Actress Gwyneth Paltrow stepped in it pretty badly a couple of weeks ago, triggering the wrath of many online commentators. And paradoxically, the misstep happened when Paltrow was trying to make a serious point about the toxic effects of Internet meanness.
While speaking at a tech conference, Paltrow made the mistake of comparing Internet critics’ effect on someone’s self-esteem to the way war shapes a soldier’s identity. Here’s what she said: “You come across [online comments] about yourself and about your friends, and it’s a very dehumanizing thing. … It’s almost like how, in war, you go through this bloody, dehumanizing thing, and then something is defined out of it.”
She also talked insightfully (I would say) about how the Internet enables both objectification and bullying.
Facebook actually started as a place to judge women on their pulchritude or lack of it. I think it’s kind of fascinating that a company that’s so huge and that would come to define much of the modern Internet was founded on this objectification of human beings. … The lack of empathy that is created when people can anonymously opine about the looks or actions of others. … It’s where we are in our culture. Yes, it does worry me, for the development of my kids and the next generation, that people can be so cruel without experiencing the consequences of being so cruel face to face.
It’s safe to say that the first quote got a lot more traction in the media than the second one did. The headlines were not, “Gwyneth Paltrow Talks Online Bullying and Its Effects,” but more along the lines of “Silly Gwyneth Compares Thin-Skinned Celebrities to Heroic Wounded Soldiers.”
Indeed, some of the most strident criticism Paltrow’s words came from a wounded Afghanistan vet. In an open letter to the actress on clashdaily.com, Sgt. First Class Bryan Sikes, who suffered a broken neck and back in a 2008 IED explosion in Afghanistan, ripped into her:
I’d first like to start out by saying how terrible I feel for you and all your friends that on a daily basis have to endure mean words written by people you don’t know. I can only imagine the difficulty of waking up in a 12,000 square foot Hollywood home and having your assistant retrieve your iPhone, only to see that the battery is low and someone on twitter (the social media concept that you and all of your friends contribute to on an hourly basis to feed your ego and narcissistic ways), has written a mean word or 2 about you. You’ve hit the nail on the head, war is exactly like that. You should receive a medal for the burden you have carried on your shoulders due to these meanies on social media. … You know what is really ‘dehumanizing’, Miss Paltrow? The fact that you’d even consider that your life as an ‘A-list’ celebrity reading internet comments could even compare to war and what is endured on the battlefield.
Had Paltrow literally suggested that online crit was the real-life equivalent of having limbs blown off in war, Sikes’ comments would be 100% on the money. But that wasn’t, some observers have noted, what Paltrow intended. Instead, the actress was simply trying to make a comparison—albeit one that was largely missed and misconstrued—between being wounded physically on the battlefield and being wounded psychologically by people’s comments online. And she wasn’t just talking about celebrities. She was also talking in a more general way about the meanness of Internet culture and its lasting effects upon those who are on the receiving end of it, especially young people.
Writing for The Daily Beast, James Poulos said the vitriol hurled at Paltrow proves her point.
“As a reward for her attempt to depict the consequences of online commenters, Gwyneth Paltrow has become their latest victim. … In a now-infamous impromptu speech, Paltrow told a tech conference… well, something about online hate and real-life war. … It was the analogy that launched a thousand flame wars. In her sheltered, celebrity ignorance of the peril of metaphors and similes, Paltrow has played right into the hands of the outrage machine. And someone needs to take her defense. This isn’t just about protecting a celebrity from mockery and scorn—although at some time in our lives pretty much all of us need that kind of support. It’s about taking a stand for the integrity of language and the possibility of real communication.”
Poulos notes that the Internet is increasingly a place where rage gets paired with the most literal possible interpretation of what someone has said instead of giving the benefit of the doubt and trying to discern in good faith what someone actually meant—even if it was poorly worded. “A hallmark of the modern age is literalism in all things,” he observes. “In ancient times, the realm of wisdom and truth freely commingled with the realm of mythos, metaphor, symbol, poetry, allegory, and dreams. Not so today.” And so quick are we to attack, judge, demean and ridicule, Poulos suggests, that often we don’t take the time to try to understand what someone actually said before launching, as he puts, “a thousand flame wars.”
In the wake of Paltrow’s comments and the response to them, he notes: “Two things should be completely obvious to everyone. First, communication in our culture has taken on not just the rhetoric of war but the psychology of battle in a particularly degrading and modern sense—totalistic, hate-soaked, viciously othering, and massively xenophobic. Second, it is not bad to say this is so. Instead of a virtual punch in the ovaries, Paltrow should get a round of applause.”
Sometimes the vacuity of celebrity silliness absolutely earns them the mockery and scorn lobbed their way. Other times, however, we need to give celebs the benefit of the doubt and give them credit for trying to say something helpful … even if the metaphors they choose get in the way.
And on a more personal note, I think stories like this one can serve as a catalyst for personal reflection. How do we relate to others online? Are we willing to listen, to engage, to seek to understand, even if we don’t agree with someone? Or are we quick to mock and scorn and throw someone under the bus as a fool or an idiot, never mind that we would never relate to that person the same way in a face-to-face interaction?
In an interview immediately before the conference where she voiced her controversial comments, Paltrow said, “The Internet is an amazing opportunity, socially. We have this opportunity to mature and learn, which is the essence of being on earth—to being the closest person we can be to our actual, real, truest self. But the Internet also allows us the opportunity to project outward our hatred, our jealousy. It’s culturally acceptable to be an anonymous commenter. It’s culturally acceptable to say, ‘I’m just going to take all of my internal pain and externalize it anonymously.'”
Then she added, “It’s almost like we’re being given this test: Can you regulate yourself? Can you grow from this? Can you learn? You can make it as bloody as you want to, but is that the point?”
Those are good questions for all of us to ponder.
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