As you grow your community, one of the big visibility challenges for business owners is managing the different voices and interests that start to be expressed. For a long time, this stopped me from wanting to grow my community too extensively. I wasn’t sure if I had the resources or skills to manage things effectively and I had a pretty significant fear of angry mobs.

For a while my best tactic was to stay smaller than I needed to, keeping a safe barrier around me. Then I did a good amount of visibility block clearing and realised that staying small wasn’t the answer. I also realised that if my marketing and messaging was on point, I would invariably attract the right kinds of people and repel the people I wasn’t interested in having in my community.

So I started speaking up more about issues that mattered to me. I knew this would be considered controversial by some, but I was also hoping it would have a curatorial effect, attracting more of the right kinds of people into the School of Visibility (SOV) community.

During the pandemic, as the wellbeing community started being influenced in really significant ways by QAnon, I created social posts to deliberately move people through who were no longer a good fit for us.

And as I spoke up more about feminist issues, I went through a period where men’s rights activists started showing up on our social pages. It wasn’t just one or two, the SOV account had clearly been targeted by a syndicate. They were systematic in the way they showed up and they all had the same (stupid/boring) arguments designed to inflame and provoke a response. So I spent weeks blocking and deleting until eventually the entire syndicate had been cleared out.

Fuelled by a fear of social change

As a community builder, it’s difficult to keep tackling these issues one at a time. It’s quite tiring to keep track of what issue you might encounter next given that, over the last few decades, the right and far-right have been aggressively pushing back against social change of almost any sort.

Women’s reproductive rights, the Voice, affirmative action, trans rights, Black Lives Matter, drag shows, taking effective action on climate change, teaching history of slavery in schools in America, and the existence of books that challenge their worldview, have all been targeted for demonisation and misinformation campaigns as well as significant legal and political manoeuvring.

We’ve seen some grown men lose their minds over Barbie and a bunch of white people get their nickers in a knot about The Little Mermaid. (Incidentally, these were both movies which I was personally going to leave to watch with my kids on a streaming service. Then I saw all the fuss and decided that both films were absolutely going to benefit from my patronage.)

On the whole, these are reactions instigated, not exclusively but predominantly, by straight white cis gendered men against a world that’s becoming more inclusive. A world which, thanks to the internet, has seen marginalised voices gaining more traction and influencing change in ways that challenge the status quo.

In that environment, a whole range of groups have been gradually gaining more and more influence. QAnon popped up in the mid to late 2010s in the American far-right political sphere. MAGA (make America great again) are Trump’s people. Incels and men’s rights activists pre-date Trump’s presidency, but the internet has facilitated connection amongst them in a way that was previously unprecedented. And toxic masculinity… well that’s as old as patriarchy itself.

And they’re just a few of the loose assortment of groups working to move people toward a racist, sexist, anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQIA viewpoint.

This isn’t happening casually and it’s not happenstance. 

This is about politics and it’s about power.

They’re planting seeds of outrage over the perceived threat posed by people who have traditionally been defined as ‘other’ all over the internet. And if this approach is sounding familiar, there is of course, a playbook they’re using. Pulled directly from the Nazi party.

Lest we forget.

Sex, porn and pedophilia

A recent example in Australia occurred when a conservative radio host – those great instigators of moral outrage – expressed his horror at Yumi Stynes and Melissa Kang’s book ‘Welcome to Sex’. That in turn, kick started the old QAnon treatment where the number one accusation being flung around – in amongst sexual assault and death threats – is that Yumi Stynes (the more prominent of the two authors) is a pedophile.

For the record, the number one protective factor against pedophilia and sexual assault for children is sex education. Pedophiles thrive in environments where children aren’t armed with knowledge about what sex is or how it works.

In case you’re wondering how on earth pedophilia entered the conversation, the core QAnon conspiracy theory is that the world is run by a cabal of Satan worshipping pedophiles.

According to the New York Times, ‘QAnon followers believe that this cabal includes top Democrats like President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and George Soros, as well as a number of entertainers and Hollywood celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks and Ellen DeGeneres and religious figures including Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama. Many of them also believe that, in addition to molesting children, members of this group kill and eat their victims to extract a life-extending chemical called adrenochrome.’

What I’ve noticed recently is that the label of ‘pedophile’ isn’t just being used by Q followers and the Q influenced about the alleged cabal anymore. It’s being used to defame anyone who has an even vaguely different perspective to the followers of Q.

This strategy is not new

Like the burning of books and demonisation of any group being labelled as ‘other’, we’ve seen this before. Alternative terms used in such a way in the past include ‘witch’ or ‘heretic’.

