MR Round Table: The Gravity of Our Words

Leandra Medine: Can you recover from a comment you make publicly anymore? In the last couple of months we’ve seen a ton of backlash toward Giuliana Rancic and subsequently what that has meant for Fashion Police (it’s going on hiatus and losing a cast member). In March, The New Yorker published a story by Lena Dunham titled, “Dog or Jewish Boyfriend? A Quiz.” This one fell under heat for the obvious anti-semitic implications that could be inferred from that comment.

There are several more examples of this happening, two of which include Justine Sacco’s tweet, which the New York Times recently revisited, and the college baseball player’s tweet about Mo’ne Davis. I think that an interesting conversation to have right now might consider whether or not it’s fair that we can no longer take back what we say. Or maybe…are we now finally living through the cautionary tale (“Watch what you say”) we’ve all be taught? Or is there some merit in forgiving, forgetting and allowing people to live?

Charlotte Fassler: I think people assume that “watching what you say” mostly applies to those with some sort of authority. But Justine Sacco only had 127 Twitter followers, and it took a single tweet to have her be the number one trending topic on Twitter. Putting something into the “webisphere” can have a bigger potential impact than you think. If your Twitter or Instagram is public, your private jokes with friends can suddenly be taken to a new level.

Amelia Diamond: For some reason, I can’t help but eventually feel worse for the person who said the stupid thing. I haven’t quite gotten there yet with Mo’ne Davis, because who the hell calls a 13-year-old girl a slut. That said, Mo’ne Davis responded, saying something to the effect of: everyone makes mistakes and everyone deserves a second chance. The guy who wrote that tweet was kicked off his college’s baseball team, and she asked his college to let him back on the team.

We all say stupid things. If I had a book printed of every stupid thing I’ve ever said, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. There are people you assume are bad person and so what they say, they mean and should be thrown into a pit of lava. Generally though, you have to assume that people are good but have bad moments. If your bad moment is verbalized online, you can’t take it away and that sucks.

LM: I wonder if we should be forced to watch what we say. In this era of overt political-correctness, maybe there is some value in possibly just speaking on instinct. Of course people should be held accountable for their words, but should they be forever penalized? Are they forever penalized?

AD: I don’t think they should be forever penalized. It goes back to what Stella Bugbee said to us when we were talking about moderating the comment section. That’s where freedom of speech gets blurry because technically, freedom of speech means that we should be able to say whatever we want and not be legally penalized for it. But then you have to ask, where does human decency come in? Where does feeling threatened come in?

Take Paula Deen for example, someone who went on record using the N word. I don’t think anyone’s ever going to forget that. Should they?

Kate Barnett: So, aside from the criticism just not going away, is it also desensitizing us from the terrible things that people say? Everything is just so discounted to such a degree.

AD: What do you mean by discounted?

KB: When you look at the vitriol that’s up all of the time on your Twitter feed, for example, you have access to so much more of people’s — what otherwise would be intimate — thoughts. I’m asking if we as a culture are somewhat desensitized. Yeah, there’s some article and it’s trending on Twitter and people are horrified, but for how long?

CF: That’s what I thought was interesting in that New York Times article — they went to the author of the article that essentially ruined Justine Sacco’s life, and he said that he still stood by his story because he felt it was juicy. Then later, when he made a stupid comment and was publicly shamed, he apologized to her.

Esther Levy: On social media, you put yourself out there to be judged by people. Who are the people condemning Justine Sacco? What gives these people the right to be the judge, jury and executioner? I don’t necessarily know if I think that’s fair, but then again, we’re electively putting ourselves in that position.

LM: Well what’s your personal policy? Do you forgive people for nasty things they say to you and how long does that process take?

EL: I think it depends, I don’t think there is one answer.

AD: There are certain people who you feel meant actual harm, who said something with evil eyes and all that. If a friend said something really crappy about me, I’d probably be pissed (it’s happened before) but if they apologized, I’d assume, Okay, you were drunk. You were in a bad place. There are benefits of the doubt depending on who you’re talking to and I feel that way about the public as well.

