One thing that’s seemed striking to me in this Dragon Army discussion is the priors on different people’s threat assessments.
I remember when I was younger, I used to want to meet my friends from the Internet, and my parents were horrified, and had all of these objections like “What if they’re pedophiles who befriended you so they could molest you?” or “What if they’re kidnappers who befriended you so they could kidnap you?”, or less lurid possibilities like “What if they’re creepy drug people and they insist on bringing you along to their creepy drug abuse sessions and won’t let you say no?”
And I never developed a good plan that countered their concerns, like “I will bring pepper spray so I can defend myself”. It was more about rolling my eyes and telling them that never happened in real life. I’ve now met hundreds of Internet friends, and I was absolutely right - it’s never happened, and any effort I put into developing a plan would have been effort wasted.
I’m not claiming there are no Internet pedophiles or kidnappers. I’m saying that based on my own Internet communities, and my threat-detection abilities, and the base rate, I was pretty sure it was more in the realm of terrorism (the kind of stuff you hear about on the news) than the realm of car accidents (the stuff that happens to real people and that you must be guarding yourself against at every moment).
This is also how I think of people turning out to be abusers. It’s possible that anyone I date could turn out to be an abuser, just like it’s possible I could be killed by a terrorist, but it’s not something likely enough that I’m going to take strong precautions against it. This is obviously a function of my personal situations, but it’s a real function of my personal situation, which like my Internet-friend-meeting has consistently been confirmed over a bunch of different situations.
(Please don’t give me the “that’s just male privilege!” speech; men and women get abused at roughly similar rates. I do think that probably women are socialized to fear abuse much more, and that’s a big part of this, and probably other axes of marginalization contribute more)
One interesting thing about Tumblr and the SJ-sphere in particular is that because it comes disproportionately from marginalized communities, it has this sort of natural prior of “people often turn out to be abusers, every situation has to be made abuser-proof or else it will be a catastrophe”. I once dated someone I knew on Tumblr who did a weird test on me where (sorry, won’t give more details) they deliberately put me in a situation where I could have abused them to see what I would do. When they told me about this months later, I was pretty offended - did I really seem so potentially-abusive that I had to be specifically cleared by some procedure? And people explained to me that there’s this whole other culture where somebody being an abuser is, if not the *norm*, at least high enough to worry about with everyone.
I’m not sure what percent of the population is more like me vs. more like my date. But I think there’s a failure mode where someone from a high-trust culture starts what they think is a perfectly reasonable institution, and someone from a low-trust culture says “that’s awful, you didn’t make any effort to guard against abusers!”.
And then the person from the high-trust culture gets angry, because they’re being accused of being a potential abuser, which to them sounds as silly as being accused of being a potential terrorist. If you told your Muslim friend you wouldn’t hang out with him without some safeguards in case he turned out to be a terrorist, my guess is he’d get pretty upset. At the very least it would engender the “stop wasting my time” reaction I had when my parents made me develop anti-pedophile plans before meeting my Internet friends.
And then the person from the low-trust culture gets angry, because the person has just dismissed out of hand (or even gotten angry about) a common-sense attempt to avoid abuse, and who but an abuser would do something like that?
I think it’s interesting that the Dragon Army idea received more positive feedback or constructive criticism on LW (where it was pitched to, and which is probably culturally more similar to me) and more strongly negative feedback on Tumblr (which is more full of marginalized people and SJ-aligned people, and also maybe more full of abusers as judged by the number who get called out all the time).
Tangential but I think relevant: A lot of discussion of “abusers” — or “racists,” “transphobes,” etc., as regards this general point, although the specifics are not particularly analogous — seems to center on trying to treat “abusers” as a single group that one can meaningfully talk about the motivations, threat level, etc. of. At best this leads to people talking past each other; at worst, it leads to people talking past each other while both being wrong, since both sides are subconsciously equivocating without realizing it — one by tacitly treating the prevalence of people who qualify under a broad definition that includes a lot of relatively low-threat people as the prevalence of high-threat people, and the other by tacitly treating the prevalence of really high-threat people as the prevalence of people who pose any meaningful threat at all.
If I were to classify people-who-behave-abusively (some of whom it feels a bit dissonant to call “abusers”), I’d start by breaking them down into those who are actual sadists, who specifically want to hurt their victims[1], and those who aren’t. The first group is dangerous, but rare. (Not non-existent — I had a sister date one, and oh boy did that not turn out well. But still, rare.)
Among those who aren’t sadists, I’d make another two more-or-less orthogonal divisions:
- Those who want control for its own sake vs. those who want in-themselves reasonable things like sex, emotional support, a hot dinner that’s ready when they want to eat, etc., but who use unreasonable (specifically: abusive) means to obtain these things.
- Pre-meditated, calculating abusers (those who want their victims to do what they’re told, whether as a goal in itself of as a means to some other end, and who set out to mold their victims into the sort of people who will do that) vs. conscious, but in-the-moment abusers vs. people who’ve been conditioned/have unthinkingly conditioned themselves to have the emotional reactions that produce the behavior (from themselves) that obtains the results they want (vs. people who simply genuinely lack emotional regulation altogether, although my impression is that this a good deal rarer in adults — and generally results in visible scars and busted noses, from times when they got angry at someone a lot stronger than them, and suffered the natural consequence of starting a fight they couldn’t possibly win).
These are probably less consistently predictive of extremeness of behavior or damage done than sadism, but they’re still important for understanding the underlying dynamics.
In particular, to tangent off of a tangent, I think a lot of discussion of the “cycle of abuse,” and arguments about the reality of apparent remorse, are heavily confused by the latter of the two orthogonal splits. A calculating abuser isn’t actually sorry that he hit his wife[2] (for example) when she didn’t have dinner ready for him when he got home and left her in fear and pain; he did it precisely to produce that fear and pain, as part of conditioning her to be hyper-responsive to his desires. A conscious, in the moment abuser stills lacks true remorse, but he may regret the outcome, just less than he would regret having “let her get away with it.” And a conditioned abuser may genuinely feel awful about having “lost control” like that — because he really did! There’s just a reason that he gets so angry that he loses control when his wife is late with dinner but not when his boss yells at him, and it’s that his subconscious has learned that losing control and hitting his wife is likely to get him what he wants (albeit at the price of feeling a bit bad about it in the short run).
But back on the main topic: On top of those distinctions, there’s also variation in what limits, if any, pre-meditated and conscious abusers have on how far they’ll go, and what reactions conditioned abusers have and have learned “work.”
And I think, in particular, that the prevalence of people who have some conditioned abusive responses (not all of whom I feel comfortable calling “abusers,” particularly when it comes to responses that are self-destructive first and foremost, and produce their impact on the other person mainly as a result of that[3]) that can cause meaningful damage in some people is quite high. (Many of whom you’d never know had those responses, because their partners never trigger them.) I think the prevalence of both (1) sadists and (2) pre-meditated abusers who have no limits on how far they’ll go to achieve their goals is very low (although not negligible). In between is, well, in between.
[1] I’m consensual BDSM–positive; if [general] you like inflicting physical (or transient emotional) pain on people who like receiving it, and freely consent to it on that basis, and you don’t seek to inflict pain and suffering on your partners/friends/dependents outside of that context, I’m not talking about you.
[2] Using opposite sex pronouns for clearer referents. I flipped a coin to pick which was the abuser. I 100% reject the Duluth model.
[3] Such as becoming vocally depressed and suicidal — again, genuinely! really wanting to die!
— in response to a partner lacking time to come visit as planned,
which I have been on the receiving end of, so this isn’t simply me making excuses for my own behavior or anything.