by Meghan Daum
William Shatner tweeted a shot of himself, from a Star Trek episode, shirtless and wearing leggings emblazoned with the Starfleet arrow symbol. The comedian Billy Eichner joked about how he’d flown with his penis exposed and had no problems, adding the hashtag #Misogyny for good measure. Even when the whole concept behind buddy passes and dress codes finally began to seep in, the Twittersphere would not part with its outrage. Comedian Sarah Silverman went through the motions of trying to reason with the company in text speak—“I understand. I suggest u consider updating ur rules 4 friends & fam as they seem to apply mostly 2 females & are outdated”—and actor Seth Rogen took the opportunity to just flat-out virtue signal: “We here @united are just trying to police the attire of the daughters of our employees! That’s all! Cool, right?”
The tweets became their own news stories, with outlets from People magazine to the Washington Post whipping up half-baked yet hyperventilating posts about United’s misogyny. Watts herself managed to post an opinion article on Time.com the very next day, entitled “I’m the Woman Who Called Out United and I’m Sick of Sexism.”
Women are tired of being policed for our clothing. Dress codes are laced with words and phrases that easily conform to—and are manipulated by—a misogynist society. United’s pass rider dress policy, whether intentional or not, is sexist, and it sexualizes young girls by calling their leggings inappropriate.
As a woman and a mom of five kids, I was uncomfortable and angered by what unfolded at the Denver airport.
#Leggingsgate was hardly the signature internet scolding event of the season. It probably wasn’t even the biggest one of the week. (Nearly two years later, the fundamental mechanics of the whole donnybrook would play themselves out on a much bigger and more serious scale in the form of a viral video that led to the hounding of MAGA hat–wearing high school students who had been deemed racists for no rational or coherent reason.) But for some reason, the story obsessed me. It wasn’t just that I’ve always been peevish about overly casual dress on airplanes and generally think airline personnel are among the most unfairly maligned workers in the labor force. It wasn’t just that I wished United’s buddy-pass dress code, which also prohibited “attire that reveals any type of undergarments” and “attire that is designated as sleepwear, underwear or swim attire,” applied to all commercial passengers on all airlines at all times. (I’ve long been convinced that approximately a third of all passengers flying in and out of LAX are wearing sweatpants with the word “Juicy” written across the butt.) It was that the sanctimony sickened me. The chorus of scolding had built to such a crescendo that pretty soon it wasn’t even a chorus anymore—just part of the white noise of online life itself. Pretty soon, I felt there wouldn’t be any point in saying anything. Pretty soon, I felt, there would be just two lanes on the conversation highway: the one in which everyone agreed to agree, no matter the truth, and the one in which you’re inaudible.
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Half-truths, repeated, authenticate themselves. After twenty-five years as a working writer, I can’t believe what’s happened to words themselves. It’s as if they’ve been starved of oxygen. It’s as if they’ve been denied one another’s company, forced into a solitary confinement in which their value is based solely on their most basic definitions. Robbed of context, flattened into blunt objects, they thrash about, unmoored, in the seas of stupidity, only to crash so hard on the rocks that they break apart into further meaninglessness.
Sexism. Misogyny. White supremacy. What do these words even mean now? What is justice? What is rage? What is privilege? Why have we decided that prejudice against some groups is phobic—transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia—and prejudice against other groups is just prejudice? What is “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit” even supposed to mean? It originated as the title of a 2011 manifesto-like essay by feminist writer Flavia Dzodan, but even Dzodan has bucked at its watering down. In 2016 she wrote a Medium essay entitled “My feminism will be capitalist, appropriative, bullshit merchandise.” She may be onto something.