EL: I think that’s the problem though. At least within the judicial system, there is a system. When you commit a crime, there’s a specific amount of jail time you get — obviously I’m oversimplifying this — but there are finite sanctions in place. With something like a misconstrued or malicious tweet, there’s no way to measure whether the punishment fits the crime. There is no set system in place.

KB: Do you think there’s value to people’s response to that, though? As a social corrective?

In the case of Justine Sacco, she thinks that she is funny. How much is that her wanting to entertain and wanting to get the feedback from social media, and how much of it is her having a very caustic view of the world and lack of awareness?

AD: Lack of awareness is a huge one. I think that that’s what happened with Giuliana Rancic. I’ve heard so many versions of that story, but in one account I read that what she said was a line fed to her over the microphone, and that prior to this comment she was already getting criticized for picking up the snark void that was left behind. But she’s not funny, and that wasn’t her role. If Joan Rivers said that comment I don’t know that anyone would have gotten mad, because it was Joan Rivers. The Fat Jewish gets away with a lot of stuff that most of us could not.

LM: He gets away with it is because he doesn’t care and might possibly sense a vulnerability from the audience because they know that their shouts are not going to penetrate his moral compass.

CF: Think of a media entity like Vice, and some of the provocative headlines and articles that they’ve put out. Sometimes they make the rounds and people get annoyed at them but at the end of the day, this is the voice that they project.

AD: There’s definitely a public threshold for digestibly, uncomfortably offensive versus violently offensive.

CF: With Lena Dunham’s article in the New Yorker — a recognizable publication, it’s an article, which took time. It wasn’t just a tweet, which is a much more flippant way of communicating your thoughts. A tweet has a character limit, it’s one sort of idea dump. I think that often times people don’t really understand how Twitter works or what they’re putting out there.

AD: For me personally, Lena Dunham has had so much controversy, I think that this is a case where in a week, it’ll be forgotten. I think that it comes down to intention. When you know that something had a funny intention that didn’t land, it’s sort of easier to forgive, maybe?

KB: I see that in personal relationships. There are friends of mine who can say something totally off color and I’ll be like, “What are you thinking? That’s not funny.” It’s different though when you’re putting it out there. It’s different when you have any sort of influence. You don’t get the benefit of having said something terrible in a conversation with somebody that you know and who understands what your intention is. You only get the characters.

LM: Maybe this boils down to a conversation on the gravity of words.

AD: I think they’re always stronger than we want or intend for them to be.

LM: Why is that when we make a silly comment, like calling women “moms on a cruise” and the audience gets offended, we rise to our own defense, shouting, “Come on, guys! We’re kidding here!” Whereas when Lena Dunham compares her Jewish boyfriend to a dog we’re — or I — am thinking, “Why is she always putting her foot in her mouth?”

We can be so hard on others, but when it’s us, because we feel like we know our intentions and understand that we’re really not trying to offend anyone, we think, “What’s the big deal?”

Is there some sort of system that needs to be put in place, like a regulator? How do you do that?

AD: Well that’s where freedom of speech, or the conversations around censoring it, gets people so up in arms.

LM: Right, and that’s happening more and more because of the prevalence of this concept of hyper-political correctness. Are any of us actually saying what we want to be saying anymore and is that shift problematic? Are we supposed to be living in a world where everyone exchanges pleasantries at the level we do now? I mean this is New York. I feel like you’re not a real New Yorker until someone curses you out; or offends your religious policies; or the color of your skin; or the shoes on your feet.

AD: The problem is that each person has different things that offend them. I am far less offended by religious comments, because I’m not religious. But if anyone were to ever use the word “fag” around me, I’d get very angry.

LM: I guess that’s also the societal weight put on specific words. We don’t have a problem calling each other “fuckers.”

