Bullying is not a net social good

Anime Culture and Its Discontents

My apologies for the lack of articles over the last few months. I’ve got some fun pieces lined up on Andy Daly’s Review and Kazuo Umezu’s The Drifting Classroom; however, I feel compelled to write the following after a recent exchange on Substack.

Like many people here, I recently read a disturbing article entitle ‘The Year When My Husband Started to Act Like a Tsundere Teenage Girl to Get My Attention’ on Katherine Dee’s default.blog Substack. In a follow-up piece, Dee broadly considered the question of ‘Just How Damaging Is Hentai?’ Having had friends who have been into squickier anime than I’ve been comfortable with, but also having been housemates with the woman who became the most prolific English-language visual novel writer in the West, this is a question I’ve given some consideration to over the years (and a subject on which, as an animation scholar, I’m especially ambivalent about).

In reply to a specific part of article, I wrote in the comments section:

"Even though, in reality, it’s abuse, in the shipper’s mind’s eye, it is a distillation of closeness that only a terminally lonely person could long for. These ships are appealing for the same reason yaoi and slash are often appealing. It’s symbolic of the closeness only a person who’s never experienced intimacy could want." This strikes me as incredibly astute and perhaps helps give a more sympathetic framing of the high levels of autistic individuals within these communities [as a teacher I find that it's the autistic kids who are bullied the most - especially those who are into anime or give the impression of being furries or might identify as otherkin].

To which a user called Sasha replied:

Do you think bullying still functions as an overall net social good helping delineate beneficial norms and rebuke anti-social/dysfunctional behaviors like otherkin and furries or has the balance shifted sometime recently into being a net harm?

Having been bullied a great deal myself at school I’d never thought of bullying before as a net social good, but it was an interesting position to consider… especially as I suspect that it’s one a lot of people agree with on some level, but would be wary of being seen to endorse.

Presumably, the logic goes like this: People tend to be bullied for dysfunctional behaviour. This bullying shames those who are bullied, ensuring that they cease this behaviour or, at the very least, work harder to mask and disguise it.

The first issue with this utilitarian perspective is that it relies on the idea that school kids only bully other kids for displaying 1.) dysfunctional behaviour 2.) dysfunctional behaviour they can control. Good news for all the physically disabled kids I’ve seen bullied over the years!

However, let’s put that group aside and focus in on an example directly related to the article’s focus:- Teenagers who watch anime or manga that most of us would agree is problematic at best and criminal at worst, such as lolicon (anime or manga that sexualises pre-pubsecent children).

Say a student brings in a copy of this manga to school. Not only would they receive a safeguarding referral form, they would likely get mercilessly insulted and probably beaten up. If this curbs behaviour which could end up with them like the paedophilic husband in the aforementioned article, a sensible utilitarian would argue that such bullying is a net social good. However, would that be the outcome?

I’ve only known one person who openly talked about that kind of content while at school. He was a friend of a friend and he was certainly bullied. I’m afraid to say he later became infatuated with a 14-year-old and while he was thankfully too socially awkward to act on his attraction, it made me uncomfortable enough that I don’t know if I ever saw him again after that revelation.

My best friend at school was thankfully not into lolicon, but his friend (see paragraph above) may well have tried to push those tastes upon him. He was, however, openly into anime and manga at a time (early 2000s) where in the UK this was still unusual and seen as inherently suspect. I’ve known very few people in life experience bullying as merciless as he did. This bullying (combined with a genetic predisposition) led him towards drug addiction which (combined with a genetic predisposition) led him to develop severe paranoid schizophrenia in his 20s. Far from allowing him a way back into the social fold, bullying induced in him a state of alienation so acute that he is now unable to engage in pro-social, functional behaviour that would contribute to the net social good. In terms of redirecting so-called dysfunctional behaviour… well, my scolding disapproval of the anime Chobits as a teenager seemingly stopped him from watching it… but that’s because the mild shaming came from //a peer he respected//.

In terms of my own anti-social/ dysfunctional behaviour being critiqued as a young man… a lot of the bullying I received targetted my OCD compulsions, such as obsessive hand washing. To a degree this bullying meant that I better learned to disguise such behaviour and be more secretive about it, but it largely caused me more stress and upset, making the intrusive thoughts that prompted these compulsions far worse.

