The bullies of the era do not come shouting foul epithets and derogatory names. They do not come proclaiming their strength. Ever since victimhood triumphed over heroism, the bullies of our world have instead come proclaiming the language of the hurt and upset, of weakness and suffering. It’s become such a tried and tested tactic we barely even notice it anymore.
Where once a person would have assaulted another person, verbally or otherwise, to win in the era of “oppression” the would-be victor must claim that they themselves are the ones who have been assaulted. Where once the loser would have wept, today the would-be winner must weep: very early, very fast and as insincerely as occasion necessitates.
This was the case with the attack on Suzanne Moore, whose stupendous account of her fall-out with the Guardian is a fine reminder of the laws of modern combat. The people who edged her out of her place of work did not do so firstly by calling her derogatory names; they did so by pretending — falsely — that she had used such names of them. They pretended that she had been “transphobic” against them. They lied about what she had written and they pretended that her words even made them feel endangered. In doing so Moore’s accusers got their victimhood in early.
As Moore narrates, the crunch point came when a trans employee at The Guardian announced her resignation, despite having already left weeks earlier, claiming that Moore had made them feel “unsafe”. It is a clever little trick, because of course there is nothing in any Suzanne Moore column that could make anyone at the paper feel unsafe. Unless the Guardian was a well-known hotspot for gangs of volatile thugs looking to beat up trans people, which seems unlikely. The suggestion is clearly insincere or deluded.
But the trick works, because so few adults want to call bullshit on the bully-words of our time. Not just because the bully-words are the words of the oppressed, but because they come cloaked in this language of impossible-to-disprove suffering. Who are you to say that the other person does not feel “unsafe”? How can you prove they don’t?
Suzanne Moore’s testament of what it feels like from the inside to deal with these latter-day Torquemadas would be familiar to many working in publishing, too.
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