KB: I think there’s something to what you were saying about the difference between when someone else, versus when we say something. I’m not saying in every instance, but isn’t there something beneficial to us having to take pauses and think about the words that we’re using? Because they do have weight, and they do mean something, and there is a way to convey what you mean to say. Whether it’s funny, or intellectual, or off the cuff, without offending somebody. If you didn’t mean to offend somebody, then you’re not actually communicating well.

LM: That’s a really interesting and smart point. We talk about this with our stories all the time. If Amelia is confused by a sentence that I put together, that means that I was not successful in building a clear sentence. It does not mean that she’s an idiot — and this subtle difference in who is to blame is an important one.

AD: I totally agree. But sometimes people are wrongly offended. There are instances where the general population needs to get a grip.

There are well executed, hilarious comedic jokes or well-written newsworthy articles that offend large populations of people. There are political statements that people are campaigning against. Those can be misinterpreted wrongly, I believe. Not necessarily because they were communicated wrongly.

KB: There’s always the aspect of, somebody can say something that massively affects someone else, and they can both understand each other crystal clear, particularly if you’re talking politics, and neither of them be in the wrong. I completely agree with that. So I guess I’m not saying that if someone is offended and you didn’t mean to offend them, that you’re always communicating poorly. By and large, if you get some sort of backlash to this extent that you didn’t anticipate, and didn’t have any sort of self-awareness that this is what you were going to generate, that’s sort of the point when I feel like you’re not quite communicating well.

It’s also about knowing your audience. One of the reasons that Joan Rivers could get away with snark versus Giuliana Rancic is she spent who-knows-how-many decades in small clubs honing her craft as a comedian. She can be eerily offensive, but she built an actual craft and she knew exactly how everything she said was going to be taken. There’s thought and artistry put into it, and she created the effect she intended.

AD: Maybe it hinges on whether or not you have an audience, or an intended audience. If you know the audience you’re speaking to, even if you’re bound to piss off 3 people in that audience who did’t want to hear the joke —

LM: That doesn’t make it okay though. I feel like something I tell myself frequently re: running this business is that I have to get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. I have to find comfort in discomfort, because it’s never going to be comfortable. As long as it’s moving and growing, there’s going to be no true level of comfort. When you become really comfortable with your audience and feel like you can say whatever you want to say, you lose sense of the fact that your words carry the weight that they do.

AD: Totally. But don’t you think there’s a difference between those who have an audience and therefore understand it and those who don’t have one, who are speaking for their own brains as opposed to a group of people?

LM: The latter is what George Saunders called the braindead megaphone.

EL: They’re also not necessarily asking for an audience.

AD: Which is where feeling sorry on their behalf comes in: “They didn’t ask for this!”

LM: So what’s the conclusion here?

CF: I don’t want to reduce it to “think before you speak” but I think it’s just trying to grasp this weird social climate we live in, with being able to project things that you’re saying to more people than you think you can.

AD: In an ideal world, of course people should think before they speak.

LM: But this isn’t just speaking, with Lena Dunham’s incident — this is a story that was published in the New Yorker. Do you know how many eyeballs had to look at that piece before it went up?

KB: What’s her response? Has she recanted at all?

LM: David Remnick did on her behalf.

KB: There are all of these levels obviously, but Giuliana said, “I’m sorry, I was wrong.” Has Lena done that? Will she do that? Will she mean it?

LM: Right. Did Giuliana mean it? She was sorry that —

EL: Because of how it went down.

LM: She was sorry for the outcome. She’s sorry that people were not charmed by her sense of humor.

KB: She’s sorry that people see her this way.

LM: Which is very different.

AD: But I’d argue that she’s sorry she ever said the stupid joke. I feel bad for her for some reason. I think she said a really stupid thing and got punished for it. I think as someone in the public eye, she should know better, but I’m like, ok, how long is that woman going to have to suffer?

So is it after the apology then? Is that when we stop? Do we pester until we get an apology?