The strategy is a simple one; throw the label around often enough until people start believing it. They, in turn, start spouting it indiscriminately, or interpreting the behaviour of anyone they dislike as evidence of their witchcraft, heresy, pedophilia. Hysteria builds, people call on the authorities to intervene and genuinely heinous acts of violence and torture are enacted. All in the name of moral purity.

Because ‘Welcome to Sex’ is sexually explicit in parts, some people are also calling it pornography.

Way back in the 1990s, I wrote a philosophy thesis on how power works in the pornography industry and considering how women might respond powerfully to the terrible power imbalance in that multi-billion dollar industry. In preparing my paper, I looked extensively at the work of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin and found their way of thinking through what constitutes pornography and what doesn’t, to be very helpful. Here’s how I’ve come to categorise these things ever since:

Sex education books might be sexually explicit but are designed to educate. They’re tools for parents to use to discuss sex with their kids. As a parent it’s up to you whether you wish to use these tools or not. If you don’t like them, it’s very simple; don’t buy them.

Erotica is sexually explicit material focused on consensual sexual behaviour. It’s designed for adult entertainment and the people involved are neither degraded nor treated disrespectfully.

Then there’s pornography which is misogynistic and involves female actors being drugged or assaulted in order to perform their roles. It perpetuates extremely harmful ideas about what sex is and the gender roles that people are supposed to play when they’re engaging in sexual activity.

‘Welcome to Sex’ is clearly not – by these definitions – pornography or even erotica, but it is a response to the influence of pornography which is now being regularly accessed by children as young as eight and nine years old. It attempts to bring the conversation away from the internet – where actual pedophiles are operating – and into the home, so young people can learn about these things under the guidance of the adults in their lives.

Each parent or caretaker who decides to buy the book – and certainly no one is being forced to buy it – will need to assess the content for themselves and determine what to introduce to their child/children and at what age. They may find sections they disagree with and that’s not particularly surprising. People get all sorts of twitchy about sex and talking to your kids about it can definitely be embarrassing or even excruciating.

Additionally, some people are clearly uncomfortable with the LGBTIA content in the book. It’s pushing homophobic buttons and perpetuating a falsehood that you can ‘groom’ someone into being gay. (Hot tip; you can’t.) Here’s the way one man described it on Goodreads;

The books that are sold to children should be taken off the shelves as it is inappropriate forms of education and grooming of children, absolutely disgusting. Children should be learning abc’s numbers, geography, developing friendships and social skills, life skills, not LGTBIQ+A-Z.

The idea that there’s a link between homosexuality and pedophilia is another harmful myth trotted out by the far-right (and people not quite as far to the right). It’s part of a long and offensive story about homosexuality being a ‘deviant’ form of sexuality. The homophobic narrative takes one expression of pedophilia – men attracted to young boys – and conflates it with age appropriate sexual relationships among consenting males. We know this is quite specifically about homophobia because the same insinuation has never been made about heterosexuality, despite the fact that young girls are regularly being groomed and sexually abused by older men.

With all of this fear and deep seated prejudice fuelling the moral outrage around the book, what I personally find disturbing, is that rather than simply exercising discernment about whether or not to buy the book, people have opted for abusive language and death threats, not just toward the authors, but toward staff members in shops where the book is being sold.

When the majority of people protesting about this book have likely never spoken up in outrage about the porn industry, I also can’t help but wondering, is this really about the kids, or is it really about silencing women and reinforcing heteronormativity?

Where to from here?

Where does that leave us, either as:

• community builders who are welcoming all sorts of people into our communities and who may find that some of these people have been influenced by the aforementioned groups and ideologies, or
• individuals who might want to pop onto social media from time to time and leave an occasional comment on a post in the name of participating in public discourse.

Here are some guidelines for wading your way through this quagmire:

1. Understand the environment you’re operating in.
Understanding the broader influences impacting the online world, the people in your community, and/or your individual conversations is extremely helpful. It’ll save you from feeling completely blindsided by someone who suddenly out of nowhere and apropos of nothing starts referencing pedophiles.

2. Know the tactics.
The use of violent, abusive or threatening language has been so normalised within such groups that when they start swearing at you or randomly labelling you, it’s useful to remember that it’s not personal. They’re using it as a tactic or they’re so amped up by moral outrage, they can barely control themselves. Knowing this can give you some distance from the situation and from the level of everyday violence that surrounds them.

