The Reddit Thing, Pt 2: What Does Ellen Pao Have to Do with Donald Trump?
It’s hard to nail down the demography of Reddit’s userbase. As with anything that gets covered by the media, reports tend to coalesce around the spectacular: a survey from four years ago found that 78% of Redditors were men, 21% were women, with the remaining 1% some combination rounding error and people who don’t fit neatly into either category. Others suggest numbers closer to 60% men.* Either way, it’s overwhelmingly male. This is something I can attest to from my experience using the site. It’s common to presume that the person you’re communicating with, whether it’s about A Song of Ice & Fire (/r/asoiaf) or visually stimulating maps (/r/mapporn), is a guy. This is a correct assumption often enough that when you get corrected,** you notice it.
* Last time I wrote about Reddit, I said the website had “fewer than 100” employees; this website claims that, as of April, it actually had just 74.
** doesn’t happen to me anymore, because I am just that virtuous
This manifests in a number of ways, a lot of them basically harmless. The level of crudity is high in many (but not all) subreddits. Subreddits — non-porn, non-exploitative — dedicated to things like “pretty girls” (/r/prettygirls) and “girls smiling” (/r/girls_smiling) are substantial (/r/prettygirls has more than 100,000 “subscribers”, ie, people with accounts who wish to see popular posts from the subreddit on the front page when they log in; this number is in line with ones you see for cult TV hits like Archer or Community). But, like any monoculture, it can get toxic, especially in the parts of the website where men take steps to sequester themselves from any women. In these places, like /r/mensrights, users will claim not to object to women — but a culture of fear and disrespect festers, and it manifests as a weird sort of mutation of the English language, one in which the weight of various words is altered to match a set of shared assumptions that underpin a lot of the paranoia and loathing manifested in those places. And unfortunately, these places bleed. This lingo, and these attitudes, radiate outward into other parts of the website, where they win converts and / or cause conflict. There is no mechanism by which Reddit can prevent users of ugly subreddits from wandering into other ones to spew their invective, at least not given the tools they currently employ.†
† There’s actually a distinction to be made, I think, between subs like /r/mensright, and others that are dedicated to really loathsome content. In a way, /r/mensrights is more insidious than really disgusting subs like /r/coontown (I imagine you can guess what that’s about), because it cloaks its agenda in a veneer of respectability, not least because of that lingustic metamorphasis they’ve managed to effect. The distinction is not unlike that between the KKK and Richard Nixon’s use of racial dogwhistles to appeal to people’s ugly instincts in order to get elected.
I’ll give you three examples. Whole disserations could be — probably are being — written about this, but in the interest of quasi-brevity, I’m going to limit myself to these three.
1. Feminist. This word has developed a distinct derogatory flavor among people who frequent /r/mensrights and similar subs. This is not dissimilar to how liberal came to be code, in the conservative discourse of the 90s and early 00s, for “everything I hate about America, including but not limited to effete latte-drinkers who want to take my money, black people who want to take my money, Hispanic commies who want to take my money, and gays, who want to take my children.” In many respects, feminist has become divorced from the meanings it has for most people, many of which are strongly positive and are largely about strength, assertiveness, and making the world a better place for everybody;†† in this context, it means a fun-killing ninny who views it as her job to lecture, censor, and oppress men. Feminists, in this formulation, seek to deprive men of sexual pleasure by reclassifying sex as rape, sexual imagery as fostering rape culture, and harmless flirting as harrassment. The feminist is a bugaboo, and to call someone a feminist in this context is to reclassify anything they say as hopelessly agenda-driven and not really worthy of listening to.
†† This is the big thing that I think a lot of people miss about feminism, among many other activist movements. They’re not about stealing happiness or well-being from anybody; they’re about creating new happiness and well-being, and a world with more happy and well people in it has a tendency to be a better world for everybody.