When I was 18 I dated a 16/17-year-old girl a year-and-a-bit younger than me. For this one of my most persistent bullies insisted I was a paedophile. Now, the age gap discourse is more intense and such power imbalances taken much more seriously today than they were in the early 2000s [certainly I’ve quite regularly encountered kids at my school accusing other students for being paedophiles for dating someone a year or two younger than themselves]. However, the fact that the two of us have remained good friends some two decades since suggests that there was little-to-no damage done by the relationship.

Moreover, I suspect that the bully in question (I’ll call him Paul since I don’t believe identity is permanent enough that an adult man in his 30s should be answerable for their behaviour as a teenager) was not making the accusation in good faith since so much of his other bullying focused upon things largely outside of my locus of control, such as my OCD compulsions - putting a big empty crisp packet over my head, etc.

If, though, we decide to take the younger Paul in good faith, his bullying did not have the intended outcome. I did not break up with my younger girlfriend, though I certainly became more insecure in the relationship. After sixth form I was in a mentally precarious state from the years of bullying and became very isolated at university (my best friend having fallen into serious addiction because of his own aforementioned bullying) and alienated my housemates through becoming conviced I had a brain tumor - a topic I would talk about for what must have been interminable lengths of time. As such, when a girl I was chatting to online revealed that she was not, in fact, just turning 19, but actually just turning 17, I was lonely and self-pitying enough to handwave away my own moral reservations and engage in a relationship with a teenager a few years younger than myself - after all, I’d already been labelled a “paedo”, why not date a sixth former if noone my own age was interested in me?

Having OCD, I’ve spent a massive amount of the last 16 years beating myself up for that relationship, despite the girl in question having told me at least a decade back she’d long moved on and I was taking the matter way, way, way too seriously. The age of consent is 16 here in the UK (though, let’s be honest, it really should be raised to 18 with a two year close-in-age exemption) so I’ve just indulged in a lot of self-shaming and punishment in lieu of proper social sanctions.

And maybe that has worked! I’ve certainly never dated anyone that young again! But it’s not made me any less insufferable and obsessive in future relationships… nor has it done much to increase the net social good in the world. Because, at the end of the day, utilitarians shouldn’t be seeking to just reduce potential harm, but to increase net social good. Shame is effective for ostracisation, but an ostracised individual isn’t much good to society, except as a scapegoat.

Moreover, seeing anti-social or dysfunctional young people who are into anime (including furries and otherkin) simply as undesirables who need to be policed, rather than as vulnerable human beings, is a reductive simplification that potentially allows for more - rather than less - harm. Freddie deBoer, who reliably explodes the binaries of internet discourse, rather sagaciously (I thought!) noted in his recent ‘No Discourse Has Ever Been More Discourse-y Than Age Gap Discourse’ that:

“[A] given age can be represented as either an age of total innocence and lack of guile or as an age of total competence and personal responsibility, depending on what side of the equation they’re on. That is, a 21-year-old who’s dating a 24-year-old is just an innocent baby who doesn’t understand the world enough to know that they’re being manipulated, but a 21-year-old who’s dating an 18 year old is a devious manipulator who knows exactly what they’re doing.”

I profoundly regret dating a teenager when I was 21 - as a 37-year-old I do not think that kind of power disparity is acceptable. However, I remember enough of my younger self to know that I did not consider myself to be a devious manipulator. I was, rather, a young man emotionally and psychologically stunted by OCD. I don’t think bullying helped with that and I’m not convinced it helps many other outcasts, but further entrenches them into alienation and self-pity (a position from which anti-social and dysfunctional behaviour is more likely to arise).

A decade back Laurie Penny wrote an article decrying the sexism of male nerds. Since then the idea that male nerds are more likely to be villains than victims has grown exponentially, not helped by the toxic behaviour of many male nerds during Gamergate. At the time I was thrown out of an online comics fandom for trying to argue that it was wrong for these sexist nerds to be described as “sub-human” or “monsters”. I likewise believe it was wrong for Clinton to refer to Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables”.

Even if both examples are the perfect model of bullying as a form of punching-up that actually rebukes anti-social, dysfunctional behaviours, we can see some ten years on that it was woefully ineffective. Instead, self-identified victims (whether legitimately victims or not!) doubled down on their anti-social, dysfunctional behaviour. The question of whether they “deserved” to be insulted online is irrelevent from a utilitarian perspective… more importantly, it did not work.