Also, all of the discussions being held online, when viewed one by one, don’t seem connected. In one community the conversation seems to be all about pornography, in another it’s about vaccines, and in another it’s about transpeople. But the far-right agenda isn’t just racist or just sexist or just anti LGBTIA. Which means that your single issue agenda can easily become swept up in something much more problematic and you can find yourself inadvertently supporting agendas you don’t mean to. (Which is precisely how people who would never consider themselves to be racist, have ended up, in recent years, walking in protest marches right alongside white supremacists.)

3. Find the balance.
There’s a delicate balance here between not giving certain people any conversational oxygen – knowing that they’re spoiling for a fight and responding in kind is exactly what they’re hoping for – and speaking up so that dangerous and unhealthy narratives aren’t perpetuated.

So pick your battles, use block and delete liberally, and notice your own inner guidance around where you really need to speak up and what you can scroll on by.

4. Be cautious of private accounts.
There are definitely some legitimate reasons for people to have private accounts on social platforms. People with a history of domestic or family violence, or people who want to share photos of their kids with a small group of friends but don’t want other people accessing them, are just two examples.

What I’ve also found however, is that the vast majority of people I’ve interacted with who espouse far-right or extremist perspectives just happen to have private account. This says something alarming to me about the level of accountability they’re willing to take for their behaviour online.

5. Extremist thinking crosses borders. 
While this piece has focused on right wing extremism, extremist thinking obviously happens on the left of politics as well, and in all sorts of communities and environments. So if you’re thinking, ‘I’m building a community of women, this won’t affect me’, or ‘I’m not in America, this isn’t happening here’, take a moment to consider not just the far-right, but extremism more broadly. Extremist thinking has been showing up in religious communities, in spiritual communities, in feminist communities, in wellbeing communities. It’s popping up in countries across the globe be they Iran or Afghanistan, England or Canada.

And once a certain level of dogmatism enters a person’s thinking, it’s difficult to pull them back. People become less open to nuanced conversation, more heated in the way they express themselves, and rational conversation becomes near impossible.

So setting clear conversational boundaries within your community is imperative. Healthy boundaries and rules of engagement, reiterated regularly, make for safe and positive collective spaces.

6. Exercise discernment. Clear out whatever is provoked.
When I find myself in contact with people who are using language or turns of phrase which imply some affiliation – conscious or unconscious – with the far-right, I do my best not to be reactionary. I decide whether I have the time, energy and inclination to engage and if I do, I’m just as interested in watching my inner response to the discussion as I am to what they’re saying.

Essentially I’m using the engagement as an opportunity to bring up any visibility related fears I might have. I then clear them out as they arise.

In order to communicate as cleanly as possible, I use block clearing tools like the Visibility Methodology™ to release reactive energy. This helps me to response as neutrally as possible. (Stay tuned for next week’s Visibility Matters episode where I’ll talk you through the Visibility Methodology™ and how to use it.)

I also watch my nervous system and take any action there – be that pranayama, or yoga nidra, or EFT/tapping – to deactivate anything that might have been sparked.

Finally, I’m conscious that the conversation I’m having is public and so there are people who are reading the interaction who aren’t speaking up. I’m conscious that many of them are looking for someone to show them how to respond. Or they’re looking for someone to express what they want to say but don’t know how. And I try, in those moments, to lead well.

Naturally, I don’t always succeed. But I know the more I do it, the better I become.

And always in the back of my mind is my core reason for choosing to show up and speak up in such circumstances. It’s this; when I was a girl and I learned about the Spanish Inquisition and the witch hunts and the Holocaust, there was one thought that ran through my mind on a loop; why didn’t good people speak up and stop the moral outrage/puritanism from spiralling out of control?

As an adult, and specifically as a parent, I now know why they didn’t. I understand the fear of having a braying mob turn on you next. I understand the desire to protect yourself and your family against such threats.

At the same time, I want to break the collective legacy of cowering to bullies. I want to know that future generations won’t need to keep finding ways to quash these virulent forces. I hope you do too.

RESOURCES

For more on incels, men’s rights activists and more, check out ‘Men Who Hate Women: The Extremism Nobody is Talking About’ by Laura Bates.

For more on QAnon, check out QAnon and On: ‘A Short and Shocking History of Internet Conspiracy Cults’ by Van Badham.

For more on toxic masculinity, check out ‘Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship’ by Clementine Ford.

For more on the rise of the far-right more broadly, check out ‘Rise of the Extreme Right: The New Global Extremism and the Threat To Democracy’ by Lydia Khalil.

For those genuinely concerned about the harmful impact of pornography, Collective Shout is, according to their website, an organisation born out of a concern about the increasing pornification of culture and the way its messages have become entrenched in mainstream society, presenting distorted and dishonest ideas about women and girls, sexuality and relationships.