The theory of intersectionality was coined and first discussed in 1989 by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who was then at UCLA and has been at Columbia University Law School since 1995. Originally used in the context of a 1976 anti-discrimination case involving black female workers suing General Motors, it refers to a framework for looking at how privilege and oppression play out in cultural cross sections. On its face, intersectionality always seemed to me an entirely reasonable and useful schema for thinking about the world. It’s important to understand that, for instance, a white woman can experience sexist discrimination because she’s a woman and, all the while, a black woman can be discriminated against on sexist and racist fronts. Similarly, even though men may, generally speaking, be considered the privileged sex, black men have a double disadvantage because in some situations their blackness may compound stereotypes related to their masculinity (in that sense, black women may in some situations have an advantage over black men). Intersectional analysis also takes into account factors like disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, and various other forms of social stratification.
In theory (and intersectionality is just that, a theory) this all sounds great. The problem is that intersectionality has been subject to gross misapplication. From there, it’s been oversimplified and sensationalized. In the worst cases, it’s used as an excuse for the kind of circular firing squad you see when one sort of marginalized person tries to pull rank against another. No longer just a framework, it’s now a doctrine in which group identities are assigned value based on the amount of discrimination its members are likely to experience. This interpretation has given way to what the anti-PC crowd likes to call the Oppression Olympics; the more disadvantaged you are because of prejudices aimed at your particular group, the more deserving you are of reparations. In that sense (and in ways that range from the patently obvious to the largely incomprehensible), intersectionality gets tangled up in things like Marxism and postmodernism.
Intersectionality has been all the rage on college campuses for the last decade at least. But sometime around the midway point of Barack Obama’s second term, maybe late 2014, I noticed it was beginning to wander off the campus and into the mainstream media sphere. Here, the framework for actual thinking mutated into a framework for the shorthand thinking of virtue signaling. The seductions of this shorthand were obvious; there was no need to sort out facts or wrestle with contradictions when just using certain buzzwords—patriarchy, white supremacy, gaslighting—would grant automatic entry into a group of ostensibly like-minded peers. Inside this group, the narrative was already established and solidarity was assumed: Ironic feminist memes, good; mansplaining, bad! Black Lives Matter, good; unchecked white privilege, bad! And since this group contained an enormous generational demographic, the millennials, the trend spotters in the media smartly figured out that the way to reach them was by speaking their language, the language of virtue signaling. The way to reach them was to take intersectionality, which had already been turned into a trend, and make it into the ultimate brand.
From there, the brand could be wielded as a weapon against ideological opponents. If, for instance, you suggested that (or even wondered aloud if) the gender wage gap might not be entirely due to systemic sexism but also to women’s interests, choices, and the inconvenient but unavoidable realities of pregnancy and rearing young children, you were likely to be labeled an internalized misogynist. This same dynamic played out in other spheres of public debate, too: gun control, immigration, due process in campus sexual assault cases. If you more or less toed the requisite liberal line but thought there were some gray areas that warranted consideration, you were on the wrong side of history. If you called for nuance, you were part of the problem.
This dynamic started feeling really acute around 2015, maybe even a little bit before. And it wasn’t just in the media sphere. I also began to sense some fraying around the edges of my soci
al circles. Both online and in real life, people who’d once shared a common set of assumptions about the realities of the world and the nature of human behavior now seemed divided. Questions that had once been treated as complicated inquiries were increasingly being reduced to moral absolutes, at least as far as liberal types were concerned.
By the summer of 2018, amid that roiling debate between what you might call the civility camp versus the outrage camp of the Trump resistance, “nuance” had become a kind of fighting word. For civility types, who feared that displays of indiscriminate and unfettered rage against the Trump regime were as strategically misguided as they were viscerally satisfying, nuance was what was sorely lacking. In the outrage camp, the call for nuance was sometimes seen as a form of tone policing, a dog whistle for centrist and right-leaning scolds whose privilege blinded them to the severity of the crisis before them. Both sides had a point (naturally).
As the summer sputtered along, I was struck by how much this state of cultural cognitive dissonance resembled the developing situation inside my brain over the last few years: a situation best described as a maddening toggle between what I felt versus what I thought I was supposed to feel.