2. Social Justice Warrior. Now, on the face of it, social justice warrior sounds like it might be a good thing, right? Wouldn’t you classify, say, Mother Teresa as a warrior for social justice? Gandhi? Rosa Parks? But in this context, these three words have been weaponized, to form a mocking appellation that is similar to, but not the same as, the above mutation of feminist. Social justice warriors (SJW’s, in the parlance of our times) are people who are hyper-sensitive to matters of race, class, and gender, and prone to getting their “fee-fees” (viz feelings) hurt by basically imaginary injustices they perceive everywhere. SJW’s are weak, silly, and they are definitely, definitely, wimps. That they tend to be women and people of color, well . . . them’s the breaks, I guess? I’ve never really been able to wrap my mind around how people can just rationalize away the fact that so many of the people who might perceive injustices that white guys don’t also might have a unique insight into the matter, but there you have it.
This is maybe the most complicated of these because there is a sense in which people sometimes use identity as a cudgel with which to beat people with whom they disagree. I recently had a conversation with someone — someone I’d just met but who I generally really liked — in which she asserted that “empiricism is a weapon of white supremacy.” And there are ways in which empiricism have been used in that manner, or least the pretense of it has ben. But there are many ways in which empiricism is potent weapon against white supremacy, and that mostly sounded to me like someone who didn’t like being proven wrong and so had found a way to try to get people who had proven her wrong to shut up.
This is maybe the most complicated of these because there is a sense in which people sometimes use identity as a cudgel with which to beat people with whom they disagree. I recently had a conversation with someone — someone I’d just met but who I generally really liked — in which she asserted that “empiricism is a weapon of white supremacy.” And there are ways in which empiricism have been used in that manner, or least the pretense of it has been. But there are many ways in which empiricism is potent weapon against white supremacy, and that mostly sounded to me like someone who didn’t like being proven wrong and so had found a way to try to get people who had proven her wrong to shut up.
But at the same time, I was able to understand this as a function of human psychology, rather than a symptom of some reprehensible social disease that was threatening my freedom as a white dude. Social justice warrior is more than an acknowledgement that there is a culture of censorious PC-ness that has gotten out of hand. It’s a label meant to demean.
3. Misandry. This is meant to be a parallel concept to misogyny — ie, the hatred of men by women. The word was coined more than a hundred years ago, but it’s now become one that shows up in the discourse, almost entirely between men talking to men who agree with them. It’s the kind of thing that I’m sure exists somewhere, a little bit. But the word has entered the frenzy that is places like /r/mensrights and is now used to describe an allegedly common social problem that, as far as I can tell, hardly ever really manifests. Massive discrimination against men by women doesn’t really happen all that much, and furthermore, isn’t all that realistic — because, in nearly every culture on every corner of the planet, it’s mostly men who control the levers of power. Even if Hillary Clinton is elected president next year, that will be true.
What’s insidious about this mutation in the language is the way in which it, and the assumptions about the world it represents, can seep into the brains of people who don’t know any better and poison their attitudes. I know a kid — well, he’s 27, but I’ve known him since he was 15, so he’ll always be a kid to me — anyway, I know this guy who I hadn’t seen in a few years, and when I ran into him again, he had a lot of these words in his mouth. It was shocking to me, but he seemed to view it as totally normal. I’m not really a believer in the domination of the sign over the signified — in fact, it seems often preposterous to me — but when we’re talking about social constructs like gender, class, and race, it can happen.˚ Ultimately, it turned out that this kid — a straight, white guy, a product of the middle class and with a college education — mostly hadn’t gotten laid in a while. I can’t help but think that this is where a lot of this stuff originates: guys, especially white guys, who have struck out with the ladies, and feel better if they believe there’s a conspiracy against them.
˚ That said, it can also be a distraction. See my earlier post about “the n-bomb”.
*
Ellen Pao! Where is she? We’re not there yet. Because now there’s some stuff about race.
It’s a little harder to keep track of Reddit’s racial breakdown. Maybe it’s not harder to keep track of, but there are fewer publicly-available statistics about it than there are about the gender breakdown. The sources cited above do indicate that white and black people are about equally likely to use Reddit, and Hispanics are almost twice as likely to do so — but they don’t break down absolute numbers, and they don’t include other ethnic categories, as far as I can tell. But it’s a safe bet that Reddit is overwhelmingly white. Maybe as overwhelmingly as it is male. Why?
