I’ll have to take your word for it, with me not being around at the time and not being terribly interested in doing the necessary research to have an informed opinion. But again, Velocity’s words, “Without focusing too much on that particular tree”… the Boeing example may be flawed but we all get the point of bringing it up.
~Max
The point of bringing it up is to show how this poor rich guy had his career ruined supposedly because he wrote an essay taking a position that women shouldn’t be in combat roles in the military. But the actuality is that the essay was massively sexist despite the OP glossing over that, and rather than losing his entire career, he’s just disqualified from a particular job overseeing the correction of an extremely sexist workplace.
We should NOT ignore the fact that the example is flawed, because when people complain about overreaching ‘cancel culture’ and people having to ‘worry about future judgement’ they are consistently unable to come up with non-flawed examples. If it was really the case that people were routinely losing jobs for minor, casual comments they made decades ago, it should be easy to come up with multiple examples that aren’t deeply flawed. But the two examples we have in this thread are a guy who had a published article extoling his extremely sexist position being considered unsuitable for a job overseeing a company trying to fight an extremely sexist workplace, and a woman who had racist comments taken out of context, lost her job, then sued the person who published them out of context and got offered a better job. Neither one supports the hand-wringing in the OP, and this is not unusual for this kind of thread.
You don’t have to have been around in 1987 to read his essay, and realize that the arguments that he put forth to advocate against the rights of women were misogynistic, even for the time.
And I get why the example was brought up, it was leveled as an example of someone unfairly treated. But it was not actually that. If your example fails to demonstrate your point, then it has failed, and bringing it up was a mistake.
Right, this is a very specific case and circumstance – outside commenters have broadened it to be about other things by implication or association, but it is not a good example of a general “cancel culture” in the sense of bringing up something character-related from your past that may have nothing to do with what your job is today. This, OTOH, was something that detracted from what the company needed.
The individual penned that article towards the very end stages of the argument on women-in-combat in the general sense, to be soon replaced by one about what role IN combat. In 1993 (probably put over the edge by the Gulf War and Balkans experiences) the general Combat Exclusion Policy was lifted, replaced by a ban from some specific types of duty (e.g. infantry, armor, SOF) that lasted yet another 20 years. But he did not even stick to discussing specific qualification, going into some sort of theory of male essentialism to warfighting. I almost expected to see something there about the Virtue of Womanhood. So even then he was arguing from the side that was being left behind.
Then we look at this page,:https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1988/february/comment-and-discussion where if you scroll a bit down (under “No Right To Fight”) you’ll find some letters to the editor that came to the journal after that article and you will see that inside the services there was still debate that time. The reality is, it’s not news now and it wasn’t news then that the military’s internal culture on gender issues was/is NOT apace with the general society’s (and IMO in 1987 he was probably buttressed in his position by Reagan-era “values” politics).
This is historically accurate. I was there then in a similar role. As I mentioned above.
It was/is odd to me that DoD was far ahead of civil society on race equality and so far behind on sex equality. I would argue based on personal anecdote that DoD in the 1980s was ahead of where civil society was on race in 2015. Equally arguable, DoD in the 2020s is somewhere near where civil society was in the 1980s on sex equality.
Which is an interesting reality in light of my “can’t predict the sequence of future realignments” arguments way upthread.
Golightly may have been “… arguing from the side that was being left behind.” as you say, but that was only somewhat true in the civil culture and not at all true of the DoD culture of the time.
At the time the CEP was lifted some 4-5 years after Golightly wrote, doing so was still mightily controversial among Congress. Many attempts to alter the no-women status quo had failed to pass before we got to the place that just barely over half of 535 congresscritters agreed that women had the moxie to be in a fight and wouldn’t fatally pollute the manly virtues of all-male warrior bands. With lots of “Virtue of Womanhood” being quoted by all and sundry.
It was also quite controversial among the services themselves, both top brass and ordinary schlubs. And at least some of society as a whole.
And as you rightly go on to say, it was a further 20 years before the last of the remaining restrictions fell. Each of which was presaged by a long culture war rear guard action by conservatives arguing the inherent differences between the character virtues of Manly men and Womanly women.
It all sounds pretty inevitable to somebody who didn’t live through it. History is very contingent and I could easily imagine a slightly different path where women’s roles in the DoD was still far more restricted even today than they really are.
Switching gears, here’s a fresh thread about a culture war in the doctoring biz and the failure of folks to self-censor to future-proof (or is it past-proof?) themselves:
Are surgeons in bikinis a teensy-weensy bit unprofessional?
Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose!
Respectfully, I don’t feel qualified to judge the opinion of a man by the standards of a culture of which I am unfamiliar. Throughout my own life I have heard many different opinions about sexism in the 1980s. In light of subsequent posts it may be that the military had an entirely different culture with regards to sexism. I wouldn’t know.
~Max
Yes, yes it did, and that culture being exposed to the country at large resulted in the ending of many careers.
CMC
I don’t think people should worry about future judgment. Future judgment could be righteous and sound. Or it could be hateful bullshit. A person could drive themselves crazy trying to appease future Judgy McJudgerson’s.
A very convenient position to selectively take.
I would say the same thing if the executive had been a woman.
~Max
So you say
Because they are the same argument. If I have the right to choose not to give money to something, and I have the right to tell others, then so does everyone else, and thus we all have the right to collectively choose to not give money to something.
