Say What?: On having an ethical delivery of our ethical message
Mar 3rd
At first glance, this seems like such a fender-bender in a world that is otherwise full of overturned eighteen-wheelers. In fact, when I first heard about it, I didn’t even think it worthy of a mention until a few days later, when I had mulled it over (actually, I couldn’t STOP thinking about it) and decided that it warranted some further analysis.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that even these seemingly insignificant, nit-picky points about the message by which we deliver our activism can have a huge impact on the world. For one thing, if individuals and organizations continue to make these tragic missteps, the heart of the vegan argument — don’t exploit animals — is going to get completely lost amongst the outrage; in fact, I barely read any of the rest of the article in which this particular offense is contained. Not only that, but we are going to actively lose allies if we continue to ignore the voices of those not in power: if we repeatedly perform actions or make statements that contribute to women’s exploitation; if we disregard the histories and stereotypes that contribute to the exploitation of people of color; and if we make a mockery of people’s gender identities and sexuality, they and their allies will not want to align themselves with animal activists.
We cannot afford to lose anyone.
Anyway, the story. An article called “5 Reasons to Thaw Your Frosty Relationship With Winter” was recently posted on Vegan Chic, a fashion and lifestyle blog for (primarily women) vegans. It was written by self-described “Ethical Man” Dan Mims, who also posted the article at his blog. So why did this particular piece ice me up instead of thawing me out? There’s a teeny, tiny line in the section of the article devoted to snuggling that caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end. “In the early stages of a dating relationship, gauging each others’ interest isn’t so easy,” writes the Ethical Man. “Boundaries have to be respected, but they also have to be pushed.”
Insert sound of scratching record here.
In a paragraph about presumably consensual contact with a romantic partner, Ethical Man Dan Mims suggests to his (predominately male) audience that it is ok to push boundaries. Not only that, but they HAVE to be pushed. Can we talk for a second about why people have boundaries in romantic and sexual relationships? How about the fact that one in six women has survived a sexual assault (a statistic, by the way, that does not account for women who were repeatedly assaulted)? Or the global cultural narrative that women’s bodies are for consumption and men are the ones who do the consuming at will? The less-privileged groups in this equation (women, gay men, trans- and gender non-conforming individuals) have been forced to establish boundaries for themselves because otherwise, we get attacked. We get assaulted. We get killed.
It is the opposite of ethical to suggest that those boundaries be pushed.
And this is why we have to be so careful with our words. I am not saying that Dan Mims is encouraging his audience to assault women (just as feminists have been arguing that we don’t detest rape jokes because we think the people telling them or laughing at them are or will become rapists). What I am saying here is that this inattentiveness to the lived experiences of disempowered groups is not only detrimental to the cause of animal activism and indeed all social justice, but it is also straight-up dangerous. In my activism — and in my vision of a vegan world — people listen to one another. We consider whether our words will inadvertently trigger or cause discomfort to the people to whom we are speaking. And if we are called out on our mistakes, we apologize, we educate ourselves, and we fix it.
No one is free when others are oppressed.
about 1 year ago
I don’t think Dan Mims was actually trying to encourage date rape or anything like that. However, I think this post reveals a deep insensitivity about the struggles faced by the many individuals who encounter sexual violence.
Mims could’ve written “explore new areas of intimacy,” “collectively expand boundaries,” “take new journeys together.” There are a dozen ways he could have expressed the idea of an evolving relationship without using such dangerous language. You have to push something because it’s hard to move, stuck in place, or resisting. When boundaries in a relationship are READY to shift, they don’t need to be pushed.
I find this blog, as a whole, to be far too herteronormative for my tastes, so it’s not on my radar. Thank you for bringing this particularly offensive post to my attention.
about 1 year ago
Thanks for your thoughts, zantedeschia. I agree completely — I don’t think Dan Mims was using his words maliciously, but given the violent associations with the phrase “pushing boundaries,” especially as it relates to gendered and sexual violence, it seems that there are a number of better choices that can be made. I love your suggestions and hope that advocates will, in the future, take them to heart and continually strive to speak our minds in a way that does not steamroll or threaten other people’s identities.
about 1 year ago
Hi Jenna, Dan Mims here. I’m happy to have discovered your site.
I fear this will be a rather long response (apologies in advance), because there’s a lot to address. Despite its length, I hope you’ll read all the way through. I also hope that, afterward, you’ll read a related post over at my blog:
http://blog.theethicalman.com/post/3702936724/a-message-of-inclusiveness
Please trust that I am committed to a constructive airing of view points, and that when I counter yours and/or others’ statements, beliefs, or actions, I am doing so on the merits only, with earnestness and respect — much more than I’ve been given, I think.