Well, Reddit’s userbase is overwhelmingly American, and — despite what Donald Trump might have you believe — white people still form something close to a supermajority in the US; according to recent census statistics, nearly 64% of Americans are non-Hispanic white people. Furthermore, Reddit skews towards the following people: (1) college students; (2) people with college degrees; (3) people with a lot of free time; (4) people who can afford an internet connection. Every single one of these categories, in one way or another, selects for white people, either in the US or outside the US. It’s also an almost-entirely English-language community, which again selects for white people, inside or outside the US.
Okay, so what? In some degree, for reasons that I leave the reader to parse out, I’ve been less attuned to this matter than to the matter of gender.*** But, much as the assumed user of Reddit is male, so is he white.††† During my brief tenure working on the podcast Upvoted by Reddit, I worked on an episode of the show dedicated to an interview with /u/mach-2, an African-born, British-educated Redditor who had some cogent views on the topic. One of the things he talked about in that interview — conducted by Reddit co-founder and board director Alexis Ohanian — was Reddit’s “fuck black people mode”.
*** I mean, I get it, I’m white, and that means that I have to pay closer attention than do non-white people in order to perceive the everyday dynamics of race. But I’m also a dude: I’m genuinely asking, why is it easier for me to see the gender stuff on Reddit (or in life) than it is for me to see the race stuff? Is this common? Is it more a matter of having attuned myself to it younger? Is it because I know lots of women but only a few non-white people? (I do live in Portland, after all.) Is it because race is so goddamned touchy in this country that those of us who have the privilege of ignoring it are more prone to doing so?
††† Or Asian-American. Asian-American men are common enough in tech, I think, that white people tend to assume that they possess a sort of co-majority status, an honorary whiteness. But that is a huge can of worms that I am not willing or qualified to open up at the moment. It’s worth noting that one of Reddit’s former CEO’s, Yishan Wong, is an American of Chinese ancestry.
As /u/mach-2 described it, Reddit’s “fuck black people mode” tends to kick in a day or two after a high-profile incident of racialized violence or protest; it closely mirrors racial attitudes you see throughout American society, and not just on Fox News (though most obviously and unapologetically on Fox News). It’s highly complex, but it boils down to three things: (A) heavily biased portrayals of events, ones which tend to paint black people as violent and / or criminal and ignore the constructive and peaceful things black people might do in response to things like police violence; (B) a tendency to blame black people broadly for allegedly responding badly to incitement (viz, “why are they looting their own businesses?!??!?!?”); and (C) highlighting individual black people who validate these views by apologizing for the behavior of their fellow black people in public.
In common with the coded language of the Men’s Rights Assholes (ahem, activists), this has the insidiousness of avoiding obvious epithets and overtly nasty rhetoric of the openly racist people in places like /r/coontown, while simultaneously propagating an image of black people as somehow uniquely irresponsible, stupid, or criminal. Especially to Redditors who don’t have a lot of exposure to black folks outside what they see on the internet, this could be both influental and hugely destructive.
Of course, this is just one aspect of race on Reddit — the one I’m most familiar with. Because, like a lot of white Americans, I’m used to thinking of race as a kind of binary, in which there are black folks, white folks, and everybody else kinda doesn’t count. (I’m working on that, by the way.) But there’s a generalized anxiety about race on Reddit that mirrors the generalized anxiety among white people in the country as a whole.˚˚ Take, for example, this: on the subreddit /r/mapporn, where I hang out a lot, every time there’s a thread about a map concerning anything to do with American Spanish-speakers, or the ancestry of Americans, or anything that might hint at immigration, you’ll find comments carelessly throwing around the word illegal as a noun, implying that America is terribly threatened by immigration, and worse. Usually these are massively downvoted, but they’re there, every single damn time.
