What Happened to Glennon Doyle

Doyle broke a minor—and largely arbitrary—social norm. And, like so many women, she was mobbed as a result of this.

I don’t usually offer recipes on my Substack, but I am giving you one today.

1. Be a woman, who is hence not supposed to ask for much of anything—much less people’s money and time and attention;

2. Violate a minor—and largely arbitrary—social norm, such as the norm that you don’t go paid straightaway on Substack;

3. Attract the visceral and overblown disgusted and subsequent moralistic reactions that often follow norm violations;

4. Watch the disgust spread to many, many more people, and look to be only getting more vociferous rather than simmering down;

5. Suffer and end up losing valuable social and life opportunities due to this misogynistic mobbing.

That’s what happened to Glennon Doyle on Substack. It’s a shame. And, most importantly, it’s a lesson and a warning about what will happen to more or less any woman who asks for too much, relative to patriarchal norms and expectations—especially in close-knit communities where people can be pounced on.

Image credit: Desert Sun

Research in social psychology shows that norm violations tend to elicit condemnatory responses, including anger, contempt, and disgust toward the perceived violator. This includes when the norm is largely arbitrary, and minimally important even if you do want to defend it. Yes, I can see some good reasons as well as bad ones why people often wait to turn on paid subscriptions—such as not taking people’s money until you know your way around the space and are sure you can deliver the sort of content that people want on here. But it’s a pretty unimportant norm, at least from where I’m standing, and arguably doesn’t apply to someone with Glennon Doyle’s experience. Moreover, nobody is forced to give anyone else their money here; you can cancel a subscription at any time, and, often, get your money back. Subscription prices are not, relative to other expenses, particularly high. Writers are typically, though by no means always, generous in comping those who cannot afford a subscription and want to read their writing. And person A subscribing to Glennon Doyle’s newsletter has, one might have thought, a fairly low impact on whether A is likely to subscribe to my newsletter too. Yes, money is a finite resource. But since person A might have come to Substack with the express purpose of accessing Glennon Doyle’s content, there’s also a strong possibility that they will be spending more on other newsletters than they would have otherwise.

Nevertheless, norm violations elicit strong feelings. This is especially so, research again shows, in culturally tight cultures such as Substack (rather than loose or diffuse ones).

The thing about norm violations is that women are punished unduly and disproportionately for violating any social norm. Moreover, we are subject to additional norms that are highly gendered in nature. As a woman, one is not supposed to ask for people’s (a) money, (b) time, or (c) attention, a least without elaborate moral justification. Glennon’s self-introduction on Substack was neither coy nor apologetic—she introduced herself with confidence, announcing “a new community is born!” with a joyful vibe behind it. She turned on paid subscriptions without an extensive preamble or an overly involved justification, save for the point that doing so would allow her to pay people on her team fairly. There was something refreshing about these absences of the usual hand-wringing, disclaimers, and apologetics.

And it backfired, bigtime.

Once disgust reactions get going—be they visceral or moral in nature or, as here, a complex mixture—they spread like wildfire, especially within tight-knit communities. Disgust is a distinctive emotion within psychology partly because, once one person evinces disgust, other people often come to share it. This would have been a boon in our recent evolutionary past when one person expressed disgust toward a food that was contaminated or contained pathogens. A witness to another person’s revolted face at the bad or wormy apple would tend to avoid that food source themselves, often long afterward. But in social situations the rapid, vicarious spread of disgust is a moral liability—it means that small or gendered norm violations can quickly lead to a veritable dumpster fire even when many of the people who come to share and express the disgust didn’t originally care, or care much, about the counter-normative behavior.

And certainly many of the people who contributed to the widespread reaction against Glennon Doyle aren’t misogynistic—or any more misogynistic than average—in their daily life and practices. Many of them are feminists and abortion activists and progressives. But they caught a whiff of disgust and channeled it despite themselves. They didn’t reflect adequately on whether the reaction was getting out of hand, or had been truly justified in the first place. And, rather than backing off, shrugging, and moving on, they confabulated reasons why Glennon Doyle is actually Deeply Problematic, or doesn’t really belong on Substack.

Bullshit.

I call bullshit despite feeling—confession time—a tiny twinge of annoyance at Glennon Doyle for a moment myself. I felt a little stab of envy when she quickly accrued over 200K subscribers—even though I’ve long accepted the fact that I will always be a bit niche, an acquired taste, a little bit too spiky to appeal to a large audience. I also felt a stab of low-grade disapproval: turning on paid subscribers so soon struck me as slightly off, relative to norms I too have come to internalize.

But it was my responsibility to sit with these emotions and decide whether or not they have a rational basis. I decided they didn’t: they are likely me catching a whiff of others’ disgust—due to a trivial norm violation—and then unwittingly channeling a reaction that spread and ultimately made for a misogynistic shitshow.

Many people will misunderstand this point, so I will spell it out slowly. Misogyny is about what women face, not what men or others feel toward us. The question we need to ask, when it comes to whether or not this is misogyny, is the environment we are creating, not what is going on deep down in our hearts during the creation process. And here, as it so often is, the impact is misogynistic even if the people contributing to this impact are no more likely to police or punish outspoken or successful woman than average in other forums. We may even be such outspoken and successful women ourselves. But by uncritically harboring and nursing and expressing our disgust toward a woman who has done little or nothing wrong, we will often contribute to an environment where (a) this disgust will proliferate, and (b) its impact will be outsize. And unfair. And, again, gendered.

This is one reason why I am so freaking careful about criticizing women, especially as individuals, in my work. It’s simply not enough that the criticism be justified. One must also think that the criticism is worth it, and not in grave danger of becoming a basis for the moral disgust that will often spread far too quickly and too widely, and result in a grossly disproportionate reaction rather than a thoughtful, useful reckoning. The sort of thing that drives a person like Glennon Doyle to leave Substack entirely, rather than, at most, registering a few helpful minor notes about how best to approach the platform.

I know some will react to this short piece by rolling their eyes and shrugging. “Glennon Doyle is not a victim!” will tend to be their flavor. But, actually, she is, albeit of a relatively small and everyday sort of injustice on which this incident provides a useful lens, as well as a cautionary example. I don’t think we get anywhere by ranking victims or withholding sympathy and support for anyone subject to misogyny, whatever their degree of fame and fortune and privilege. The only way we build communities more resilient to misogynistic mobbing is to point it out when it happens and to non-judgmentally suggest that those who contributed to it be more thoughtful in the future. After all, it’s the most vulnerable women who are going to disappear from these spaces without comment or even notice if we don’t stand up for everyone.