Men Demand I Agree With Them

There are men who don't (only) mansplain; rather, or in addition to this, they demand you echo and repeat their ideas, however obvious your disagreement.

I recently had the opportunity to travel to a lovely city, give a talk on a topic dear to my heart, meet many charming people, and catch up with an old friend who I hadn’t seen in a long time. As I told him, he is one of several people who did me the great service of taking me seriously as a budding logician way back when I was an undergraduate—and thus freeing me up to make a foray into the mushier subject matter of social philosophy that now centrally concerns me. 

So my hosts were delightful, and it was an excellent trip overall. But one experience at the very end of the Q&A period after my talk really got me thinking. 

There’s often one. A man—invariably, in my experience, a white man—who behaves... memorably, let’s say. I have been accused by one such of being oblivious to theoretical distinctions I in fact helped develop. I have been compared favorably to such a man’s brilliant, recently deceased, feminist philosopher colleague whom he dismissed in one sentence as doing “mere sociology, not philosophy,” unlike me—the most invidious imaginable compliment, offered a few weeks after her memorial service. I have been literally patted on the head after giving a talk canvassing social norms wherein, I argued, women are held to different standards than our male counterparts. “It’s all in your mind,” he said, as I flinched from his touch. I didn’t ask him if he regularly made physical contact with male speakers unknown to him. But goodness, I wanted to. 

In all of these cases, other colleagues of the man in question—frequently white men themselves, given the demographics of philosophy—have been apologetic, and even aghast in some cases. It is so not all white men: it’s a small statistical minority. But it is, in my experience, almost only white men who feel entitled to behave in these ways that do, and ought, to raise our collective eyebrow. And this is worth bearing in mind when it comes to thinking through social dynamics that would otherwise be quite puzzling. 

In this instance, the man in question opened by joking I’d taught him a valuable lesson in terminology, that there was such a thing as a “small fat” person. (I identify as such to make it clear that, despite my investment in the topic of fatness, I am painfully aware that I now benefit from many forms of thin privilege, such as fitting comfortably in airplane seats—which I didn’t used to.) I had been arguing throughout the talk that fat people are entitled to take up space in the world. We do not, to adapt the words of the poet Rachel Wiley, owe it to anyone to shrink ourselves. But my right to occupy the stage that day seemed a point of contention for this questioner. 

“Surely you must admit,” he said, “that some diets work.” He cited intermittent fasting, which, as I pointed out, has been recently debunked as an especially effective weight loss method. (It was also, for me, the gateway to horribly disordered eating habits.) “But you must agree,” he went on, “that there are things we can all do to control our weight!” “And I know you wouldn’t deny that fatness is unhealthy, and causes type 2 diabetes,” he insisted. 

So far, so good, honestly. It’s no bad thing to have someone bluntly ask questions that may be on many other people’s minds too following an argument like the one I had been making. And, as I reiterated, by saying “diets don’t work,” I—like every other person working in this space whose work I am aware of—mean something quite specific. I mean that, while some people can take off some weight (often around 5-10% of their initial weight) through diet and exercise in the short term, for many people, the weight comes back inexorably. Comprehensive meta-analyses show that between one and two thirds of people actually end up heavier than they started over a four to five year period. Some experts suggest even less impressive figures.

And, in this talk, I initially cite an “ought implies can” principle (or rather, its contrapositive—not being able to do something negates the idea that you ought to do it). As I immediately go on to clarify, I’m relying on a looser adaptation of this principle which I suggest is also plausible: ought implies realistically can, roughly. So, if you can’t realistically lose weight in ways that are humane and sustainable, then this is not the kind of thing we can demand of you, on behalf of the moral community, within the bounds of ethics. (And I hold, on bases I elaborate on at length both in the talk and the chapter of my upcoming book it’s based on, that the antecedent of this conditional is satisfied: there are no known safe, reliable, and reasonable methods that induce long term weight loss.)

I also challenge the idea that weight loss will necessarily lead to better health outcomes, or fat people being less of the “burden on society” that we’re often impugned as being. For one thing, as I told the man, there’s active scientific debate over the common assumption that weight gain causes type 2 diabetes. Rather, the causation may run in the other direction, with early diabetic processes linked to hyperinsulinemia tending to cause weight gain. (A kind physician in the audience wrote me afterward to back up what I’d said as balanced and accurate.) For another thing, even if fatness is associated with some health problems, and even if that association does support a causal story (another currently controversial matter), weight loss doesn’t simply turn fat people into thin ones. It tends to lead to weight cycling—repeatedly losing weight only to gain it back. And weight cycling is independently associated with an increased risk of many health problems, including type 2 diabetes. 

“But,” said the man, seeming increasingly agitated, after I said all this, “if you were the surgeon general, you’d have to tell people to eat better and exercise.” As I went on to explain, from my own position as a moral and social philosopher, I care a lot about people having access to health-promoting goods such as a range of fresh and shelf-stable foods, the time and resources to exercise in ways that suit their body, a less stressful existence (which is incompatible with the dire poverty endemic in this country), not to mention adequate health care—including mental health care. We should all care about all of these things. But not because their lack arguably makes some people fatter (though the data on this are, again, complicated). We should care about these things directly, and passionately, as a matter of social justice. 

