I am at best 1/1000th as “famous” as the OP, but the first ten paragraphs ring ABSOLUTELY TRUE from my own personal experience, and generic credulousness on the part of people who are willing to entertain ludicrous falsehoods without any sort of skepticism has done me a lot of damage.
I also attest that Aella is, if anything, severely underconveying the extent to which this central thesis is true. It’s really really hard to convey until you’ve lived that experience yourself. I also don’t know how to convey this to people who haven’t lived through it. My experience was also of having been warned about it, but not having integrated the warnings or really actually understood how bad the misrepresentation actually was in practice, until I lived through it.
An attempt to help more EAs “get it”: Almost every old-school vegan or vegetarian should instantly “get” that people will just lie about you. I think that most of us have experienced growing resentment toward us, built on false claims that we are rude about animal products, insulting, hate humans, etc. Or if we haven’t experienced this ourselves, surely we have seen fellow veg*ns share stories like “I tried to be so polite at Thanksgiving.. I brought my own meal and didn’t request anyone else make modifications, but now my family is saying I made a big fuss and was rude, and I should apologize?” The meat-eaters who say such things may genuinely believe their claims, IDK, but it certainly looks like (years ago anyway, before veganism entered the overton window more) some people would just lie so they’d have a dramatic story to tell about vegans and cement their own ingroup status or so they’d have a seeming-reason to dismiss animal welfare asks and play the victim themselves and cement their control for future interactions. There are many reasons, some conscious and some unconscious, why people lie, but they do lie and those lies even become big cultural narratives about who to stay away from (vegans, EAs, Aella).
I have better examples of lies from my own life, like rumors going around my highschool and merciless bullying that I was a slut (but the truth was I had actually been raped), but I bring up the vegan thing as an attempt to help most EAs “get it”. I know that the hate and alienation I experienced for being vegan got bad enough for me that I left my entire ingroup (DC Burning Man folks, who themselves constantly talked about SJ causes which were more in the overton window), and I began to avoid meat-eaters entirely (and then I actually became a radical vegan lmao, but that’s another story).
I think there are 2 groups: (1) the people who lie first: I think most of these are raised in a world where linguistics are so divorced from the truth that they are used to stating feelings and perceptions as fact, even if they have the inkling they are being dramatic or jumping to conclusions. And it does not even occur to them that they are supposed to say stuff with precision, and that curtailing your tongue’s impulses in favor of speaking truthfully is even an option anyone else is taking seriously. They think getting things roughly right is enough and think that is what everyone else is doing. And the other side of the coin is (2) people who wouldn’t lie themselves, but are thirsty for a salacious story about their outgroup, and will spread the lie. I think this basically serves as proving of outgroup vs ingroup, and ties into what @firinn notes that weirdos are easier to lie about.
Let EAs not forget that most people still fall into one of these two groups, and very few people fall into a “proactive fact-checking group” or “use nuance in favor of truth” group. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that lies happen and even become big well-known cultural “truths” all the flipping time.
You don’t actually have to be famous in order to experience this; it’s sufficient to be the kind of person who is easy to tell lies about. For instance, when I was in high school, other kids spread some really wild rumours about me, including that I had gotten in a fistfight with my English teacher and got away with it (without even getting detention), or that I cheated on all my tests. I did judo outside of school, and other kids apparently found that implausible enough that the majority of my school peers believed I was making it up and couldn’t possibly actually do judo. I think this rumour got started just because I was pretty bad at the sports we played in school, like netball and hockey, so people told each other I was clearly lying about being good at judo.
When I was like twelve I identified as asexual, and I remember a group telling me that they’d heard I just pretended to be asexual in order to cover up being a sex addict. As far as I can tell, this just happened because other kids didn’t think twelve was old enough to know my identity was asexual (and apparently they found the sex addict thing more plausible somehow). I assure you I was not famous, neither was that rumour true (I was twelve).
I really don’t have a good model of why that happens. Being famous will definitely increase the amount that false things are said about someone, but being autistic seems to cause lots of this too. Being unusual or weird in many ways makes it easy to misrepresent you, since the truth can feel less plausible than the fiction. This happens a lot to me in social contexts where I’m very weird, and a lot less in social contexts where I fit in better.
But also, we have to be very careful about how we extrapolate these anecdotes to sexual ethics. As an adult, someone tried to spread the rumour that I was deeply in debt and lost my job for financial crimes (I’ve never taken out a substantial loan in my life, let alone not paid it back, and I’ve certainly never committed any major financial crimes). I know why they did it (I refused to sell them something that they wanted after a long and frustrating negotiation) and I also know that nothing bad happened to them due to spreading this untrue rumour, and there was no cost to doing so. It makes sense as to why they’d lie. Similarly, when people lied about me fistfighting my English teacher, there was basically no drawbacks; at worst somebody might decide that they’re an unreliable source of juicy gossip. There’s no reason not to repeat a funny or exciting rumour if you just want to be a popular kid. I think that’s a very very different thing from when a woman comes forward with a personal firsthand allegation of sexual misconduct against a man in a position of power, since often she faces massive harassment and professional consequences for doing so. I think that means that those kinds of allegations are much less likely to be lies, and definitely much less likely to be passed around as the “fun” kind of gossip.