˚˚ And I’m sure you’re getting defensive about this, dear white reader, as I tend to when I read similar sentiments. Try thinking about it this way: every time you think, “Hey, man, not all white people are anxious about increasing diversity in America!”, remember that nearly every person of color has thought this a hundred times about a sweeping generalization that has been made about them and people with similar skin tones.
*
Ellen Pao! We finally got there. What does Ellen Pao have to do with any of this stuff, and what does any of this stuff have to do with Donald Trump?
Well, as you might of guessed from her name, Ellen Pao is neither a guy nor white. She is completely American — born in San Francisco in 1970 — but her parents immigrated from China, and, like a lot of first-generation kids, she speaks two languages. She also holds a degree from Princeton, and two advanced degrees from Harvard. In almost every respect, she’s someone who has done a hell of a lot that many people would never dream of even trying to do. And a huge, vocal part of the Reddit userbase hates her damned guts.
Why?
Some of it really does have to do with those decisions we talked about in my last post, about banning controversial subreddits and firing Victoria Taylor and so forth. But Pao wasn’t the only one who was in on those decisions. Some reports indicate that Alexis Ohanian, her boss and a Reddit founder, was the real force behind at least some of them. Pao was just the one who was burnt in internet effigy for her crimes.
Look, I’m not here to argue that these decisions were executed well. It’s clear that Reddit management was not only no good at communicating with its customers, but had not really thought that hard about trying. But Pao ended up on Front Street with all of them — in part because she was the CEO, and in part, I think, because she touched a lot of the Reddit userbase’s gender and race buttons.
See, before Pao became the interim CEO of Reddit (and interim was always part of her title), she was most notable for a lawsuit she brought against her previous employer, Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm where she worked for seven years, from 2005-2012. This lawsuit was almost reverse-engineered to press buttons on that vocal, sexist subset of Reddit users who give the place a bad name: it was a gender discrimination suit; it alleged that the discrimination was due in part to a sexual affair she’d had with a married coworker; and — and — she lost it. She lost it in spring 2015, just before The Reddit Thing started happening. And she lost it in the middle of a shitstorm about sexism in tech and gaming that struck right at the heart of a lot of Reddit’s userbase.
What this all boiled down to was that when the Reddit admins started banning subs that traded largely in racist and/or sexist material, Pao was ready-made as a target. Her picture was all over /r/punchablefaces (where she had been featured even before The Reddit Thing, for losing her lawsuit, and where the most popular post of all time calls Nancy Grace a “cunt”). Pictures, coded with Men’s Rights language, depicted her as “Chairman Pao”. Ellen Pao was at the top of a lot of people’s shitlist on Reddit, and whether or not any of them would cop to the reasons, a lot of them were expressing their distain in distinctly sexist and racist ways. This exploded all over again when Victoria Taylor was fired and the users went into revolt. Pao was threatened with death. Board members, even in announcing her resignation, felt obliged to defend her. While the vast majority of people who used Reddit didn’t participate in this kind of thing, a lot of very loud users did.
What does this have to do with Donald Trump? In some degree it’s about the response of white people to finding themselves in a situation in which they feel attacked. The response is almost a form of counter-insurgency. To be clear, not all — maybe not most — white people respond this way. But in a world dominated by a white, male point of view, being presented with challenges to that can be frightening for people. I’ll be honest and say that sometimes my initial response to challenges to a status quo that benefits me is rejection. It can be really hard to parse out the different levels of one’s response — how much is this about genuinely thinking that people are damaging the discourse by hitting a mute button with PC bullshit, and how much is this about not liking to be held accountable for actions and systems that mostly serve to make you feel good? It’s really hard to say.
But Donald Trump, at least these days, mostly traffics in appealing to people who are unapologetic about their fear and hatred of the other — which is the role that Latino immigrants fill for Trump and the Republican voters telling pollsters they’ll vote for him, and Ellen Pao serves for the overwhelmingly white and male users of Reddit who want to string her up. And that — that is what Ellen Pao has to do with Donald Trump.
(And now I'm out of energy for the night. I've been writing this for nearly two hours.)