The Takedown of a Pick-up Artist

Campaigns, Columnists, Intersectionality, Masculinity, Sexism, Shane Thomas, Two Weeks Notice, VAWG

The Takedown of a Pick-up Artist

Anyone remember the character Tom Cruise played in the Paul Thomas Anderson film, Magnolia? For those who don’t, Cruise played Frank T.J. Mackey, a brash, loathsome motivational speaker, hiding personal trauma. Arguably the finest performance of his career, he is an abhorrent distillation of patriarchy. He runs classes on how to “conquer women” to a…

November 7, 2014

5–7 minutes

CONTENT NOTE: This piece will contain numerous incidents of misogyny, misogynoir, sexual harassment, and racist & gendered violence.

by Shane Thomas Follow @tokenbg

Mercifully, Frank T.J. Mackey is fictional, but Julien Blanc is real. You may already be aware of Blanc. For the uninitiated, he’s Frank T.J. Mackey made flesh. Blanc is an executive coach for Real Social Dynamics, a company which dispenses “dating advice”. This advice includes Blanc instructing a room full of white men on how to harass and sexually assault women in Tokyo, under the guise of ‘getting lucky’.

Bruce Reyes-Chow recently gave a good breakdown on Blanc’s repeated egregious behaviour, including opening interactions with women by grabbing them by the throat.

In the midst of Blanc’s misogyny, it’s important not to overlook his gendered racism. He relies on racist stereotypes to demean East Asian women as nothing more than demure and subservient subalterns. It’s a toxic cocktail, which Joy Goh-Mah has addressed on this site.

One’s disgust may start with Blanc, but it shouldn’t end there.

Last weekend brought the hashtag, #YouAreAMisogynistIf. A collaboration between @sunnysingh_nw3 and @AListRap. It was a rejoinder to a woman of colour receiving gendered abuse on Twitter (these incidents tend to occur on days ending in the letter “y”) and produced a lot of incisive and necessary commentary on misogyny in society.

However, the hashtag was soon hijacked by men, spamming it with derailing arguments and/or pictures of half-dressed women.

Earlier this week, ESPN presenter Cari Champion was on the receiving end of a slew of misogynoiristic tweets from Artie Lange – who has been a some time guest on ESPN programming. This resulted in the #IsupportCari hashtag, which was instigated by a combination of @FeminstaJones and @RodFreeman05.

And then there’s the recent viral video of Shoshana B. Roberts, unable to walk down the street without being habitually harassed by men. It was later revealed that many of the white men who harassed Roberts had been edited out of the video. [1].

It is the twin privileges of whiteness and maleness that allows such behaviour to flourish. Blanc himself stated, “If you’re a white male, you can do what you want.”

You can have a platform to deliver racist and sexist sentiments. You can laugh at these sentiments, in the knowledge that there will be little in the way of consequence. You can be like Steve Santagati, who appears to think it’s a woman’s job to prevent street harassment. Or you can avouch that white men don’t catcall, and get a mainstream space for your views.

To return to Blanc and his seminars, what’s especially emetic is that they have the potential to be transformative spaces, where men can unpack the patriarchal ideas the world inculcates into us. Instead, Blanc is an allegory for a military sergeant, readying his troops for war. Patriarchy turns men into soldiers, and positions women as the enemy to be defeated through multifarious forms of dehumanisation and violence [3].

In actual military conflict, war only has to be declared once. But the structural and individual effects of patriarchy work on an ouroboros loop, with a war on women being declared again and again, such as the effects of the Nordic model on sex workers, rates of intimate partner violence, or the wage gap between men and women – felt more acutely by women of colour.

However, the hashtag has once again become a valuable tool of resistance. #takedownjulienblanc, created by Jennifer Li, has been a key catalyst in bringing attention to Blanc. Her tireless work is also responsible for the Change.org petition that has resulted in some of Blanc’s seminars being cancelled and last night he was deported from Australia.

Be it the women (and men) who have instigated the hashtags, or the women who have penned the numerous pieces that I’ve linked to, these are remarkable examples of courage from women who refused to accept this treatment.[3]

But the problem is that they wouldn’t have to show such redoubtable bravery if so many men didn’t remain silent. How many of us have seen the events of the past week, thought it disgusting, but then forgot about it and went on with our day?[4]

Women don’t need men to rescue them, but they also shouldn’t have to struggle on their own. The aforementioned sexist conduct doesn’t just happen because of obtuse thinking. It happens because they know they can get away with it.

Men have to take their share of the responsibility to change a culture that deems this behaviour permissible – while making sure they never set the terms of the discussion at the expense of women.

Our silence isn’t golden. It’s harmful.

[1] – This shouldn’t minimise what must have been a horrible experience for Roberts, and also doesn’t minimise the subsequent violent threats she’s had to endure.

[2] – For thin, cisgender women, this can be through sexual objectification. The lot of fat women is to abuse them for not being thin. The lot of trans women are to be violently attacked or killed.

