Most Is Not Enough

How the NRA and MRA are stealing from each others’ playbooks

My Twitter feed exploded over Memorial Day weekend with news of the Santa Barbara shootings. The first tweets were about the event itself. Then there was the reaction, as more information came out about the shooter and his blatantly misogynistic motivations. Then there was the backlash to the reaction. A series of tweets happened to hit my feed at around the same time that looked awfully similar but came from two different perspectives. Here’s a generic, paraphrased version of what I saw:

Sure, [bad thing] happens, and that’s bad. But not all [class of people] do [bad thing]! Every time someone says “Hey, [person in class] did [bad thing]” it paints all other [people in that class], most of whom do not do such deplorable things, with too broad of a brush. It invalidates the point because only a very small number of bad apples actually do [bad thing].

Now let’s fill in the blanks. For the #NotAllMen or MRA (Men’s Rights Activism) crowd, the bad thing is “rape” and the class of people are “men”. For the anti-gun-control crowd, it’s “shot up a schoolhouse/movie theater/sorority” and “gun owner”. So we get something like this:

Sure, some men do rape, but the rest of us shouldn’t have to suffer because of it; you can’t go around painting all men with this broad brush of consent violation, because most of us don’t do that.

I have some bad news for the people who spout this nonsense: “most” isn’t enough.

So what’s wrong with statements like “not all men rape”? First of all, they’re irrelevant. It’s called derailing; the fact that there exists a man who has not raped anyone does not mean we get to ignore that other men have. Statements like that steer the conversation away from what’s important.

Second, they’re so trivially correct that they’re useless. If I’m talking about how much I hate pepperoni on my pizza, reminding me that some pizzas don’t have pepperoni doesn’t add anything to the conversation. And when we talk about serious things like misogyny or gun control, it’s not as simple as just deciding to order a different pizza.

Third, they’re meant to convey the idea that the number of people who commit these atrocities is small, compared to the vast majority of people who do not. Scratch the surface on that, though, and you find the implication that the person making the statement, who is part of the group, is being unfairly punished for the something they didn’t do. The problem is that the change being sought isn’t a punishment, and certainly isn’t unfair.

Put them all together, and you get a statement that not only fails to add anything to the conversation, but actively redirects it away from the point, and adds a large helping of defensiveness on top. That’s the opposite of helpful.

When we’re talking about cultural change and the question of what we as a society can do to prevent these atrocities from happening, we have to think about balance. No matter what we do, there’s going to be fallout, but we want the positive effects to be bigger than the negative.

To pick an extremely controversial example, if we made private ownership of handguns illegal, it would restrict the social liberties of people who currently legally own handguns. Is that a trade-off that we want to make as a society? I know what my personal answer is to that question. I suspect that everyone reading this knows their own personal answer as well. But I’m willing to bet that many of those answers don’t match up, and that’s why social change is hard.

Here’s another thought: let’s find ways to teach our children to respect each other’s boundaries, and resolve conflict without verbal or physical violence. If we learn that yelling crude remarks at passing women is a violation of our cultural expectations that won’t be tolerated, have we lost anything? You’d have a hard time convincing me that the “punishment” outweighs the benefit to society.

That second example may be a slam dunk for me, and it may be blindingly obvious to me that we should be doing much more as a society to make life easier for currently oppressed classes of people (spoiler: that includes women), but I acknowledge that not everyone feels precisely the same way that I do. When it comes to change like this, the devil is in the details.

Look, nothing about these conversations is simple. It’s easy to get defensive when you’re a member of the class that’s being blamed for something, even if you haven’t done that thing. But the reason those of us in the privileged class need to stop talking and start listening—and I’m a white, male, upper-middle class, American citizen, so I’m smack dab in the most privileged class of them all—is because so often when we do talk, we actively detract from the conversation.

If we want to participate in the conversation, we need to learn how to be constructive. We have to stop getting defensive, we have to stop derailing, and we have to stop injecting pointless noise. Getting out of the way is the first step, but we also need to take positive action: we have to work to make room for the oppressed to be heard, we have to call each other out when we screw up, and we have to look outside ourselves and consider the greater good instead of just our own selfish gain.

Whenever I hear about another one of these atrocities—Newtown, Aurora, Fort Hood, Trayvon Martin, the list goes on—the backlash always seems to take the same shape. I’ve lumped gun control opponents and MRAs together because they’re the ones who are responding to the Santa Barbara tragedy, but they’re not the only ones who say things like “not all men rape” or “not all gun owners go on shooting sprees”.

As a culture, we’re really bad at balance. We like to identify axes of conflict and then pull really hard on both ends, leaving the people in the middle standing alone, wondering where everyone else has gone. “Moderate” is a dirty word, when everyone has to have absolutely unshakable feelings in order to make their voice heard. When only the loudest, most extreme opinions get covered, the rest of us are silenced, and that’s bad for everybody.

We need to change the tone of the conversation. We need to devalue extremist views and make room for moderation and compromise. We won’t change society overnight, but we have to start looking for the root causes and doing something about them. Because in isolation, each individual ill may not feel like a giant problem, but when they come together like this, we all suffer.

I’m tired of reading about another school shooting, another rogue gunman, another brutally violent sexual assault, another hate crime against women.

I’m tired of the fact that “being louder than the other guy” gets swapped in for conversation, debate, and discourse.

I’m tired of conversations that get derailed by people who feel like they are being persecuted because someone suggested they change the way they act.

I’m tired of the notion that any amount of rape is acceptable; that any number of mass murders, by gun or otherwise, are acceptable.

Maybe most people don’t do those things. But most is not enough.