So, I was directed to this blog post on Saturday by one of your readers and have given myself a chance to consider your thoughts. The first thing to do is offer the context of the statement with which you have taken issue, since you did not include it in your post:
“4. Snuggle-walking never felt so right.
In the early stages of a dating relationship, gauging each other’s interest isn’t so easy. Boundaries have to be respected, but they also have to be pushed. Fortunately, the cold provides us with a mutually innocent way to see how it feels to get just a little intimate with a new maybe-more-than-friend. Side-embracing to avert hypothermia during your pre- or post-date stroll is a great way to take that first of perhaps many steps with a possibly special someone for whom you think you might have feelings.”
I think the innocuousness of it all is readily apparent, but here are some things worth explicitly noting:
A. The sentence you singled out from my post emphasizes that “boundaries must be respected.” I suppose you can refuse to take me at my words, but your refusal to do so is not a reflection of the words themselves.
B. Stand-alone phrases like “pushing boundaries” do not inherently encourage disrespect or dismissal of another person’s bodily sovereignty. That is something that has been imposed upon the statement by you, and it has been done so in a weak meta sense — not even for what the words actually mean (whether on their own, in context, or as per the intentions of their author), but instead for how it will be taken by others who, we’re supposed to believe, would interpret the words in as wild a manner as you have. Given the blog post I wrote, “pushing boundaries” entails something as inoffensive as putting one’s arm around a date while walking in the cold. (How is that supposed to happen without someone taking the initiative, by the way? Are they supposed to arrange a contract counter-signed by both parties beforehand?) Of course, if the person who is being embraced doesn’t like it, they should say as much and that should absolutely be respected. That’s the whole “Boundaries must be respected” part of the sentence, “Boundaries must be respected, but they also have to be pushed.” You haven’t offered any citation of where I said anything contrary to that (naturally, I didn’t).
C. The statement you’ve singled out comes under the header, “Snuggle-walking never felt so right,” and is surrounded by equally (or even more) tepid language. The paragraph specifically encourages a sidelong embrace in cold weather between two people who are already dating. I don’t think it could be more innocuous. (Hand-holding, maybe?) Anyway, if you’re going to criticize my post for anything, I would think it would be the sheer whitebread-ness of it.
D. The statement and context do not in anyway limit the scope of the addressed audience by sex or gender. From beginning to end of the passage, the language is all-inclusive. I didn’t make any claims about who should be initiating the widening of boundaries that, I think definitionally, *has* to occur if a deepening romantic possibility is going to be explored. In any case, you assume me to be speaking only to men, when you have no basis for that assertion.
E. This was posted on both Chic Vegan (the readership of which you identify as “primarily women”) and on my own blog, the readership of which you claim is “predominantly male.” You try to get mileage out of that latter presumption because it might support a necessary premise of your conclusion that my words had a significant effect on the males of the world. You wouldn’t know this because you did not speak to me about what my audience is like before making assumptions about it, but it turns out that my website and brand, insofar as I can track, actually attract more females than males. (There are many reasons for this, including women who want their male loved ones to take my advice.) In short, you made a convenient assertion absent any due diligence whatsoever, and as often happens in such cases, you turned out to be incorrect.
All these relevant considerations would have been evidence to a different conclusion for somebody who wasn’t just leaping to the conclusion they already wanted to find. Normally I’d grudgingly defend your right to boldly declare ill-considered assertions, but it’s not okay when you’re unjustifiably dragging me (or anybody else) through the mud.
Similar to the gaps in the case for your interpretation of a single sentence, there are glaring gaps in your investigative process, which your readers deserve to know about:
1. You didn’t include for your readers (and you obviously didn’t seriously consider) even the immediate context of the statement you found problematic.
2. According to your own words, you “barely read any of the rest of [my blog post].”
3. You didn’t reach out to ask for my perspective before publication of a reputation-harming post about me and my work. You didn’t even send notice that something was going to be or already had been published.
4. You’ve presented conjecture — regarding both your primary case and the secondary details meant to support it — as strongly as you would present fact, without a shred of due diligence.
These are not the hallmarks of a constructive, respectful, inclusive, or truth-seeking conversation (as you claim to demand in your site’s mission and value statements), and they clearly indicate conclusions drawn from reactive assumptions instead of genuine investigation. Meanwhile, again, my reputation is made to suffer.
