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[post_date] => 2021-05-26 00:54:57
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[post_content] => The ability to intuit the feelings of an emotionally uncommunicative man can make a woman feel strong—or not.
Recently I rewatched Bridget Jones’ Diary. It was one of my favorite films when I was a teenager, and now that I am 32—Bridget’s age in the movie—I’m more impressed than ever with the way the film and eponymous book capture the comic conundrums of the average woman. But there was one character that I viewed with new eyes: our leading man, the ever-diffident Mark Darcy.
I was a Jane Austen fan growing up, so I found his demeanor very appealing. The way he expressed feeling through actions rather than words, combined with his utter inability to demonstrate affection, struck me as thoroughly classy, strong and “masculine.” Now, another term sprang to mind: emotionally unavailable.
My therapist asked me recently whether or not I have a tendency to gravitate toward emotionally unavailable men, and I told her that I’m not entirely sure what the difference is between “emotionally unavailable” and reserved. It seemed she didn’t know either, so we just stared at one another uncomfortably over Zoom for a moment.
Truth be told, I’m not sure the modern take about people who are unable to express themselves emotionally—i.e., that they lack feeling—is accurate. My ex-boyfriend was (surprise!) a lot like Mark Darcy. The closest he ever came to being effusive was when he looked at me over the corner of his newspaper and gave a “Oh, very nice” nod. When we broke up, I was certain that he had never actually cared about me; I only changed my mind because his best friend told me that he didn’t leave his room for six months and subsisted on deliveries of beer and fried chicken.
My father is (again, surprise!) another classic example. The man physically stiffens at any attempt at a hug, and I can count on one hand the number of times he’s said something affectionate. In fact, I’m not sure I remember him saying anything at all to me throughout my childhood other than, “You hungry? You want something to eat?” But if I called him at 3 a.m. to tell him I was stranded in Sheepshead Bay he said “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” no questions asked. My father is also an alcoholic in recovery. During a recent relapse, he sobbed and said he’d always loved me but didn’t know how to show it, and I could see the pain that inability had caused him.
I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for Mark Darcy. I feel sorry for many of the men I’ve dated, and I feel a little like Wendy in Peter Pan, when she tells the Lost Boys that they’re all just little boys who didn’t have a mother. I feel as though my natural urge to nurture will compensate for whatever hole their mothers left, which it sometimes does and sometimes does not. When it doesn’t, I wonder if I’m falling into the classic Narcissist—Empath relationship, and whether I should feel a little sorry for myself as well, for once.
Society often portrays women like me, who choose to deal with these men, as a little pathetic. People say we lack self-esteem, that we are tragically conditioned by our toxic upbringing and the unhealthy attachment styles it wrought. Some of that is (unfortunately) true. But I have to say—as someone who does a fair amount of deep digging into her psyche on a daily basis—it doesn’t feel that way. It feels the opposite. It makes me feel strong.
Culturally, we only seem to acknowledge traditionally masculine forms of strength: power, money, status. I was raised to believe there are also equally important traditionally feminine forms of strength: patience, forgiveness, understanding. It gets tiresome, sometimes, to deal with the men that I deal with, and it frustrates me that the patience and understanding aren’t really a two-way street. I’m expected to be inherently “better” in some ways, more immune to proclivities, because I am a woman—a belief that has no logical basis in reality. But it certainly feels like a form of strength and it gives me a sense of pride.
I will also continue to argue, as I have done in the past, that people are a tradeoff and men like this have certain upsides that are difficult to find in today’s society. They take forming attachments very seriously, so you don’t have to worry about them love-bombing you and then promptly ghosting you the way some of the more “modern” men seem to have a tendency to do. They also feel a firm sense of responsibility and obligation toward a woman—you never have to worry about them waking up one morning and telling you that they’re moving to Thailand for a year to find themselves and that you’re both just on different journeys right now.
