I was struck this week by two parallel confessions of complicity in the Imus affair. One, by Ana Marie Cox, AKA Wonkette, whose integration into mainstream media outlet Time really did seem to rob her of any perspective for a good long time. The other, from the usually sane Frank Rich, who earned a rare Wanker of the Day from Atrios for his efforts.
The parallels are instructive: both are liberalish writers who have gone on Imus to slog books at various times, both should have known better, both are now sheepish about their participation in the cult of the now thoroughly discredited Imus. But Rich is defensive and says it's about far more than Imus, Cox notes that she felt creepy even when she was doing it, and neither defends herself nor him in the process.
Every time I've been on Don Imus' show, he has reminded listeners that he "discovered" me. It's not exactly hyperbole. He first invited me on when I was just a foulmouthed blogger who ran the gossipy political site Wonkette. As I recall, my first on-air conversation with him was about the Bush twins, or, as I called them, "Jenna and Not-Jenna." Last fall I became a regular guest and took up slightly more serious topics (on my last appearance we talked about Senator John McCain's Baghdad trip and Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani's lack of social graces), but the subjects hardly mattered. I had been invited inside the circle, and to be perfectly honest, I was thrilled to be there.
As the invites kept coming, I found myself succumbing to the clubhouse mentality that Imus both inspires and cultivates. Sure, I cringed at his and his crew's race-baiting (the Ray Nagin impersonations, the Obama jokes) and at the casual locker-room misogyny (Hillary Clinton's a "bitch," CNN news anchor Paula Zahn is a "wrinkled old prune"), but I told myself that going on the show meant something beyond inflating my precious ego. I wasn't alone. As Frank Rich noted a few years ago, "It's the only show ... that I've been on where you can actually talk in an informed way — not in sound bites." Yeah, what he said!
I'm embarrassed to admit that it took Imus' saying something so devastatingly crass to make me realize that there just was no reason beyond ego to play along. I did the show almost solely to earn my media-elite merit badge. The sad truth is that unless you have a book to promote, there's often no other reason any writer or columnist has to do the show. If Rich wants to "talk in an informed way," I'm sure there's an open mike at C-Span Radio, and if there's really a hunger for such adult dialogue, does it really have to be accompanied by childish crudeness? Actually, don't answer that. In any case, the media figures and politicians who clown around with Imus can pretend that the show is really about informed conversation or pop sociology or anything except junior-high-level teasing, but its true appeal for them lies in the seal of approval Imus bestows.
As opposed to:
Of course I was aware of many of his obnoxious comments about minority groups, including my own, Jews. Sometimes he aimed invective at me personally. I wasn’t seriously bothered by much of it, even when it was unfunny or made me wince, because I saw him as equally offensive to everyone. The show’s crudest interludes struck me as burlesque.
I do not know Imus off the air and have no idea whether he is a good person, any more than I know whether Jerry Lewis, another entertainer who raises millions for sick children, is a good person. But as a listener and sometime guest, I didn’t judge Imus to be a bigot. Perhaps I felt this way in part because Imus vehemently inveighed against racism in real life, most recently in decrying the political ads in last year’s Senate campaign linking a black Tennessee congressman, Harold Ford, to white women. Perhaps I gave Imus a pass because the insults were almost always aimed at people in the public eye, whether politicians, celebrities or journalists — targets with the forums to defend themselves.
And perhaps I was kidding myself. What Imus said about the Rutgers team landed differently, not least because his slur was aimed at young women who had no standing in the world of celebrity, and who had done nothing in public except behave as exemplary student athletes. The spectacle of a media star verbally assaulting them, and with a creepy, dismissive laugh, as if the whole thing were merely a disposable joke, was ugly. You couldn’t watch it without feeling that some kind of crime had been committed. That was true even before the world met his victims. So while I still don’t know whether Imus is a bigot, there was an inhuman contempt in the moment that sounded like hate to me. You can see it and hear it in the video clip in a way that isn’t conveyed by his words alone.
Note Rich's pat-on-the-back to Poor Old Imus as well, for taking it like a Manly Man--"And perhaps even Don Imus himself, who, while talking way too much about black people he has known and ill children he has helped, took full responsibility for his own catastrophic remarks and didn’t try to blame the ensuing media lynching on the press, bloggers or YouTube. Unlike Mel Gibson, Michael Richards and Isaiah Washington, to take just three entertainers who have recently delivered loud religious, racial or sexual slurs, Imus didn’t hire a P.R. crisis manager and ostentatiously enter rehab or undergo psychiatric counseling. 'I dished it out for a long time,' he said on his show last week, 'and now it’s my time to take it.'"--just because Don Imus does seem to have figured out what much of the media elite and the current Administration have not: tape exists, print exists, and you can actually check whether or not something is a pattern of behavior, instead of taking someone's word for something being an isolated incident. Rich implies that Imus admitting he was a dick shows unhypocritical classiness, a bubble NTodd bursts pretty effectively. (See there's tape and print....)
Cox points to an inherent gender bias, which she felt even while she was benefiting from it: "It's depressingly easy to find female journalists who will tolerate or ignore bigotry if it means getting into the boys' club someday. (If only I were the only one.) And I'm not so vain that I think I brought something unique to the airwaves. In fact, I assume that one reason he had me on was the tantalizing prospect that I might say something scandalous or racy. That, and he and his cronies seemed to enjoy having the occasional guest they could leer at." Well, she could have mentioned ass-fucking at any point I guess.
The number of white men in media racing to defend Imus from us nasty PC-lynch mobbers is truly impressive, and many of them really ought to know better. But I think men are often truly blind to women's issues, and really do not see what the big deal is.
A similar issue plagued the left blogosphere this week, when tech blogger Kathy Sierra came forward to say that she had had death and rape threats leveled at her, and Markos--not inconsequentially, a guy--basically told her to get over it and toughen up.
More people have said this better than I ever could, but let me just note here that the violence always simmering under the surface of the internets may be a joke to some, but there are many, many people who cannot afford to take things that lightly, and many of them belong to otherwise disenfranchised groups in our society.
I was specifically struck by this excellent post at The Republic of T, which draws a nice equivalence between what happened to Kathy Sierra and what happens to gay men frequently.
How easy is it to say, “Well, if you weren’t out this wouldn’t happen. If you’re going to be openly gay, you have to expect this. It’s no big deal.”?
I don’t know what criteria anyone uses to determine when a death threat is credible and when it isn’t, but I do know what it’s like to sit in my alone in my apartment not knowing if the specific threat, from someone who knew where I lived, was credible or not. In that sense, I tend to agree with Kathy.
In an interview, she dismissed the argument that cyberbullying is so common that she should overlook it. “I can’t believe how many people are saying to me, ‘Get a life, this is the Internet,’ ” she said. “If that’s the case, how will we ever recognize a real threat?”
We won’t, until one is carried out. And then everyone will say what a shame it was, but it was an isolated incident, and shouldn’t change how people do things online. And we’ll go right back to doing the same thing. Until the next time, at least.
And there would be a next time. The threats against Kathy, the picture of her with a noose around her neck, appeared on someone else’s site, someone who defended his decision not to remove those comments, instead putting the responsibility on the commenters, and eventually removing the sites altogether rather than remove the comments.
I speak here as someone who has been maliciously outed, and, through me, they found Thers. I was not scared, was not particularly careful about my identity, because as a music blogger I attract very little vitriol (except for jazz aficionados and Boers). But I should have been; I realize that now. And that's a sad thing.
I would love to say that we have a level playing field, that female athletes are judged by their skills rather than their tattoos, that men don't feel threatened by technologically competent women, that women are not judged by their clothes or their looks or their waistlines. But that just does not seem to be the case. That may be why Wonkette "gets" things Rich does not (and why plantsman has a point about casual homophobia, a related but distinct conversation).
--molly ivors