To an even larger point, this kind of friendly fire — wherein vegans attack vegans about perceived and petty offenses — merely divides our community and weakens our influence. For example, though I can’t be sure that it’s a direct result of your blog post, I received an extremely ginned-up email from someone in our community who claimed (and shall remain anonymous): “I have to say I am completely appalled by the following statement: ‘Boundaries have to be respected, but they also have to be pushed.’ This statement is degrading, offensive, inappropriate, dangerous to women, and essentially encourages date rape.” This person did quote and reference your blog post in a way that suggested it had catalyzed his/her own reaction, and the timeline of your publication and his/her email would support as much. But whether your post catalyzed this person’s reaction or merely reinforced it, it’s clear that your blog post only functions to fragment our diverse but largely overlapping community in a completely unjustifiable manner. That same emailer — the only direct complaint I have received about the post, by the way — explicitly and in no uncertain terms professed zero interest in even hearing what I had to say, while also claiming to speak for at least some others in our community who, again, did not in any way seek out my perspective before assuming the worst. It was a toxic confrontation of which no amount of politeness or reason on my part could amount to an olive branch, and I regret it has probably harmed my relationship with that person, his/her friends, and, therefore, the vegan community as a whole. Not for anything I actually did or said, though.
You have not *quite* taken the truly preposterous “Dan-Mims-encourages-date-rape-and-I-won’t-entertain-any-other-possibilities” position of the emailer, and it would be fallacious to hold you directly accountable for it. But you aren’t that far from it. You said:
“I am not saying that Dan Mims is encouraging his audience to assault women (just as feminists have been arguing that we don’t detest rape jokes because we think the people telling them or laughing at them are or will become rapists). What I am saying here is that this inattentiveness to the lived experiences of disempowered groups is not only detrimental to the cause of animal activism and indeed all social justice, but it is also straight-up dangerous. In my activism — and in my vision of a vegan world — people listen to one another. We consider whether our words will inadvertently trigger or cause discomfort to the people to whom we are speaking. And if we are called out on our mistakes, we apologize, we educate ourselves, and we fix it.”
Thanks for the first sentence there, I guess? I find the presumption that it’s even *plausible* to think I encouraged my audience to “assault women” quite slanderous and completely unmerited. I also deny the analogy between my statement and the making of rape jokes, for all the reasons already noted. Also for all those reasons, it’s obvious that you not only don’t have any right to attribute such “inattentiveness” to me, but that you yourself have been grossly, irresponsibly inattentive in your investigation of this matter.
The icing on the irony cake is that, although it’s more information than you or anyone else has any right to know — and though this is not at all logically necessary to establish my own ability to have perspective on these issues — I’ve been victimized myself on three separate occasions, once by a woman who drugged me and twice by men who made unwelcome attempts via physical force. My point in bringing this up is to underscore just how little right you have to claim that I am “inattentive to the lived experiences” of sexual assault victims. If anything, you have revealed your own “inattentiveness to the lived experiences” of men like me — a man who is your ally in just about every way, and yet feels forced to divulge private details of his own life to you, a complete stranger, in order to prove that he has a right to sit at the adults’ table. It’s wrong on its own terms, just incredibly disrespectful, and if you had reached out to me before posting your shoot-from-the-hip smear, you might have discovered how little you really know about my perspective on these issues.
As a matter of consequence, energy would be better spent taking on actual victimizers than sweating small (or, as is my opinion in this case, non-existent) offenses committed within the vegan community. And it’s worth noting that I do not react to my own victimization by claiming, quite irrationally, that it’s wrong for someone I’m dating to initiate physical contact with me. It isn’t wrong. It’s only wrong if the overture is rebuffed and yet the initiator continues. Of course, it’s plain to see that I didn’t encourage anything of the sort in my blog post.
I hope you’ll take your own advice: “if we are called out on our mistakes, we apologize, we educate ourselves, and we fix it.” I think a fix and an apology are especially in order given the beating my reputation has taken as a result of your many mistakes here. If I, in a moment of haste, had written such a plainly false and slanderous post, my first action following realization would be to take it down and replace it with an apology post. I also suggest that you correct the errors of your investigative process in the future. When you target someone for criticism, you should do better to ensure that your criticism is accurate, which (at a minimum) includes allowing your target an opportunity to clarify his/her perspective to you, and, in the event that you still aren’t satisfied, an opportunity to have a voice within the body of the piece. Such a process would be far more constructive, proactive, and community-oriented than spreading discontent on the basis of supposition, and without even informing the object of that discontent (in this case, me).
