Greta Thunberg bodyshamed Andrew Tate, but that's almost certainly good, and even if it's not good, we should let it slide: language, policing and political morality

I went for “Greta Thunberg shoots Sith Lightning from her hands” but Midjourney couldn’t quite figure it out.

I. The scene

Don’t worry, I promise this essay will move on from pointless hot takes to say something interesting about politics, language and morality.

Quick summary: Andrew Tate, who we can at least roughly say is a self-confessed human trafficker [see images I’ve appended at the end] made some puerile attack or other on Greta Thunberg in which he asked her to give him her email address so he could tell her how much his cars were killing the planet or some dross. Greta Thunberg responded that yes, he could email her, and her email address was: “smalldickenergy@getalife.com”

Sensible people rejoiced at seeing such a dickhead kicked where it hurts. However, a contingent of people popped up saying that it was such a pity she was body-shaming Andrew, although of course, she meant well. Well I found this point of view wholly obnoxious. Here’s what I said on the subject on Twitter:

“Let me give a serious view on this, though I really shouldn't. I think we have to accept that for the foreseeable future that humans are going to body-shame, and focus on the really malign kinds, rather than being killjoys.”

In other words, my view was and is that Greta Thunberg did body-shame Andrew Tate, but I really don’t think we should get angry about it. In fact, I’ll go further and say that I think it was a good thing.

And then people started arguing with me about that- a new contingent of people who, while holding that of course body shaming is always wrong, Greta wasn’t body-shaming him. You see, she was referring to small dick energy not actually implying he had a small penis.

I responded there are two problems with this:

1. It’s not true. To say someone has small dick energy is pretty clearly meant to imply that they have the bearing of one with an inferior member and that they therefore may well have a small dick.

2. Even if it doesn’t imply that Andrew Tate has a small dick, it pretty clearly implies that having a small dick is a bad thing so it’s body shaming. If I went around saying that people I disliked had “fat woman energy” as an insult, people would be offended by my bodyshaming of fat women and rightly so.

Or as David Sligar on Twitter put it:

“Greta's own of Andrew Tate was hilarious and I'm glad she did it. Was it body shaming on some level? Yes of course! The "energy" defence is a comically feeble rationalization and we would never permit it in other more sensitive contexts. Good own though.”

II. What has this come to teach us?

Why does everything have to be a thick term?

Fewer words should be treated as thick terms.

Thick terms in philosophy are terms that have both an evaluative component and a descriptive component. To call someone “gluttonous” is an example- it implies not only do they eat a lot, but also, in your view they eat more than they should. Some words have both thick and thin versions- kill is more or less descriptive, whereas murder includes a prescriptive aspect. There are plenty of perfectly good thick terms, but I think we’ve got enough and should stop making new ones.

A lot of people seem to think that “body-shame” is a thick term. To say someone is “body-shaming” is at once to describe what they are doing (attacking someone’s body) and to condemn them for it.

That’s why people are making these extraordinarily weak arguments that she wasn’t “really” body-shaming. The concept of body-shaming has become a North Star in their moral terrain around these topics. They use it to navigate right and wrong. That’s their mistake. Bodyshaming is usually bad, yes, but technically, like almost everything else in this world, it is neither inherently good nor bad, but context makes it so. The mere fact that it is generally or prima facie bad doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad.

The problem with thick terms is that they impoverish the specificity of our moral thought. If “body-shame” is a thick term, that means that, in a sense, we don’t need to evaluate “body-shaming”- we know it’s always wrong. Holding, a priori, that it’s always wrong to body-shame prevents us from thinking carefully about each particular situation. To the extent that we do think about specific situations, it becomes a dishonest sort of thought- we look for ways to show that something is “not really” bodyshaming if our desire is to excuse rather than condemn. “Oh, she wasn’t actually implying anything about dicks, she was…”

Trying to think things through in a balanced way using principles, and an appreciation of contextual nuance is harder than simple rules like IfBodyshameThenBad, but it’s necessary.

When description and judgement get too tangled up both our moral judgement and our descriptive fidelity suffer.

Two extraordinary moral premises

But there are two other reasons why, even if what Greta did is “body-shaming”, you shouldn’t worry about it.

There are two premises that a lot of people on Twitter seem to believe. At least as far as I can tell, they are needed for the inference from “Greta Thunberg bodyshamed Andrew Tate” to “We should say Greta Thunberg did something bad”. But these premises, when stated, are very strong. Yet in all sorts of moral discourse on Twitter, people seem to rely on them:

1. If something wouldn’t happen in an ideal world, doing it in our world is wrong.

2. If something is wrong, you should say it.

Is it true that in some perfectly just ideal paradise we wouldn’t make fun of anyone for having a small dick? I dunno, maybe. Probably I guess? But our world is so far from ideal in so many ways, that we can’t infer from the absence in something in utopia, to the notion that people should not do it right now in the real world.

There’s a concept of the theory of the second best in economics. We know that certain kinds of markets that fulfil implausibly strong constraints (e.g. total rationality, no positive or negative externalities), are, in a certain very particular sense, ‘efficient’. However, we also know that in general, it is not true that just making individual things more like they would be in an efficient market, in isolation, improves things. It could easily make them better, have no effect, or make them worse. This is called the theory of the second best.

Maybe this is a very pretentious reference for an obvious point. Vicious jabs targeting weak points created through social cruelty, wouldn’t exist in an ideal world, but sometimes they serve purposes in this world- a show of strength, removal of social capital from those who should not have it and so on. It’s a mean world and you’ve gotta fight dirty babe!

The second premise is crazier yet- if something is wrong you should say it. NO! Keep your mouth shut unless it’s going to help. In this case, even if, improbably you’re right and Greta did the wrong thing, saying it is not going to help. In fact, I would say that, more often than not, when you spot someone doing the wrong thing, especially if they are a stranger and especially if it’s in public, you should be silent.

This particular case is obvious at its face. Taking a young woman who’s been harassed [with definite sexual undertones!] by a creepy manosphere dark-acolyte- and not for the first time- and chastising her for not responding in what you see as “the best” way is terrible! You shouldn’t do it! If you’re convinced what she did isn’t great or quite what you would have done, fine, but shut your fucking mouth about it and leave the poor woman alone.

But it’s true across the board. People say stuff that’s a little whack, off base or impolite, all the time, and I generally don’t comment on it because I’m not a dickhead. People do not want or need your feedback for everything, you lunatic, you maniac.

As a rule of thumb, with exceptions, you should only intervene to correct someone and “call them out if”:

1. They’re known to be an awful person anyway (and you should set a very high bar for that!)

OR

1. There is a good chance that doing so will help them, or help someone else to avoid the wrongdoing.

2. You have exhausted other options (e.g., modelling the behaviour you would prefer).

3. The good created by correcting the wrong will outweigh the angst, conflict and division you create by pointing it out.

We’re not in a bad English class wherein you’re trying to spot every “problematic” aspect of the text. Pull your head in. Greta Thunberg is grouse, nuff’ said. Overthinking, it sometimes seems to me, is the opposite of thinking.

Footnote: Why do I say Andrew Tate is a human trafficker:

Cause he did this stuff while taking women across international lines: