Editor’s note: I was working on tying together some threads on the topic of LGBQT teen suicides when this comment on the post below came in from Fe Bongolan. I’m promoting it to its own post because it broadens the discussion succinctly on the point that the issues surrounding Tyler Clementi’s recent suicide (along with four other teens in September who identify as LGBQT in the US, two as young as 13, according to Democracy Now!) are not just a matter of straight vs gay. – amanda
Eric:
I spent most of the day yesterday commenting on this diary by arodb at Daily Kos on the Rutgers incident.
Read it and the comments, for I think they are quite compelling and synchronous to the Venus-Mars conjunction in Scorpio (and a little Sun-Saturn in Libra as well!), and totally supports what you have written.
Here is a comment I made near the top of the thread:
We’re watching a decline in valuing other people’s sensitivities, and exchanging the value of one’s privacy with that of what can you expose as entertainment with this technology we have at our disposal.
I think arodb has a great point — this is an event worth “feeling” in our consciousness. We may, as a society, have taken a wrong turn away from respecting each other, and instead have turned to bullying — as a way to belong.
On an individual level and a societal one, we need to be very very wary. This signals to me a kind of social sickness. A moral decline.
and here is a response to it by a blogger named phaktor:
It is a moral decline and a very serious one. It has happened to me. First, nobody is much qualified to talk about this unless it has happened to them. Those who are psychoanalyzing Tyler make me laugh, especially when they suggest it was the “outing” that bothered him. It has nothing to do with that. It is the violation of personal privacy during our most vulnerable moments. There is no way most people can understand the experience. Their opinions are empty intellectualizations. The suicidal reaction is intense and almost automatic for anyone with normal sensibilities. This is not the same as performance or someone knowing when they are observed. It is a terror beyond comprehension because the person did not know they were observed and had no opportunity to conceal what an actor or exhibitionist would be able to conceal. It’s not “reality tv”.
If you can make it through the first few days you will have to develop a strength of character which most mere mortals will never comprehend — including those who did it to you.
It will be a shame if this becomes a gay/straight thing with gays claiming the high road and the victim status; because the people who did it to me, and most of those who participated in the festivities afterward, were gay. This is not something straights dreamed up to do to gays. It is something self-centered, callous people do who have either not considered the pain which it inflicts or who don’t care. It is, like arodb reflects, a serious issue about our fundamental respect for the human rights of others as a society.
The commenter Fe quotes describes an incident of gays bullying one of their own, making the lack of support services for LGBQT students on college campuses that much more glaring. According to an interview on NPR this morning with Sue Rankin, associate professor of education at Penn State, only 7% of higher education campuses in the US have visible support services for these students; many who are out in high school go back in the closet in college because they fear an un-supportive roommate.
But as phaktor says, “This is not something straights dreamed up to do to gays. It is something self-centered, callous people do who have either not considered the pain which it inflicts or who don’t care.” With the prevalence of online bullying growing among many age groups (from middle schoolers to college students, who may attack professors as well as peers, to adult coworkers), this points to a lapse in the development of empathy and the need for support and awareness at all levels.
Eric has noted before that our technology has outpaced our understanding, and now we see more evidence that our use of it is outpacing our respect and empathy for each other — in addition to our notions of ‘privacy’ as he investigates in today’s issue. We’ve had bullying for eons; it’s just easier now. The sooner we can get past the illusion of remove and anonymity online, the sooner we can start to see only ‘us’, and understand the pain we can cause others is our own.
So sad. Of course many different kinds of people get bullied, but I have to say I think society colludes in bullying some people more than others. It’s hard being different in a world that pushes for human homogenization, pushes fitting in and sameness, rather than supporting diversity and uniqueness and the corresponding diverse and unique gifts these qualities have to offer. It’s especially hard when these qualities essentially put a target on your back from childhood on, at which the spiritually crippled and deformed feel compelled by their own sense of inferiority/fear to take aim. And technology only enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of this inhumanity.