All that can be done now is damage control. As it stands, I will be immortalized on the internet, and already in some people’s minds, in a way that doesn’t at all fairly characterize me or my work. I really can’t emphasize that enough, because no matter how wrong you are, there are those who will not read my comment here, who will not get to know me, who will not consider anything other than your ill-gotten perspective, and that’s a bell you can’t unring.
Well, that’s it. Thanks for reading this very long response, Jenna. I hope it’s a testament to how seriously and earnestly I take this conversation. I don’t know you and don’t know what to expect from you as a result of this, but I would certainly welcome removal of this post, which I believe to be an incredibly unfair piece that breaks both standards of decency and the policies of your own site.
- Dan
about 1 year ago
Hi Dan,
Thanks so much for taking the time to come over and elucidate the thought process behind your blog. I’m also truly sorry to hear about the experiences you’ve had with sexual assault.
The reason that I “barely read any of the rest of the article” about which I have written — although I will note that I did read the entire paragraph in which the statement was found, and I apologize for not including the entire thing in my post — was not that I was willfully ignoring your words or trying to deduce meaning that “wasn’t there;” I had to stop reading because that statement completely stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t get past the use of the phrase “pushing boundaries” in the context of intimacy and relationships, innocuous though you may have intended it to be, and given the feedback both you and I have received, I don’t think I was alone in feeling that way. It literally caused me anxiety, to the point, as I mentioned above, that I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I’m sorry that you think my perspective — which is based on my own lived experiences, just as I am arguing in my blog post — is “ill-gotten.” As with most of the writing I have done on this blog, I am emphasizing that it’s not intention but people’s reactions that we — as vegans, as activists, as human beings — should be worried about: I can have all of the good intentions in the world, but if my message is delivered in a way that is unintentionally offensive or disrespectful to a person or a group of people, those intentions will be completely lost on that audience.
On one last note, you asked: How is that supposed to happen without someone taking the initiative, by the way? Are they supposed to arrange a contract counter-signed by both parties beforehand?
I think obtaining verbal (or written) consent from a partner before zie touches you and before you touch hir is a completely reasonable expectation. I find that incredibly attractive, much more so than having my boundaries tested and hope that I’ll feel comfortable enough to assert myself in the moment. Maybe I’m the whitebread one.
xj
about 1 year ago
Hi all, I’m Dan Mims’ twin brother Matt. I know my brother better than just about anyone. Like him, I’m vegan and in full support of gender equality, and I can say unequivocally that this blog post and the first two comments above characterize him untruthfully and irresponsibly. Unfortunately, they also do so publicly.
A lot of harmless, well-meaning sentences can be taken out of context to suggest something more nefarious. In this case, a sentence intended to be about gender-neutral side-hugs and respectful romance has been twisted and amplified into one that supposedly could encourage assault or date rape and even herald the possible failure of the entire vegan movement. If this extreme and unfounded view were accepted by a broader audience — or anyone, for that matter — it could permanently and baselessly harm my brother’s reputation.
I see plenty of value in this blog as a whole, but this particular post is clearly out of line and deserves to be amended, corrected, or removed. No judgment on the author — we’ve all shot from the hip on occasion and had to make amends. It’s past time for that to happen in this case.
- Matt
about 1 year ago
If anything, this article and the following comments highlight the necessity to pay attention to how you use your language. I don’t think calling on the author to take this down is appropriate. I think it’s a good conversation for other bloggers to read.
about 1 year ago
Hi Christine, I see your point of view, but I think there are a few other things to consider:
1. It’d be great if everyone read this entire conversation in the interest of becoming better bloggers, but many readers would not, and might only read the original blog post (or even just part of it). These people could easily be left with the wrong impression of my brother’s actions and character.
2. The author has still not acknowledged on this thread that her post was factually and journalistically out of line. When presented with information and perspectives that clearly show one’s public claims about someone to be false and even outlandish, one should publicly correct oneself, ideally in the same forum as the offending claims. Although the only sure way to protect my brother’s reputation from future misinterpretation as a result of this post would be to take it down completely, this could also be reasonably achieved by placing a note at the very top of this post explaining that the original content was not thoroughly vetted or thought through before written and was not fair to its subject. This note could even extol the benefits of our resultant conversation in learning how to carefully choose one’s words.