[3] – If you think pushing back doesn’t take bravery, take a look at the increase in abuse women – especially women of colour – always have to endure for speaking out.

[4] – For clarity’s sake, I’m not absolved of accountability. I’m also complicit in this.

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A mixed-race film graduate, Shane comes from Jamaican and Mauritian parentage. He has been blogging about sport since 2010 at the website for The Greatest Events in Sporting History. He is also a contributor to ‘Simply Read’, the blogging offshoot of the podcasting network, Simply Syndicated. A lover of sport, genre-fiction, and privilege checking, Shane can be found on Twitter, both at @TGEISH and @tokenbg (and yes, the handle does mean what you think it means).

The Symbolic Use of Women (mediadiversified.org)

4 responses to “The Takedown of a Pick-up Artist”

alexandertat

November 10, 2014 at 6:32 am

Incredible thoughts.

“Men have to take their share of the responsibility to change a culture that deems this behaviour permissible – while making sure they never set the terms of the discussion at the expense of women.

Our silence isn’t golden. It’s harmful.”

Wonderfully stated.

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1. Shane Thomas
  
  November 11, 2014 at 12:45 am
  
  I appreciate your kind words, but so many of the thoughts I’ve formulated are thanks to the courage and wisdom of numerous women (some of whom are found on this site). And whatever I write has to be backed up with action to really count. Same goes for any man who thinks the behaviour of Blanc and his ilk are vile.
  
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Shane Thomas

November 7, 2014 at 7:47 pm

Indeed. You’re 100% right about women having to plot their pathway when walking the streets. If you haven’t had a chance, I’d have a read of the Pia Glenn article on street harassment that I linked to in this piece. It’s highlighted under “sexual objectification” on footnote number 2. There’s also an excellent Emily Heist Moss piece on this, too – (TW for rape culture) – http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2012-12-a-letter-to-the-guy-who-harrassed-me-outside-the-bar

I hope the incredible work Jennifer Li has done will be a catalyst for progress. If women feel more comfortable in speaking out, that’s great. Although, I hope they don’t feel obligated to. I think men have to speak to other men to try and change the culture (am I being too paternalistic by saying that?)

We may not be able to physically prevent people doing bad things, but we can delineate between what we deem as acceptable, and what we don’t. If Blanc – or anyone other man – tries this kind of disgusting behaviour, he should know that there will be consequences. Because of what Li has started, Blanc and RSD are now experiencing some of them.

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Sally

November 7, 2014 at 2:43 pm

Great article. And fantastic Julien Blanc has been deported! A real triumph for good over evil.

Just to add to what you wrote about men acting alongside women… My sister and I were discussing the other day how men really have very different experiences in regards to personal safety. I’ll use this example my sister gave… She walks to the gym about 40 mins from her house every morning. She often encounters the same young man each morning leaving his house and they walk several of the same streets, as he is headed to work in the shopping centre near her gym. It’s still dark as they’re walking, and while my sister carefully selects a well-lit path, that’s longer and a little winding and inconvenient, the guy boldly walks straight through the middle of the car park, through dark areas near trees, past parked cars, where there’s little or no light. He is carefree. She is self-aware and although not scared, hyper-aware of her surroundings. They have a completely different experience on this almost-shared walk. And her state of alertness is lifelong.

All of ours is. A woman does not walk alone down a street carefree. We don’t approach even our own car at night without almost subconsciously checking the backseat or glancing around to ensure we’re still alone. When we walk alone at night or early hours of the morning, if we pass a man, a fast stream of choices appear before us – cross the street? Slow down? Speed up? Avert my eyes? Boldly look him in the eye? Smile at him? Say hello? Turn around? What’s the right thing to do in this moment in this place with this man in this scenario? What will his response be to what I choose to do right now in this moment? How do I handle passing this man in the street? What’s my escape strategy?

Men don’t have to live with that every single day the way we do. It’s not that we generally live in a state of fear, but we live in a state of alertness that varies in degree, mostly existing subconsciously, because we are so used to it. We are so well-accustomed to the reality that we are potentially prey, our state of awareness and defences are automatic.

So when a man like Julien Blanc comes along brazenly grabbing girls on crowded streets, no matter who is around, we take it bloody personally. Because we already have so many scenarios in which we don’t feel completely safe. This behaviour is taking away our basic human right to feel like we have control over our own person in an environment where we should feel at ease.

This man (and I use that term lightly) calls himself an expert in women. He knows nothing about women. Zero.

Anyway, my point is, I think this whole episode could really lead the way for women to speak up and say how we really feel. Explain that our world is different in even what could be perceived as the smallest ways, like what I have described, but actually it’s huge because it’s so present in our worlds that we don’t even think about it. I’m envious of that young man walking to work. He has one goal in mind – to get to work on time. What a luxury! My sister, me, and all the other women out on their own… our goals are not just to reach our destinations. Our goal is to reach the destination without falling prey on our journey.

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