I went to a book reading for Helen Fielding’s long-awaited third installment to the series, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, and someone asked her why she (spoiler alert) killed off Mark Darcy. “I needed Bridget to be single,” she responded, “And Mark would never leave her.” There’s a sense of security to men like this that isn’t all that easy to find these days.
Still, I find myself wondering how much of their actions comes from a place of love and how much of it stems from a sense of obligation, and whether or not there’s a difference between the two.
I watched another movie recently that gave me pause: My Fair Lady. I’ve always adored Henry Higgins, so I texted a friend joking that it seems like my love affair with emotionally stunted, confirmed bachelors who try to mold a woman into their version of “the perfect woman” began early. Men like the ones I’ve described tend to get a lot of flak for being very controlling, and it is–truth be told—more than a little depressing to feel you will only be loved if you are a very certain way all the time. But I don’t mind it so much so long as we’re aligned on what that vision is, because I welcome any extra motivation to be my best self. I think there’s strength in that, too, because God knows it takes a lot of effort.
And—try as I might—I can’t help but always find the ending scene romantic. Eliza leaves, and Higgins sings a song called “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” which seems to be the closest to admitting that he loves her that he can manage. He walks into his drawing room, and puts on an early recording of her because he misses her. She walks in at one moment, turns it off and says the last line out loud. “Eliza?” he rises from his chair, then settles back in, puts his hat over his face, and says, “Where the devil are my slippers?”
It’s pathetic, really, the sexist statement and the fragility of his masculinity–the fact that he can’t simply tell her how happy he is that she’s back, and needs to lower his hat in order to hide his emotional response. It shows a lot of strength and self-esteem—I think—that she recognizes precisely what’s happening. It’s not a healthy form of love, for sure. But it is, nonetheless, love.
[post_title] => Mark Darcy and the allure of taciturn men who love with actions instead of words
[post_excerpt] => Culturally, we only seem to acknowledge traditionally masculine forms of strength: power, money, status. I was raised to believe there are also equally important traditionally feminine forms of strength: patience, forgiveness, understanding.
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A still from the film shows Bosniaks taking refuge at the UN Dutch peacekeeper base in Srebrenica.[/caption]
In 1993, at the dedication of the U.S. Holocaust Museum, Elie Wiesel made an 
During the decade prior to the 2011 uprising, Egypt saw a blogging boom, with people from diverse socio-economic backgrounds writing outspoken commentary about social and political issues, even though they ran the risk of arrest and imprisonment for criticizing the state. The internet provided space for discussions that had previously been restricted to private gatherings; it also enabled cross-national dialogue throughout the region, between bloggers who shared a common language. Public protests weren’t unheard of—in fact, as those I interviewed for the book argued, they had been building up slowly over time—but they were sporadic and lacked mass support.
While some bloggers and social media users chose to publish under their own names, others were justifiably concerned for their safety. And so, the creators of “We Are All Khaled Saeed” chose to manage the Facebook page using pseudonyms.
Facebook, however, has always had a policy that forbids the use of “fake names,” predicated on the misguided belief that people behave with more civility when using their “real” identity. Mark Zuckerberg famously claimed that having more than one identity represents a lack of integrity, thus demonstrating a profound lack of imagination and considerable ignorance. Not only had Zuckerberg never considered why a person of integrity who lived in an oppressive authoritarian state might fear revealing their identity, but he had clearly never explored the rich history of anonymous and pseudonymous publishing.
In November 2010, just before Egypt’s parliamentary elections and a planned anti-regime demonstration, Facebook, acting on a tip that its owners were using fake names, removed the “We are all Khaled Saeed” page.
At this point I had been writing and communicating for some time with Facebook staff about the problematic nature of the policy banning anonymous users. It was Thanksgiving weekend in the U.S., where I lived at the time, but a group of activists scrambled to contact Facebook to see if there was anything they could do. To their credit, the company offered a creative solution: If the Egyptian activists could find an administrator who was willing to use their real name, the page would be restored.