to get back to the bullying:
related to this idea is the concept of ‘mobbing’, typically in a workplace environment
what happens when someone is different, stands out, or doesn’t fit what everyone else would have them be/do
http://www.mobbingportal.com/
Kenneth Westhues at the University of Waterloo is a leading researcher in this field
to get back to the bullying:
related to this idea is the concept of ‘mobbing’, typically in a workplace environment
what happens when someone is different, stands out, or doesn’t fit what everyone else would have them be/do
http://www.mobbingportal.com/
Kenneth Westhues at the University of Waterloo is a leading researcher in this field, and has his personal site on the topic at: http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/mobbing.htm
..something having to do with god-given social hierarchy.
michele….ya…somewhere about the same place that Darwin and Hitler start to sound like soullmates.
here in canada we sterilized women without their consent. aboriginal women, often. and crazy women, like me.
and it america: “By 1963, most states had taken sterilization laws out of use, though many of them remained in the law books for longer: North Carolina did not rescind their laws until 1974. Roughly 70,000 Americans were sterilized against their will.”
in canada: “However, an overly large proportion of Métis women were sterilized. The Métis people are an aboriginal people, who have a heritage of First Nations mixed with European settlers. It is possible that the government was concerned because they represented miscegenation, that is, the mixing of racial genes.”
this is where I like to think of “society” in a different way that i think of “the universe.” that may also be a delusion?
oh — the syiphilis discussion has jumped posts.
really terrifying to contrast what doctors/scientists do when they have a sense of humanity/ethics/compassion vs when they don’t. here’s a chilling quote from the tuskeegee wiki page:
“In 1972 the Tuskegee Study was brought to public and national attention by a whistleblower, who gave information to the Washington Star and the New York Times. [Dr.John] Heller of PHS still defended the ethics of the study, stating: The men’s status did not warrant ethical debate. They were subjects, not patients; clinical material, not sick people.'[10]”
contrast that with one of the doctors who founded the study with a 6 – 9 month timeline in mind; he resigned when it was clear humanitarian science was taking a wrong turn:
“Dr. Taliaferro Clark was credited with its origin. His initial goal was to follow untreated syphilis in a group of black men for 6 to 9 months, and then follow up with a treatment phase. When he understood the intention of other study members to use deceptive practices, Dr. Clark disagreed with the plan to conduct an extended study.[clarification needed] He retired the year after the study began.”
without the inclusion of a treatment phase, full information to the patients to be able to give informed consent, the whole deal veers into pure sadism, as mentioned by eric in a comment to another post.
and in the guatemalan case, can soldiers and prisoners truly be said to be free to give consent? it seems to me both situations are partly defined by limitations on freedom, an expectation to follow orders, hierarchy and genuine consequences for saying “no.”
do prisoners and soldiers theoretically have a choice? sure. but practically speaking, i get the sense that choice is highly compromised, at best.
Johnny Asia posted to facebook
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20018272-503543.html
The Guatemala syphilis inoculation project was run by a PHS physician, Dr. John C. Cutler (who would later oversee the Tuskegee, Ala., study two decades later).
Cutler seemed to reco…gnize the delicate ethical quandaries their experiments posed, particularly in the wake of the Nuremberg “Doctors’Trials,” and was concerned about secrecy. “As you can imagine,” Cutler reported to his PHS overseer, “we are holding our breaths, and we are explaining to the patients and others concerned with but a few key exceptions, that the treatment is a new one utilizing serum followed by penicillin. This double talk keeps me hopping at time.”
Cutler also wrote that he feared “a few words to the wrong person here, or even at home, might wreck it or parts of it … ”
PHS physician R.C. Arnold, who supervised Cutler, was more troubled, confiding to Cutler, “I am a bit, in fact more than a bit, leery of the experiment with the insane people. They can not give consent, do not know what is going on, and if some goody organization got wind of the work, they would raise a lot of smoke. I think the soldiers would be best or the prisoners for they can give consent.”See More
is not bullying a fundamental element to the success of fascism?
Unwitting. Uncaring. Two sides of the same bully-coin.
The Bully finds glory in the parlay of abuse.
I don’t think a single community up here, out of something like 40 (I include Nunavut because I’ve been there and we were once one big territory), that has not been gut-punched and heart-bit by young people choosing suicide. Then when one does it, suddenly another one, or two, or three follow suite. All the worse for some communities due to their smallness.