LM: Are apologies even satisfying?

KB: Also, what do you think, is Giuliana entitled to the influence she has? Do you feel badly because she’s lost some of that and the work that’s gone into it?

The other thing that comes up is, if she had said it at a roast, would anyone care?

AD: But that comes back to knowing your audience, doesn’t it? Justin Bieber’s roast is getting knocked all over the Internet because of racist comments about Selena Gomez. I think six jokes got pulled from the airing Monday night because they were so widely controversial and racist and rude.

LM: I think an interesting thing to consider is how we feel when we’re offended by comments, and what we look for in response to them. What do you want when someone offends you? Do you just want an apology? Do you care if they’re sorry? Isn’t sorry supposed to feel like this intimate connection you have with someone? How can you strike that with someone you’ve never met?

AD: I think if someone said something insanely offensive, and then they apologized in a way that made me really believe that they didn’t know that what they said was bad, they didn’t understand the weight or implications of it — for example Giuliana — maybe she’s so vapid, and so detached from reality, that she did not understand that what she said what offensive. And she apologized. It’s harder for me to accept an apology that I comes from a place of true intolerance. Then the apology feels for the sake of your public image and that’s much harder for me to digest or accept.

LM: When people take issue with the stories you write, how do you feel?

AD: I never write anything with the intention of offending people and my whole thing is always, if I’m going to make fun of someone, then make fun of myself more. As a human, I hate nothing more than having enemies. I personally try to write articles that bring people together. I like to write things that bring people together. I love when someone can say, “oh my god I know exactly what you’re talking about.”

So when someone takes offense to something I’ve said, I feel bad. But it doesn’t mean that people don’t get mad. In the past, when I have pissed off people, or edited an article that pissed people off, I try to write in the comments, “hey, really sorry that you took this that way.” If I ever said a comment that was unknowingly racially or sexually offensive and it was a bad joke that shouldn’t have been said, I would have never have meant it in a bad way. I would apologize and I would mean it, and I think that’s why I’m more hopeful of people’s intentions.

CF: I just don’t think you would ever say something that was racially or sexually offensive in a public forum.

LM: Well not knowingly. I accidentally put MLK Day and a bikini wax in the same tweet and that was almost really bad.

AD: I accidentally titled a post Strange Fruits because I literally had no idea what the song was about. There are dumb mistakes that we all make.

LM: I feel like I have to believe that there aren’t that many people in the media, at the level that a Lena Dunham or a Giuliana Rancic or even a John Galliano are involved, where they’re acting out of pure malice. Galliano’s circumstance is obviously different because there was a lot of vitriol in his speech which we saw on video, but that was rooted in a much deeper and darker frustration with himself, than it was anything to do with the Jewish population.

AD: Right. And you as a Jewish person are responding in that way. Versus the Lena Dunham article — which clearly pissed you off — you feel like she should know better.

LM: It’s annoying to see people that you believe are really smart, interesting and compelling, making the same stupid mistakes over and over again. How many times has she had to put her foot in her mouth these last couple of years? How many free passes will she get?

KB: Before what?

LM: Before she’s actually removed from the public conversation. Or does that not happen? Are all of these experiences ones that make us, the audience, feel like we have a bit of power. We’re mice being fed crumbs, who are getting excitable by the power implied by a regular person forcing a celebrity to apologize and then asking for cookies and cakes and enormous pastry platters as a result.

I think my ultimate point of view — and I don’t know if this runs counter to everything we’ve just said — is that people need to chill. The irony of this 4,000 word dissertation on thinking before you tweet is that we need to chill. I don’t know if by chilling, we’re appeasing the cakes that the mice demand and I don’t know what the future of dialogue looks like but I fear that we’ve hit a block where an actual lack of free speech in the collective consciousness is ruling the conversation. That’s bad.

Image Shot by Norbert Schoerner, for Prada Fall 1998. Check out past Round Tables here.