The part about trying to get people fired is similar. If you have the right to tell other people that you think someone should be fired, so does everyone else. And if the employer has the right to fire them, them they have the right to do so because others convinced them to do so.
The only difference in “cancel culture” is that people started doing it with thing that everyone knew was wrong at the time, but were let slip by. People don’t get successfully cancelled for things that are newly realized to be wrong, but for things they knew were wrong at the time.
That’s why I didn’t realize that @Velocity’s OP was about “cancel culture.” That’s never been about predicting what will be wrong in the future. It’s about not doing bad things assuming you can get away with them, as they may still come back to bite you in the future.
I was actually thinking more about people who are now dead being judged by as being bad by modern day standards, and whether I should try to avoid doing things today that people 100 years from now would consider wrong.
Still, the answer is the same. Don’t try to futureproof yourself. Just try to not to things you know are wrong today.
It’s tricky… Earl Derr Biggers wrote the Charlie Chan novels, and Sex Rohmer wrote the Fu Manchu novels, roughly about the same time. Biggers’ work, despite the caricature, is actually tolerant and inclusive, and celebrates the multi-cultural environment of Chan’s Hawaii, with visits to California and Arizona. The stories are not racist, but actually quite advanced for their time. Rohmer’s work – not so much. The racism is blunt and painful. (Although, toward the end of his career, he got better.)
Rohmer only did what he thought was right by the standards of the time, but Biggers went farther, and tried to depict a “more perfect society,” an environment that celebrated ideals not so widely embraced in his era.
I think we, as writers (or “would-be” writers, in my case) should try to present ideals and not mere reality, at least to some moderate degree. (I want to write murder mysteries, so my stories can’t be entirely “My Little Pony” episodes!)
I for one would love to read a story about a murderous little pony with a rainbow tail. Talk about your plot twists and nightmare fuel for little kids.
Stephen King got nuthin’ on you!
I largely agree in the spirit of “be (or depict) the change you want to see.”
At the same time that motto if applied to current TV & cinema would pretty well kill the industry. And would eliminate a lot of genres of literature, e.g. dystopianism.
Good riddance to much of the gratuitous nastiness poured into modern storytelling, but still and all it’d really cramp a lot of folk’s style.
Yup, and if people really do want to “future-proof” themselves against future judgment, the recommended procedure is the same as it’s always been for centuries if not millennia: Keep your trap shut. Practice reserve and discretion in expressing your opinions, and you won’t need to worry about whether those opinions will turn out to be ones that future generations will condemn, because future generations won’t even know you held those opinions. Crisis avoided.
This used to be routine counsel for young men embarking on their professional life, as in this 1905 example:
Am I advocating that people should consider themselves obligated to censor their own expressions of their opinions for fear of eventual criticism? Certainly not. Am I acknowledging that anybody who doesn’t censor their own expressions of their opinions is running some non-zero risk of being harshly judged by a future society if those opinions turn out to be very unpopular? Absolutely.
If somebody expects to be able to get, or thinks that they’re entitled to, some kind of effective guarantee against negative repercussions in the future from opinions expressed in the past, they’re demanding admission to a fool’s paradise.
Or if you don’t want to get the kind of judgement that’s been talked about in this thread, just keep your trap shut when you have the urge to say stuff against historically disadvantaged groups (minorities and women). The OP’s example was a guy who argued that women don’t deserve equal rights three years after the first major-party female VP candidate ran. Had he avoided putting in all of the weird sexist stuff, he’d be fine. If you don’t make nasty statements about women, LGBT people, black people, brown people, disabled people, and so on, you’re pretty unlikely to get harsh judgement. And note that in the OP’s example, the terrible, terrible fate that the rich exec suffered is that he isn’t considered qualified for a specific job where the primary job is fighting the kind of discrimination he argued for, there’s no indication that he isn’t just going to work as a high level exec at some other company and make baskets of money there.
There are a lot of attempts to exaggerate how ‘canceled’ he was or how unreasonable it is to criticize someone for not embracing the idea that women are fully human in the far-off year of 1987, but it’s really not that complicated.
Also, it’s silly to imagine that Golightly wasn’t aware even in 1987 of the controversial nature of his position. His article explicitly says concerning some of his arguments: “Does that observation reflect a primitive, machismo attitude? Perhaps […]” And the publication that ran his article was dealing with the commentarial fallout for months afterwards.
Attempting to portray this 1987 article as the expression of an unremarkable consensus opinion that Golightly couldn’t possibly have predicted would end up reflecting poorly on him is either naive or disingenuous. Of course he had every right to express his opinion, but he was well aware even at the time that many people considered his opinion offensively sexist. If a company that’s been struggling with a disastrously sexist (and racist) long-term corporate culture decides that they don’t want to take on that additional baggage, I don’t think that makes Golightly a victim.
And indeed this is the key part. As the line from Hamilton says, you don’t control “who lives, who dies, who tells the story” – and it is not always obvious what “side” will end up looking better down the road. I think that many of us have invested too much of our self-worth on Not Being Wrong.
People keep saying that no one knows “what ‘side’ will end up looking better down the road”, yet all of the actual examples anyone has been able to come up with involve a person ‘punching down’ at a disadvantaged group in a time when it was obvious that the disadvantaged group was a demographic group of humans. They may have been in a social circle where treating that group badly was acceptable, or have hidden it behind religious beliefs, but that doesn’t change what they were doing. So the “not always obvious” actually looks 100% obvious to me, and it should be easy to disprove with counterexamples if it’s really something to look out for.