The talk ended. People applauded politely. We moved into the reception. And that’s when things went southwards. 

The man came up to me, unmasked, despite my request that this be a masked event (which my hosts had graciously agreed to) due to my husband’s health vulnerabilities. He was visibly agitated. He kept telling me what I must say, what I surely think, and what I could not help but admit simply as a reasonable person. I was kind of done at that point. Then he reached out and touched my arm angrily. His lovely colleague, bless her, told him not to do that and to stop interrupting me. “She doesn’t mind!” he yelled at her (he was really yelling at this point) “And she’s interrupting ME.” I paused and found myself saying to him, as calmly as I could, for fear of further escalation: if we’re to continue this conversation, could you please put a mask on, given my family situation? He approached me again unmasked before the evening was over—but not before I’d learned he was a philosopher who taught periodically in the host university’s department. Because of course he was.

I found the dynamics of this interesting not because of the content but rather the form of his “questions.” They obviously weren’t questions, but rather assertions. This is not unusual, and is fine with me, really. (The Q&A period might be better termed “discussion,” given the frequent legitimacy of making an observation or positing a view and asking the speaker to respond to it.) But it was the way he wanted me to echo what he said, wanted to force me to say something I had—implicitly or explicitly—already denied that interests me primarily. You must think this; you have to admit this; it’s only reasonable! (This while behaving in a manner that, I think it’s fair to say, is not anybody’s paradigm of reasonably playing your part in a nuanced public conversation.)

Boundary, boundary, boundary; cross, cross, cross. And while I know people from most walks of life can sometimes behave in these ways, there’s something about philosophy which, I fear, encourages this behavior. It’s not an attempt to find common ground (whatever one thinks of that common liberal move, which my graduate student Urna Chakrabarty has been critiquing brilliantly): rather, it annexes your territory. 

This behavior is closely related to something I spoke about recently at an excellent benefit conference organized by the mensch philosopher, Aaron Wendland, to support Ukrainian philosophers. (Please consider watching the replay and donating.) Philosophy, at its worst, can be a beacon and haven for gaslighters. I draw here on a brilliant insight of the philosopher Kate Abramson’s: the gaslighter is somebody to whom disagreement is anathema, at least vis-a-vis certain subject matters, and with respect to certain people. He is then incapable of abiding the possibility of being challenged. And, what’s more, he wants to dominate his target and perpetually win the argument, or else make her afraid to disagree with him. He doesn’t just avoid arguments by withdrawing, say, or—as Abramson points out—by doing something drastic like disabling or killing his victims. (This even though the paradigm examples of gaslighters also happen to be murderers.) He wants to keep her around as an interlocutor. And he wants to colonize her mentally, or at least to control her utterances. He wants to win, win, win; so he needs to have at least the specter of an argument with her in the offing. He wants to preserve a subject to subjugate, to control, to dominate. 

I fear philosophy attracts some people who cannot cope with legitimate differences in perspectives, valid divergences in viewpoints. And so there is a certain stripe of person who will argue not by saying what he thinks, and trying to make the case for it, but by yelling at an interlocutor that they can’t possibly think what they think without falling off the rational cliff face. Whether or not this counts as gaslighting will, on my overall view, depend on several other important factors, such as whether the process is systemic and functions to make the target feel defective for mental states to which she is, in reality, entitled. But, whatever the case, there’s that same nasty atmosphere in wanting to put words in someone’s mouth, to hear them say—or admit—such-and-such. Stuff her mouth full of your words and shove them down her throat to make her echo you: this is a form of silencing. 

For, being silenced of course doesn’t just mean literally not speaking when you want to. It can, as the philosopher Kristie Dotson has pointed out, involve speaking to an audience who doubts your competence to weigh in on the matter at hand—who refuses to listen, or fails to listen properly. Or, to invoke another of her vitally suggestive metaphors, it can involve being smothered: restraining what you say because your audience is bound to misunderstand you, owing to their ignorance. Testimonial smothering, on her landmark treatment, is thus self-silencing under coercion. 

I think silencing can also involve having words put into your mouth, and being subject to the demand that you must say such-and-such. All of this while the insister is at least dimly aware that you do not in fact think it—in this case, having spent an hour and a half defending my own, divergent viewpoint. 

Rebecca Solnit wrote of men who explain things to her, in a searingly smart essay that everyone should read if you haven’t already. I am curious, in light of my recent experience, about men who need to stuff their words into others’ mouths, and have us repeat their message back to them. And who are prone to get very angry if they don’t hear our voice as an echo. (Hecho-ing, anyone?) 

I didn’t give him the satisfaction, of course. And afterward, I felt fine: his behavior was extreme enough that everyone around me recognized what was happening as deeply inappropriate. Because I felt supported and not alone, I was able to detach and take a birds-eye view of the situation. But I can think of other instances, and other career stages, where I have or would have felt gagged: as if someone had tried to stuff a rag with their words written on it into my mouth, only to have me choke on it. Or spit it out bitterly, when my place in the discourse depended on my acquiescence. 

Reader, I wonder: have you ever felt this way?