What I thought I was supposed to feel probably has its roots in one of my earliest political memories: seeing the devastation on my parents’ faces as Walter Cronkite showed an electoral map blotted with Ronald Reagan’s landslide win in the 1980 presidential election. My parents, pro-union liberals who’d been raised in coal country and later shaped by the values and sensibilities of academia, weren’t especially political. My mother might have sat on the Capitol steps rallying for the ERA, but she wasn’t out canvassing or glued to the news. Nonetheless, my parents had instilled in me the standard set of middle-class Democratic Party values: public safety nets were a force for good, corporate greed was a real threat, civil and reproductive rights were paramount. I carried these values with me to college, where they blended right in with just about everyone else’s. When George H. W. Bush was elected president in 1988, students wrote “moving to Canada” in thick Magic Marker on their bedsheets and hung the sheets from dorm windows.
I’ve never voted for a Republican in my life. The decade-plus I spent as a newspaper opinion columnist tapped into my penchant for devil’s advocacy (Hey, why shouldn’tSarah Palin call herself a feminist?) and I enjoyed getting angry letters from liberals almost as much as I enjoyed getting them from conservatives. But for the most part, I spent the bulk of my adulthood essentially aligned with the kinds of people I’d gone to college with. That we were all on the same team was simply a given. We all read the New York Times, listened to NPR, and voted for Democrats. We would all go to the mat for women’s rights, gay rights, or pretty much any rights other than gun rights. We lived, for the most part, in big cities in blue states. When Barack Obama appeared on the scene, we loved him with the delirium of crushed-out teenagers, perhaps less for his policies than for being the kind of person who also listens to NPR. We loved Hillary Clinton with the fraught resignation of daughters’ love for their mothers. We loved her even if we didn’t like her. We were liberals after all. We were family.
Maybe it was the impending loss of Obama that caused us to begin this unconscious process of detachment—from one another as well as from him. Maybe we knew we’d never be in love like this again, so bit by bit, we started looking for problems, picking fights, finding the dissatisfaction that had apparently been hiding deep inside our contentment. It wasn’t hard, since injustices large and small were in the foreground of our daily lives like never before. Cell phone cameras, now ubiquitous, left no public altercation undocumented. Screen shots left no ill-advised text or tweet permanently unarchived. “Social justice warriors” emerged on the scene with a self-proclaimed utopian vision that sometimes sounded a lot like authoritarianism. Social media, the narcotic we were already all addicted to, now did double duty as an outrage amplifier and disseminator of half-truths spoken by well-meaning but unreliable narrators.
Some of my best friends were such narrators. On Facebook and Twitter, their posts rang out with equal measure of passion and paranoia. For all their sophistication and critical thinking skills—these were people with advanced degrees and New Yorker subscriptions—more than a few of them were coming across as surprisingly closed-minded. A link to an inflammatory article about college sexual assault would set off a cascade of Facebook comments about being afraid to send daughters to leafy liberal arts colleges that were surely teeming with violent predators. A comment expressing even mild sympathy for the obvious psychological troubles of someone like Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who was publicly shamed for pretending to be black, would be smacked down as an example of unchecked white privilege or even unabashed white supremacy. And these weren’t just meme-crazed youngsters flouting their newly minted knowledge of intersectional theory. Many were in their forties and fifties, posting photos from their kids’ middle school graduations along with rage-filled jeremiads about toxic masculinity. And here they were, adopting the vocabulary of Tumblr, typing things like I.Just.Cant.With.This. One afternoon, following a perfectly pleasant lunch near the beach in Los Angeles, I practically got into a shouting match with a close friend about whether, as she put it, “the world sucked for women.” Her conviction was that it obviously did. My feeling was that she and I must at some point have stopped living in the same world. In the ensuing months I had different versions of this same conversation with several other friends. I began to feel very lonely.
