In Defense of Trash Talk

Trash talk on the internet has been a hot issue lately, not only here in Northampton because of Moporn, but nationally, too.

The March 7th edition of the Washington Post ran an article about AutoAdmit, a popular on-line law school discussion board. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/06/AR2007030602705.html.) It slammed AutoAdmit for failing to remove trash talk that anonymous posters left. It focused upon the stories of a few women who are (or were) Yale Law School students that held the trash talk responsible for their failure to obtain any job offers, for becoming uncomfortably self-conscious of their appearance in public and even for jeopardizing their personal safety. Truly, the trash talk went to the depths of depravity, to say the least.

Then this Monday I noticed a March 19th guest editorial in the Wall Street Journal by Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of Prozac Nation, etc., and now a Yale Law School student. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117425870594940896-search.html?KEYWORDS=trash+talk&COLLECTION=wsjie/6month.) She, too, was upset about how these classmates had been wronged by anonymous posters at AutoAdmit. The trash talk had been indeed responsible for preventing at least one of these promising students from securing employment, or so she said.

Ms. Wurtzel complained the women’s woes were all the fault of the first amendment, “because once again, for about the 80th time in my memory and 80,000 time in the life of this country, here is an issue in which the right to free speech – as opposed to the need for everyone to just shut up – is going to overwhelm us all … the firstness of the first amendment trumps everything that competes with it.” Sound familiar?

Because we are “delicate people,” she lamented at length that the first amendment jeopardizes any effective legal means to coerce us to be civil and sensitive, and bemoaned the fact that all she could do was “plead for civility.” I couldn’t disagree more with Ms. Wurtzel’s insinuation that we should relax the protections the first amendment affords us.

This popular attitude is a very dangerous attitude for the law and society to adopt. For when we become more solicitous of the feelings of “delicate people” than the right to share, review and judge for ourselves improvident trash talk, we risk sacrificing any scraps of truth that may get thrown out with it.

What is trash talk today may very well be tomorrow’s chic political correctness. Imagine how openly gay literature and advocacy would have characterized by champions of public morality and appropriateness in our less secular past. The irony extends to trash talk of a factual nature, too. After all, there are times when the truth turns out to be stranger (and more sordid) than the fiction. JFK’s extra martial infidelities – they went far beyond a sole mistress on the side – were verboten in the early 1960s, but now…

Both articles focused only on stories of women wronged by messages left at AutoAdmit, but there’s no reason to believe men had not been wronged, too, even wasps, like me. Trash talk is very egalitarian. Recently, I was wrongly vilified on-line, too, by the most heinous insinuation one can level at a man these days. A (male) sexual predator seems to lie beneath every rock, thanks to the hysteria whipped up by the likes of Nopornorthampton. To be sure, when I read the defamatory posts, I felt as if I’d taken a cannon-ball in the gut, and it stuck there.

In my case the next day I posted a responsible response to the malicious posts, and supporters chimed in with their own responsive posts. The trash talkers beat a hasty retreat and hoisted the white flag. So, the “more speech cure for bad speech” proved to be very effective and immediate relief, and far less of a burden for me and society to bear that any law or legal action would have been.

In the case of these “delicate” law students, are they ready to be lawyers in the combative arena of law if they can’t effectively deal with this sort of trash talk by themselves? Why are they (and Ms. Wurtzel) not publishing the name(s) of the naïve law firm(s), etc. that would base their hiring decision(s) on anonymous trash talk and not take into account any responsive comments the women and their supporters posted?

Because justice is not what this is all about, clearly. Employers of Yale Law School graduates are not that naïve. All this whining (by the activists, not the people actually victimized by the defamatory comments) is about the power to control not only how we behave, but also how we think, by controlling what we can hear. The likes of Ms. Wurtzel form a confederacy of activists insidiously campaigning for the passage of laws to curtail how we may express ourselves and what we may learn, and thus ultimately how we think in more ways than one. All to protect “delicate people’s” feelings – just like Nopornnorthampton would entirely outlaw degrading and objectifying porn, and mold our thoughts, if it could.

Is this fear mongering on my part? I don’t think so. If China can control the internet, then it can be done anywhere. Don’t be deceived. While Ms. Wurtzel said, “I could never advocate censorship,” she later put her foot down and said “[The internet is] unpoliced, which demands that we be better people, gentler and more humane.” “Demands” implies coercion here, which means institutional codes of conduct and governmental regulation where the targeted conduct is expresssion. So, she’s merely paying lip service to the first amendment, just as Nopornnorthampton does, in my opinion. Though it’s possible she’s not really thought it through enough to understand this, like so many...

To refrain from and be wary of trash talk on the internet may be an advisable choice for an individual to make; but, it should be and remain your own choice, not Ms. Wurtzel’s or Nopornnorthampton’s.

Go Moporn, go!

Yours/Always Controversial

PS – About the women’s inability to secure employment: are the best law firms and other organizations who Yale Law School graduates seek to be employed by, and their sophisticated clients, donors, etc., put off by controversial behavior engaged in by the students’ themselves? At least one of the women, “Jill,” admits “ … I run a feminist blog where I curse and say all sorts of inflammatory things …” - her own trash talk. (See http://feministing.com/archives/006649.html#more.) She complains she just can’t win because she is both beautiful and smart; men (she presumes) trash talk her and otherwise scandalize her personality on the web (probably, I suspect, in retaliation for her inflammatory rants); and, her preferred employers, feminist organizations, can’t see that trash talk for what it is – or so she believes. Well, Jill, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, I’m afraid.