Definitely, the issues are different – but really, it’s all one and the same, isn’t it? In the case of what you’ve been following and writing about… It is a community being decimated. Isolation creeps in differently in different parts of the world.
Linking all of that with privacy has occupied much of my brain today. (In light of that mega-piece by Eric and resulting comments etc). In some ways I’m I suppose I’m really very cavalier about privacy. If the government wants to know if Michele has a perverted brain (I use the word from their perspective) then have at ‘er. Yet in some ways – like my mother – I am very private.
I guess I still feel like I own my privacy. And my brushes with attempted thievery manageable. That would make me very delusional, I guess.
Pulling it all together (rather badly), isolation and privacy… Nope, gotta go do more thinking… I think I’m starting to chase my own tail, here.
But certainly I am grateful that these conversations are taking place, my attention being drawn to the world at large. News (and underlying issues) has always reached me slowly (not just because of where I live, but also by choice.) That’s all changed since reading here regularly.
Carrie – Totally spot on.
The idea that humiliation can be funny is as old as time itself. i.e., slipping on a banana peel. But this mass sport of public humiliation and cruelty in the form of entertainment has gone totally out of control. I think technology is only adding to the fire. Please don’t misunderstand me: I love many aspects of the commercial side of technology (i.e. PC, cell phone, texting, etc.) But advances in tech have changed the way we relate to each other and made interpersonal aspects MUCH MORE impersonal. To the point where broadcasting someone’s sexual encounter over the Internet to potentially everyone ON THE PLANET becomes more of a generic ” no harm no foul” prank.
amen, carrie —
i got uncomfortable with the “entertainment” you describe years ago.
and yet i have been plenty guilty in my life of letting loose with “jokes” that are not kind, one-line barbs out my mouth without a thought. it is so incredibly easy not to look deep enough to see where it’s coming from.
“When will we stop needing to hurt others in order to feel good ourselves? Maybe when we allow ourselves to feel good first; from within.”
yes. i think we often don’t realize just how not-good about ourselves were feeling. there can be a sense of vertigo with that; the fear and guilt and fear and shame and sense of utter dislocation can spiral in pretty fast. no wonder the ego is so skilled at closing off and glossing over.
so any way we can find a way to genuinely love ourselves is key, as long as we’re really making contact & not just pumping ourselves up. i just heard on the radio today that while american teens routinely score lower than those in many other countries on all subjects, they report the highest levels of confidence; not quite what we’re after here. where is that “confidence” getting them/us?
there is disconnect on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to start.
guess it’s time to masturbate again, huh? too bad the beatles didn’t record “all you need is self-love”…maybe the message would have been heard more by now…
I so agree that this is not just about gay or straight. It is definitely a deep decay in our society. The ugliest parts of human beings have been cultivated and it started innocently enough with things like “America’s Funniest Home Videos” where people laughed when someone tripped and fell. Or “The Weakest Link” where people got “voted off.” Then it progressed to not only being voted off but being told WHY in cutting and denigrating terms. It is an insideous disease that feeds off the worst fears in us; fear of ostracism, fear of being found wanting, fear of not belonging, fear or being second best or of being unimportant, fear of being unheard and irrelevant. That fear has been morphed into virulent attacks on anyone and anything we can in order to boos ourselves up. This feels like national mob mentality and it is damaging everyone and especially our kids.
I still wonder; when we will collectively wake up and stop revelling in our fellow human beings’ sufferings? When will we stop needing to hurt others in order to feel good ourselves? Maybe when we allow ourselves to feel good first; from within.
Here is another diary, different topic, same theme. Gay college student and class president Chris Armstrong is harassed online by a state Assistant Attorney General Andrew Shirvell:
And Eric, Amanda, arodb and phaktor are right. This is not just a gay vs. straight theme. LGBTs are just the first in line for harassment. Its the very nature of one’s private life being at stake. Contending with this now as a supposedly advanced society should be, in the best of worlds, a non-starter. But this isn’t the best of all worlds, and some lessons seem to always be conveniently forgotten.