Herein is where, slowly and strangely, I started to make some new friends. Though they often weren’t discernibly on one particular side or another, I reliably felt that they were on my side. I began to find them in early 2015 on YouTube. This was before Trump even entered the political picture. I found the first ones specifically through Bloggingheads.tv, a low-tech video blogging site where scholars and journalists of all ideological stripes carried on webcam conversations about the issues of the day. I was a particular fan of the monthly dialogue between the economist and professor Glenn Loury and the linguist and literature professor John McWhorter. Calling themselves “the black guys on Bloggingheads.tv,” they talked about racial politics with more candor and (ahem) nuance than I’d probably ever heard in my life. They even dared to do what few in the left-leaning chatterati were willing to do: hold the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates up to scrutiny. Often it wasn’t so much the author himself that they griped about but the rote, self-congratulatory reverence displayed by Coates’s white fans. This reverence was itself racist, McWhorter pointed out. “The elevation of that kind of dorm-lounge performance art as serious thought is a kind of soft bigotry which is as nauseating as it is unintended,” he said.
This delighted me. For months I’d been trying, much less eloquently, to make this same point to anyone who’d listen, which was nobody. I had read Coates and learned a lot from him. But with this reading often came the nagging sense that I wasn’t supposed to engage with the ideas as much as absorb them unquestioningly. Coates wasn’t just an author but the unofficial paterfamilias of the wokescenti. (Importantly, it wasn’t Coates himself making this appeal but the cultural gatekeepers surrounding him. He won a National Book Award and a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” among countless other prizes. Toni Morrison called him the intellectual successor to James Baldwin.) As such, I sometimes wondered if my white friends and colleagues who venerated Coates actually liked his work or just liked the idea of liking it.
From the black guys on Bloggingheads.tv, YouTube’s algorithms bounced me along a path of similarly unapologetic thought criminals: Christina Hoff Sommers, a.k.a. “the Factual Feminist”; the comedian turned YouTube interviewer Dave Rubin; the anti-extremist Islamic radical activist Maajid Nawaz; and a cantankerous and then little-known Canadian psychology professor named Jordan Peterson, who railed against authoritarianism on both the left and the right but reserved special disdain for postmodernism, which he believed was eroding rational thought on campuses and elsewhere.
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Some of them, like Sommers and Peterson, who I watched intermittently but in no way religiously, made their own videos. They turned these videos into their main platform and chief export, sometimes monetizing them via subscription platforms like Patreon. Others I tracked down in crude footage from university lectures or panel discussions with names like “Is Identity Politics Eating Itself?” Many also reliably showed up on Real Time with Bill Maher and, curiously, on the podcast of Joe Rogan, a comedian and mixed-martial-arts commentator whose guest roster of athletes, entertainers, and conspiracy theorists occasionally expanded to include people like astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Three years later, a handful of this cadre would be introduced to the greater public under the dubious banner of the “intellectual dark web.” “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web” went a New York Times headline in May of 2018. (The article, fittingly, was by Bari Weiss, who’d written the opinion column defending Aziz Ansari in the wake of his #MeToo troubles.) The tagline continued, “An alliance of heretics is making an end run around the mainstream conversation. Should we be listening?” (Accompanying photos showed the subjects posing defiantly in settings like a rainstorm and a shadowy forest.) Within days, countless news outlets had picked up the story, and it seemed everyone had something to say about whether the members of this alliance had any credibility as either heretics or intellectuals. There was little, if any, consensus—descriptors ranged from renegades to grifters to white-nationalist trolls—but the fervor around the whole subject suggested a nerve had been touched, possibly even a major artery tapped.
For me, it was as if an obscure rock band I’d been following for years suddenly hit it big. I was excited but also a little worried. For starters, “intellectual dark web” was a terrible name. It reeked of sci-fi geek histrionics and, moreover, was too easily confused with that cybercrook-choked sub-basement of the internet known as the regular “dark web.” Not that it was any better than the name I’d privately assigned them: Free Speech YouTube. What will I do tonight? Make some popcorn and hang out with Free Speech YouTube!
