them and my not in turn being sacked.
Fuck all that shit. Fuck any sort of apology for all that shit.
Seriously, @Omar. You can lecture me on the golden rule from can to can’t but lack of empathy is not the leading factor here. It’s lack of decency. It’s lack of thought. And above all, it’s being cruel for the sake of it, for the glory of it. Because they can.
So true! Whether from lack of empathy, lack of knowledge, or just from being entitled assholes, this is the underlying crap we have to deal with every single day…because…macho blah blah something something blah blah emasculating bitch blah blah hunted the mammoth blah blah blah.
I don’t actually care what is in that blah, not anymore. I tried to understand them for years, while none of them gave a flying fig about understanding me. They’d rather see my chest or my bottom than understand me, and I never gave them that opportunity, and for that, I had to pay.
The rationale behind it is important sociologically, but in the end, the behavior is what needs to be dealt with initially…to keep women (and non-white people and LGBTQ) from further harm.
I don’t even know why I engaged with the idea that empathy – or lack of it – is the significant factor in the original case of people being complete dicks professionally and personally which – as we know – had detrimental effects on the careers of their female victims.
I take it all back.
Somehow we are discussing this in the abstract and bullshitting apologetics as shamefully as anyone else. I stink of it.
Pornographic memes, doctored photos, bullying tweets and stories. It’s just another slymepit and just as despicable.
^ That. They sound exactly like the slymepit.
These men were journalists. A key part of that job is being able to put yourself in another person’s shoes so that you can properly tell their story. Empathy is part of the fundamental skill-set.
So, IF we choose to accept that they were, in fact, unaware that being targeted in this way would be hurtful to the targets, then it is also fair to say that they are frauds, grotesquely incompetent in at least one key function of their careers, and owe apologies, not merely (though first and foremost) to the women, but also to their employers and readers, the former of which should be going over every piece they’ve ever produced in order to determine if this critical failing did, in fact, impact the quality of their work.
Freemage:
Well said. I will go along with that.
Well, that explains it. Back in dinosaur days (my first semester of college) I thought I wanted to be a journalist, so I took an Intro to Journalism class. I decided against that quickly, and moved on. But one thing that stuck out at me (and one of the reasons I decided I did not want to be a journalist) is the constant refrain of “you don’t care about feelings or who gets hurt, it’s the story that counts”.
Training that sort of callousness into someone can also infect their life outside of work, bleeding into all their interactions. So who cares? Other people aren’t real, they’re a story…or in this case, a game.
@Freemage 23 and especially @Omar, 24:
Didn’t I say that?