Yardsticks for Measuring Hate

PROPOSED: Misogyny can be measured as the amount of man-shaped suffering that women are expected to tolerate in life, tautologically dismissed as “that’s just how it is.”

However pain is rationalized—whether as the product of emotional immaturity or as an expression of a genderless God's absurd gender preferences—is irrelevant to its measure. Explanations for violence are just man-made lies that do the work of legitimizing inexcusable violence. Rationalizations, thus, are just excuses that get in the way of exacting factual measurement.

Disciplining focus around the measurement of harm is thought useful in discussions of social injustice because we have in the discipline of sociology amassed a wide variety of peer-reviewed methods for measuring human suffering. We can tally up pain marks any which way you want to see them. You could say, as I usually do, that we even fetishize the measurement of pain marks precisely because we’re so good at measuring them and we like showing off in journals exactly how good we are.

Tons of pain tally marks exist to make the case that heterosexuality is substantially more damaging to straight women than it is for straight men. The fact that married women are generally less healthy, experience more depression, and die at younger ages than do unmarried women serves as damning testimony to the hidden and underexamined cost of heterosexuality borne primarily by straight, partnered women in relationships with men.

But—why? Why would I do this? I could, if I wanted to, flit from one dataset to the next, picking out statistical correlations that suggest causality but would anyone really give a shit? How many articles doing exactly this have to be published in all the major journals before Congress starts making laws addressing institutionalized misogyny and violence against women? Last time I checked, there’s been no progress on that front, despite the hundreds of PhDs shitting out reams of fact-checked and peer-reviewed evidence of there objectively being a gender crisis in America.

That’s why I’m of the very, very, very unpopular opinion that the actual facts of the matter don’t actually matter all that much. We thought they did. We invested a lot of energy in the idea that they did. But, honestly, do they?

To those liberals who blithely painted up their protest signs to say FACTS MATTER, I’m sorry, but you’re totally feckless. For those who insist that we “stand up for science,” who are you kidding? Are you actually ready to go to war to defend the scientific method? Are you genuinely prepared to champion critical inquiry? Where’s your sword? Where’s your army?

As a social scientist, I’d love to be able to say that facts still matter but come on. Isn’t that itself a nonfactual statement with no real basis in reality? In other words, an untruth? Sure, facts matter in the context of a formal, structured scientific argument but where on Earth are people still having such arguments? Where is this fabled agora where public speech is not only free but mediated and regulated by the exacting demands of epistemology?

In fact, the internet has created a paradox: the more easily we can access peer-reviewed facts in journals, the less they seem to matter in the big scheme of things. With cloud-computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, we’re entering into an age of data processing that could, in theory, enable social researchers to measure phenomena that just ten or even five years ago would have seemed unfathomable to me as a graduate student. Soon enough, we’ll be able to compute facts about the social world while we sleep, in the background, while we do other things. In other words, pretty soon with AI assistance, scientists will be shitting out millions and billions of facts all day long and we’re likely to drown in a flood of the most sophisticated and detailed knowledge humanity has ever known.

Even now, though, people don’t seem to care that much about facts. Not even people whose jobs expect them to care really seem to care that much. After all, does anyone even read books anymore? Those things are stuffed full of facts and a third of men still won’t read a single one.

I’ve written before that I think numbers are numbing. It’s not that I as a qualitative sociologist can’t make graphs or haven’t read those obnoxiously gorgeous Tufte books on data visualization. It’s because I talk to people and know from talking to them that numbers are numbing. They don’t think of their lives as a formula to be solved for efficient output. They have never given a thought as to what the GDP is or what role that it plays in their lives. I’m guessing that most people in America don’t even know how much they weigh right now.

All of that is to say that I think given how little the public really seems to value positivism, I think the social sciences are thus irrationally biased towards it. That is to say I think academics are more concerned about counting how many things exist than they are about getting people curious about why those things exist and how they exist and for whose benefit they exist. In other words, I think the fetishization of facts as facts gets in the way of making space for bigger and better questions that get us closer and closer to the truth and exploding lies.

Because the way I see it, the biggest competition for truth isn’t ignorance of facts, it’s lies. Some lies are quite pleasant, like the delusion that America is the greatest country on Earth or that music festivals are fun. Other lies are less pleasant like child refugees are coming here to take jobs away from white men. It’s not the ignorance of the truth that gets in the way of discovering truth, it’s the lying that stops the search for it in the first place.

Most of the actual mission of sociology is to counter hegemony. What we’re ultimately most interested in our theorybuilding is the explanation of antisocial phenomena, specifically phenomena which we find to be perpetuating oppression and reproducing unnecessary human suffering. What I believe draws students towards the discipline in the first place is their shared suspicion that what they’ve been told about how society works isn’t right, that there are in fact many ways of “doing” society other than what we’re doing.

In other words, what I find students most interested to learn about sociology is its fogbusting, its singular focus on exploding society’s lies.

What has always interested me as a sociologist is figuring out who has the power to establish the legitimation story in society. I am, as you can imagine, obsessed with the intractability of gender inequality. What kind of pain and suffering is seen as permissible within heterosexuality tells me a lot about the entire gender arrangement. You can count up so many unequal pain tally marks when you open the ethnographic hood of any straight marriage. I could make an entire career for myself counting up pain tally marks if that’s what I really wanted to spend my life doing.

But it’s not.

What I want to do, what I am struggling to do, is get to the root of the matter, what it actually means to be radical social theorist. I want to understand who gets to talk about gendered pain and what gets to matter in how we talk about it. I really want to understand the legitimation story for gender inequity and why it persists.

For the most part, I have concluded that most men really have no idea how misogyny affects them or how being a man in society predicated on millennia of misogyny might benefit them personally. Even the best among them wrongly assume that misogyny is a decision they're choosing not to make and thus not seeing it as the antisocial broth they were boiled in from birth. The parallels between this and unexamined racial privilege are noted.

It’s really hard to establish that the harms that women experience dating and mating men are the consequent of gender conditioning that men have no conscious awareness of having received. In order to even begin having the conversation about how heterosexuality harms women, you’d have to first persuade men that they should care. And again, the parallels between this and unexamined racism are clarion.

So how do we address sexism and racism in a post-truth context? When we give up the ghost that facts just matter and that truths are simply self-evident, that leaves us with what?

These are questions I think are difficult to sit with because the answers, at least to me, are not obvious. It should feel as though the floor is dropping out from under us in ways that would feel reminiscent of the fascist creep sweeping the world prior to World War II, were any of us really alive and aware then to have experienced it. That so many people could abandon rationality, facts, and truth for stupid mean lies so quickly was shocking the first time. It’s nothing but a tragic farce this second time around.

All civilization really ever is is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. It’s the ideological programming we use to run the whole social machine. For a long time, the story we’ve been telling ourselves about ourselves is that our market economy is rational, that our facts matter, and that our truths are self-evident. But the institutions literally founded on these stories today are crumbling.

If they can’t preserve us, what can?