I am at best 1/1000th as “famous” as the OP, but the first ten paragraphs ring ABSOLUTELY TRUE from my own personal experience, and generic credulousness on the part of people who are willing to entertain ludicrous falsehoods without any sort of skepticism has done me a lot of damage.
I also attest that Aella is, if anything, severely underconveying the extent to which this central thesis is true. It’s really really hard to convey until you’ve lived that experience yourself. I also don’t know how to convey this to people who haven’t lived through it. My experience was also of having been warned about it, but not having integrated the warnings or really actually understood how bad the misrepresentation actually was in practice, until I lived through it.
An attempt to help more EAs “get it”: Almost every old-school vegan or vegetarian should instantly “get” that people will just lie about you. I think that most of us have experienced growing resentment toward us, built on false claims that we are rude about animal products, insulting, hate humans, etc. Or if we haven’t experienced this ourselves, surely we have seen fellow veg*ns share stories like “I tried to be so polite at Thanksgiving.. I brought my own meal and didn’t request anyone else make modifications, but now my family is saying I made a big fuss and was rude, and I should apologize?” The meat-eaters who say such things may genuinely believe their claims, IDK, but it certainly looks like (years ago anyway, before veganism entered the overton window more) some people would just lie so they’d have a dramatic story to tell about vegans and cement their own ingroup status or so they’d have a seeming-reason to dismiss animal welfare asks and play the victim themselves and cement their control for future interactions. There are many reasons, some conscious and some unconscious, why people lie, but they do lie and those lies even become big cultural narratives about who to stay away from (vegans, EAs, Aella).
I have better examples of lies from my own life, like rumors going around my highschool and merciless bullying that I was a slut (but the truth was I had actually been raped), but I bring up the vegan thing as an attempt to help most EAs “get it”. I know that the hate and alienation I experienced for being vegan got bad enough for me that I left my entire ingroup (DC Burning Man folks, who themselves constantly talked about SJ causes which were more in the overton window), and I began to avoid meat-eaters entirely (and then I actually became a radical vegan lmao, but that’s another story).
I think there are 2 groups: (1) the people who lie first: I think most of these are raised in a world where linguistics are so divorced from the truth that they are used to stating feelings and perceptions as fact, even if they have the inkling they are being dramatic or jumping to conclusions. And it does not even occur to them that they are supposed to say stuff with precision, and that curtailing your tongue’s impulses in favor of speaking truthfully is even an option anyone else is taking seriously. They think getting things roughly right is enough and think that is what everyone else is doing. And the other side of the coin is (2) people who wouldn’t lie themselves, but are thirsty for a salacious story about their outgroup, and will spread the lie. I think this basically serves as proving of outgroup vs ingroup, and ties into what @firinn notes that weirdos are easier to lie about.
Let EAs not forget that most people still fall into one of these two groups, and very few people fall into a “proactive fact-checking group” or “use nuance in favor of truth” group. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that lies happen and even become big well-known cultural “truths” all the flipping time.
>Almost every old-school vegan or vegetarian should instantly “get” that people will just lie about you.
I was sure you were going to talk about other vegans attacking you for not being “pure” enough.
You don’t actually have to be famous in order to experience this; it’s sufficient to be the kind of person who is easy to tell lies about. For instance, when I was in high school, other kids spread some really wild rumours about me, including that I had gotten in a fistfight with my English teacher and got away with it (without even getting detention), or that I cheated on all my tests. I did judo outside of school, and other kids apparently found that implausible enough that the majority of my school peers believed I was making it up and couldn’t possibly actually do judo. I think this rumour got started just because I was pretty bad at the sports we played in school, like netball and hockey, so people told each other I was clearly lying about being good at judo.
When I was like twelve I identified as asexual, and I remember a group telling me that they’d heard I just pretended to be asexual in order to cover up being a sex addict. As far as I can tell, this just happened because other kids didn’t think twelve was old enough to know my identity was asexual (and apparently they found the sex addict thing more plausible somehow). I assure you I was not famous, neither was that rumour true (I was twelve).
I really don’t have a good model of why that happens. Being famous will definitely increase the amount that false things are said about someone, but being autistic seems to cause lots of this too. Being unusual or weird in many ways makes it easy to misrepresent you, since the truth can feel less plausible than the fiction. This happens a lot to me in social contexts where I’m very weird, and a lot less in social contexts where I fit in better.
But also, we have to be very careful about how we extrapolate these anecdotes to sexual ethics. As an adult, someone tried to spread the rumour that I was deeply in debt and lost my job for financial crimes (I’ve never taken out a substantial loan in my life, let alone not paid it back, and I’ve certainly never committed any major financial crimes). I know why they did it (I refused to sell them something that they wanted after a long and frustrating negotiation) and I also know that nothing bad happened to them due to spreading this untrue rumour, and there was no cost to doing so. It makes sense as to why they’d lie. Similarly, when people lied about me fistfighting my English teacher, there was basically no drawbacks; at worst somebody might decide that they’re an unreliable source of juicy gossip. There’s no reason not to repeat a funny or exciting rumour if you just want to be a popular kid. I think that’s a very very different thing from when a woman comes forward with a personal firsthand allegation of sexual misconduct against a man in a position of power, since often she faces massive harassment and professional consequences for doing so. I think that means that those kinds of allegations are much less likely to be lies, and definitely much less likely to be passed around as the “fun” kind of gossip.
Selfish piggyback plug for the concept of sazen.