I happened to read the cover story of this week’s New York Magazine.
https://www.thecut.com/article/cancel-culture-high-school-teens.html
I honestly can’t believe this story was written let alone published.
It’s a sad tragedy of a kid who had to face social (but not criminal or academic) consequences for that silly, common and totally understandable coming of age ritual:
You know, committing a sex crime against a minor.
Seriously. The bulk of this article is about how good a guy “Diego” is. It doesn’t tell us much about his victim other than she’s 17 and apparently really, really hot.
Here’s a bit about Diego. The article starts like this:
“Twenty months after he developed a crush, 18 months after he’d fallen in love, Diego, who is enormously appealing but also very canceled, boarded the bus with Jenni and Dave.”
“Diego’s eyes dark, goofy, and sad; his body freshly stretched to almost six feet; his oversize Carhartts ripped on skateboard ramps.”
“…Diego was surprisingly sweet and funny given how much his life had turned to shit.”
“This nightmare began sweetly. Diego — fan of Nivea deodorant, Air Jordans, and Taylor Swift; dragged on annual camping trips by his parents; his father white, his mother is not; 8.5-by-11-inch prints of every school photo of him and his sister hanging in his family’s upstairs hall — started high school and met a girl.”
OK… so… we’ve got quite a bit here humanizing Diego. Let’s see how much time we spend talking about his victim Fiona.
“Fiona was Diego’s first real girlfriend, and she was almost psychedelically beautiful: pale, celestial skin, a whole galaxy of freckles, a supernova of lush hair.”
(NOTE: If I wrote that passage about a 17 year old girl I’d expect to be put on some kind of watch list, not published on the cover of a national magazine, but we aren’t done yet.)
Then we get this gem:
“Then, in the middle of last summer, Diego went to a party. He got drunk and — Diego really fucked up here: Everybody, including Diego, agrees on that, so please consider setting aside judgment for a moment — showed a nude of his beautiful girlfriend to a few kids there.”
So yeah, we’ve got a New York Magazine writer explicitly asking us to PLEASE set aside judgment about a kid who committed a sex crime against a minor while he was drunk. She was super hot and you know, he was drunk so…”
Yeah no. I’m not setting aside judgment here. What he did was fucked up. He deserved serious social consequences and I’m frankly glad he got them.
I’m PISSED he got them as some kind of mob justice vs. any sort of clear correction from the school system, and that’s par for the course. I’m frankly far more inclined to cut the high school kids some slack for clumsily and poorly trying to do the right thing and failing at it than I am a group of professional school administrators who have totally failed at their job.
There are things this article could have been about rather than trying to drum up compassion for the “canceled” sex criminal here. Here are a few:
There’s a discussion to be had about cyberbullying, the casual cruelty we’ve always seen in high schools that’s been taken to a new level thanks to the completely unregulated and uncontrolled tech experiment we’ve been running since the late 90’s. The author doesn’t bring that up though.
There’s a discussion to be had about “Cancel Culture” and the black and white “One move against the groupthink and you’re out” tendency we’re seeing across the political spectrum. She doesn’t talk about that either.
There’s a discussion to be had about how thoroughly schools fail to regulate the on and offline behavior of kids in any way and almost universally empower abusers. Does she talk about that? Barely. There’s a paragraph about Title IX and how it protects school districts from liability vs the students from abuse. Then it quickly pivots back to how bummed Diego is that he suffered severe social consequences for sharing nudes of a minor whose trust he violated.
And of course there’s a discussion to be had about the media’s role in glorifying a culture where violating a 17 year old is seen as “Boys will be boys” and “It’s only locker room sex crimes.” Given that this very article could be Exhibit A in that discussion I doubt we’ll see that from New York Magazine anytime soon.
The rest of the article talks about what a great kid Diego is, how it isn’t fair he lost all his friends and didn’t go to prom, and how bad he feels. The author seems to feel he’s clearly the real victim here.
The article goes on to state that the rest of his school year basically devolved into mob justice.
That’s the predictable result when there’s not any real justice and little if any behavioral controls put on a community. Kids are not noted for their nuance, experience, or wisdom when setting up societal rules. I recall from my own high school days that William Golding had a bit to say on this subject.
The article ends with the revelation that Diego wasn’t “cancelled” at all. He realized that he should stop trying to hang out with kids who didn’t want to hang out with him, and went and met new friends.
(That isn’t editorializing, it’s almost word for word what was in the article:)
The absurdity of the situation caused something in Diego to crack, and that release allowed for new clarity: You’re only canceled if you’re trying to hang out with the people refusing to associate with you. The rest of the world doesn’t know and probably doesn’t care.
He wasn’t charged with a crime and there was nothing on his academic record. He’ll go to college and that will likely be the end of it. I suspect he won’t show nude pictures of anyone again without consent.
What should have happened?
Well here’s an idea: The school could have expelled him, told him they hoped he’d learned a lesson and could get a fresh start elsewhere, and told the rest of the student body that his behavior was not acceptable in their community.
Then they could have spent a lot of time explaining why what Diego did was terrible, provided counseling for Fiona, and then very firmly stated that it wasn’t anyone else’s business, no one in the student body need do anything, and Diego and Fiona were going to go on with their lives.
They didn’t do any of that. From what I can tell the school did nothing but try to cover their own ass. That is absolutely a recipe for mob justice.
What do we do about false accusations? The article mentions a few that do seem to have happened. Again… severe consequences for lying such as expulsion and again, clear communication that the behavior is unacceptable.
What absolutely doesn’t work is the norm we have. The alleged adults are weak and ineffective. The principal ended up resigning as the whole thing got worse and worse. Was it his fault or the school system? Again, there’s a great article topic here that isn’t “Let’s excuse the horny teenager for sharing nudes of a minor.”
Kids aren’t good at setting up a functioning society without help, but they’re also not stupid. It’s the absence of “official” consequences from the alleged adults that got us to the point where the students are doling out their own justice.
This happens every single time when those in charge abdicate their responsibility, whether it’s frontier justice or Robespierre.
Here in LA County where we’re experimenting with an insane “Crime is Legal” policy and I expect it’ll be a short matter of time before we see some vigilante justice for brazen daytime smash and grab theft we’ve been seeing.
Perhaps if the author (and the culture that produced her) spent more time focused on the root of the problem vs trying to avoid holding anyone accountable when someone does something awful, things might change for the better.
Til then I’d be happy if she just stopped writing articles favoring abusers and fetishizing the abused.