I'm Telling: Employer-Tattling and the Decline of Agency

There is a slight difference between name-calling and oppression. Oppression can only be done from a position of power, and it stabilizes the power of the oppressing. Namecalling can be done by any person who wants to do it, because it does not presuppose or enforce any kind of power relation.

Pure namecalling can be differentiated from libel/slander (saying things that are discreditable), abuse of employees (which presupposes and enforces an extant power relation) or ethnic or sexual discrimination (where the offender encourages the public to discredit a whole group of people).

Claiming that all men are potential rapists would be both slanderous and discriminatory. Calling someone a cunt or a dick on the internet is a public display of immaturity, whichever the sex of the calling and/or of the callee. Insinuating that such namecalling is slanderous is ridiculous, and the claim that it's sexual discrimination doesn't ring true to me. Obviously repeated and insistent immature behaviour towards someone would constitute harassment, but we're not talking of that either - we're talking of someone writing a tweet and then deleting it shortly after.

It's also outside of the sphere where working conditions within a company are affected - someone writing and then deleting a tweet is hardly having a lasting influence. Which means that it's not within the obvious interest of an employer to maintain good working conditions.

What role is the employer then fulfilling? It is an agent for the privilege of female outrage, a modern "lese majeste" that, through the construction of women as an oppressed minority (spoiler: they're not a minority and more of those that speak out are annoyed than oppressed), allows an ill-meaning person to terrorize people without fear of reprisal.

You're also using a different definition of agency: the author uses agency as a term for responsible action by the person (her|him)self, whereas you include people acting on your behalf. The idea of female hypoagency is exactly that women have less of the former and more of the latter than men do, and a widespread criticism of (a particular variety of) feminism is that it reinforces female hypoagency while outwardly claiming a goal of achieving equality. To which the proponents of that particular variety of feminism reply that females need to be more equal than the others, because they are an underprivileged group.

> Substantively: why should the previous behavior of the reporter matter one bit?

If someone is actively baiting people on the basis of gender, it should have equal consequences regardless of the speaker's gender.

> My sympathy for the fired guy is very limited.

I never said he shouldn't have been fired. I think the problem is trolls can provoke people to the point they get fired and the trolls suffer no repercussions which is a point I should have made clearer, my apologies.

You're right that agency is not zero sum, but in this case we can see privilege as having enhanced agency in some areas (ability to call women names on social media with impunity, ability to command higher salaries, ability to get into better schools, etc.) and oppression as not having agency in those areas.

Resisting oppressive behavior is limiting the agency of privileged people to oppress others.

You can construct some notion of agency that doesn't say these words, but at the end of the day you're reducing the amount of available actions and that is reducing agency. Sometimes it is good to reduce agency.

The old system's punishments are not oppressive in a vacuum. Firing someone is obviously not always oppressive. Oppression is created by a hierarchical social context, not by any isolated act.

You'll note that this person wasn't fired because they spoke out against women objectifying him in his workplace, he was fired because he was using misogynist slurs on social media and generating negative publicity for his company.

It's often difficult for technical people to think of social justice correctly, because we're used to seeing things in terms of very reduced concepts. When we think of social justice we have to think in terms of social relationships, not of individual actions. Actions that are oppressive in one context can be liberatory in others.

Plese educate me on the difference, as (at least in this context) they seem to be interchangable.

[edit]

To clarify, consider a hypothetical total autocracy, where the autocrat makes a decision, and everyone's behavior is altered by various means. By my reasoning, the autocrat has collected everyone's agency to themself.

Maybe it's not a perfect zero-sum, as you have inefficiencies in the system, but it does seem that you reach a point at which increasing one person's agency happens only at the expense of reducing others'