They did so, and the page went on to call for what became the January 25 revolution.
A few months later, I joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation and began to work full-time in advocacy, which gave my criticisms more weight and enabled me to communicate more directly with policymakers at various tech companies.
Three years later, while driving across the United States with my mother and writing a piece about social media and the Egyptian revolution, I turned on the hotel television one night and saw on the news that police in Ferguson, Missouri had shot an 18-year-old Black man, Michael Brown, sparking protests that drew a disproportionate militarized response.
The parallels between Egypt and the United States struck me even then, but only in 2016 did I become fully aware. That summer, a police officer in Minnesota pulled over 32-year-old Philando Castile—a Black man—at a traffic stop and, as he reached for his license and registration, fatally shot him five times at close range.
Castile’s partner, Diamond Reynolds, was in the passenger’s seat and had the presence of mind to whip out her phone in the immediate aftermath, streaming her exchange with the police officer on Facebook Live.
Almost immediately, Facebook removed the video. The company later restored it, citing a “technical glitch,” but the incident demonstrated the power that technology companies—accountable to no one but their shareholders and driven by profit motives—have over our expression.
The internet brought about a fundamental shift in the way we communicate and relate to one another, but its commercialization has laid bare the limits of existing systems of governance. In the years following these incidents, content moderation and the systems surrounding it became almost a singular obsession. I worked to document the experiences of social media users, collaborated with numerous individuals, and learned about the structural limitations to changing the system.
Over the years, my views on the relationship between free speech and tech have evolved. Once I believed that companies should play no role in governing our speech, but later I shifted to pragmatism, seeking ways to mitigate the harm of their decisions and enforce limits on their power.
But while the parameters of the problem and its potential solutions grew clearer, so did my thesis: Content moderation— specifically, the uneven enforcement of already-inconsistent policies—disproportionately impacts marginalized communities and exacerbates existing structural power balances. Offline repression is, as it turns out, replicated online.
The 2016 election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency brought the issue of content moderation to the fore; suddenly, the terms of the debate shifted. Conservatives in the United States claimed they were unjustly singled out by Big Tech and the media amplified those claims—much to my chagrin, since they were not borne out by data. At the same time, the rise of right-wing extremism, disinformation, and harassment—such as the spread of the QAnon conspiracy and wildly inaccurate information about vaccines—on social media led me to doubt some of my earlier conclusions about the role Big Tech should play in governing speech.
That’s when I knew that it was time to write about content moderation’s less-debated harms and to document them in a book.
Setting out to write about a subject I know so intimately (and have even experienced firsthand), I thought I knew what I would say. But the process turned out to be a learning experience that caused me to rethink some of my own assumptions about the right way forward.
One of the final interviews I conducted for the book was with Dave Willner, one of the early policy architects at Facebook. Sitting at a café in San Francisco just a few months before the pandemic hit, he told me: “Social media empowers previously marginal people, and some of those previously marginal people are trans teenagers and some are neo-Nazis. The empowerment sense is the same, and some of it we think is good and some of it we think is not good. The coming together of people with rare problems or views is agnostic.”
That framing guided me in the final months of writing. My instinct, based on those early experiences with social media as a democratizing force, has always been to think about the unintended consequences of any policy for the world’s most vulnerable users, and it is that lens that guides my passion for protecting free expression. But I also see now that it is imperative never to forget a crucial fact—that the very same tools which have empowered historically marginalized communities can also enable their oppressors.
[post_title] => Between Nazis and democracy activists: social media and the free speech dilemma
[post_excerpt] => The content moderation policies employed by social media platforms disproportionately affect marginalized communities and exacerbate power imbalances. Offline repression is replicated online.
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Rachel Dodes with her husband and son.[/caption]
Granaz Baloch[/caption]
The scene at Chai Wala.[/caption]
Shaheera Anwar getting engaged at a traditional dhaba in Karachi.[/caption]
