back to why I was sad. When What Love Is and What it Could Be came out, and I started doing all those interviews, well-meaning friends and colleagues would say, “It must be nice for you, with your book getting all that attention!” But it wasn’t nice.
I’m an introvert for one thing. For another, much bigger thing, a lot of the attention was pure hate. Shortly after publication, ABC Nightline made a short news segment on my life and work, broadcast on national US television. They also posted it to their Facebook page. The top comments were “Immoral,” “Odd balls,” “Fucked up,” “Sick,” “It’s stupid,” and “Interesting.” (Thank you, whoever you were, for swimming against the tide.)
Some spend more time crafting their responses. “THIS WOMAN IS A DISGUSTING ANIMAL,” someone posted on one of my old YouTube videos:
A far far left-wing freak that desires to completely overthrow Western Christian Civilization. IT’S WAR ON your ethos Carrie! Every God-loving human on this planet needs to realize WE ARE AT WAR with these commies. End of Story. Oh forgot to add: PLEASE CHOKE YOURSELF CARRIE. Thanks and have a nice God-loving, mom, the flag and apple pie. God Bless America. Let Freedom Ring. Stand up and defend your 2nd Amendment rights. Have happy Christ-centered marriages with lost [sic] of Christian children who hug and feed the poor and …
This continued into several more posts, none of them reassuring.
My mental health took a nose dive. That wasn’t all about the book, to be fair. There was a lot going on in the world at the time. Between the time of writing and the little launch in my university’s bookstore in February 2017, the most powerful nation in the world had elected Donald Trump as its leader. Hate was on the rise everywhere, or so it seemed.
There’s an Islamic hadith (saying) that I like: “If the Day of Judgment erupts while you are planting a new tree, carry on and plant it.” I tried, I really did. But it was a complicated time to get people talking about the intricacies and subtleties of love.
For me personally, the hate just kept coming. Every time an interview or article appeared in a high-visibility venue, a stream of nasty feedback would follow in its wake. The public eye does not look kindly on women with ideas. (This is not a new phenomenon – women have not historically been welcomed with open arms to the pursuit of wisdom. The internet just offers us new ways of burning and drowning our witches.)
At the time it was a bit of a blur. But, in retrospect, the hate fell into three buckets. First there was a bucket of hate for feminists. One time, my Twitter account was drowned in hate after I wrote an opinion piece for the Spanish newspaper El País, the headline of which (possibly the only part many people read) was “Polyamory is a feminist issue.” The article was published in Spanish and most of the reactions were, likewise, in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish, but I was surprised at how much I could understand.4
The second bucket is for slut-shaming hate. I am a woman who talks publicly about being polyamorous, so I have been called all the derogatory words you can think of for a promiscuous woman. There are no male equivalents for these words. This was predictable, although knowing something’s coming and knowing what it will be like are not the same thing.
I simply wasn’t ready for the third bucket: the racism. My husband Jonathan is half Asian, my then partner Ray is Asian, and I’m a white woman who has spent most of her life with the privilege of having racism largely hidden from me. “Ray and Jon [sic] look like brothers …,” declared one anonymous email. “Are they both Chinese? I bet they cook you nice spring rolls for breakfast but whose spring rolls are better …” One Facebook message – in its entirety – read, “gross! are asians the only men who will f u?”5
I know it’s tempting, but the solution to this problem doesn’t begin with the word “Just …” Just don’t read the comments; just don’t talk about polyamory; just remove yourself from Twitter and YouTube and email and the internet and public discourse. These are not solutions. If I stop talking and stop engaging, the game is up. In any case, these reactions to my work are among my source materials and my clues. They help me understand the social mechanics operative behind the scenes. This is work I care about, and I can’t simply look away without giving up on it.
What other strategies are there, then, besides silence? One option is talking more. I started admitting to my poor mental health in some of my talks and public appearances. I talked about how depression makes it harder for me to perform in all kinds of ways that once came easily. At first I intended to be making excuses for my impaired performance, but I found my audiences really appreciated these acknowledgements. It meant something to them that I was making the costs of the work visible.
I started admitting, too, where I had made mistakes in my own work rather than hiding them. That was painful. I felt ashamed. Then I started talking more about feeling ashamed, and the same rush of relief and recognition came back to me. In academic circles we are trained to see our mistakes as failures, and admitting them is regarded as a weakness. (Academia can be a heartless place. Ideas and ideologies can get quite stagnant and rotten in there. I don’t think this is a coincidence.)
The other strategy that sometimes works is not doing anything at all. A piece in the American Spectator, about me and a few other authors, said that now we feminists “even hate love.” It was high-visibility coverage, so it sent my way a lot of readers who would never have heard of me otherwise. Contemporary ideas about love are constantly swirling around me, and just by being here I can alter their course. Even (or perhaps especially) when I’m staying still.
A strategy that doesn’t work is retreating into academia. The problem with that strategy is that there is no retreat to be found in academy – or anywhere else, for that matter – from the ideas and culture that shape our lives. Academia is made of people, and people bring that baggage along with them wherever they go.
I’m based in an academic philosophy department, and philosophy is (still) a notoriously male-dominated discipline. Women in philosophy are a challenge to its self-image as hyper-rational, hyper-logical, hyper-scientific – all male-coded qualities. The discipline represents its history as a procession of “great men”: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche. It might be able to accommodate the presence of the occasional woman displaying presumed markers of those male-coded qualities – a loud voice, an aggressive argumentative tone – but she is more tolerated than celebrated. As Samuel Johnson infamously said, “a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
Before I became a philosopher myself, I had pictured philosophy as something more humane. More compassionate and co-operative. Something that belongs everywhere and to everyone, not just to a few experts working within well-defined fiefdoms of prestige. I imagined philosophy as a perpetual conversation, a massive collaboration. But all this is antithetical to the mundane concerns of real academic institutions: concerns about rankings, and grant dollars, and prizes, and esteem indicators. The scholarly dreams of so many would-have-been philosophers are swallowed up by these things. Condemned to death by a thousand administrative paper cuts.
This contemporary model of a university functions like an addiction to video games or social media. Thoughts of “winning” and “status” motivate us to keep playing, keep scrolling, while the life we thought we wanted slips away.6 Constantly comparing oneself with others easily induces anxiety and paranoia, as we are invited to feel that we aren’t measuring up.7 We’re told we cannot step off the treadmill for a moment, or we’ll get left behind. It’s easy to see how all kinds of problems get swept under the rug by academic institutions eager to hang on to their high-prestige “stars,” to keep up appearances, to cling to position.
Looking back,
