Multifarious Threads

Finn Gardiner

The Charge of the “Alright” Brigade

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Pokémon has this one all right, but a lot of people don’t. (And it's not "alot," either.)
Pokémon has this one all right, but a lot of people don’t. (And it’s not “alot,” either.)

[updated 18 October 2020 to include more historical information]

Summary: Avoid using the nonstandard “alright” for the two-word phrase all right. All right predominates in well-edited writing. Most usage writers—people who show authors ways to make their writing more effective—recommend using all right instead of “alright.” Using “alright” in serious writing is like going to a job interview in flip-flops and baggy sweatpants. If you wouldn’t use “thru” or “lite” in a piece, don’t use “alright.”

All right, I’ll admit it: I don’t understand the love affair with “alright.” I’m not convinced of the need for “alright”; the standard all right seems to work perfectly fine. I’ve never seen anyone argue in earnest for accepting the erroneous one-word forms of a lot, as well, of course, or each other in formal writing, even though “alot,” “eachother,” “ofcourse,” and “aswell” are relatively common mistakes. Why, then, does “alright” get the hero’s welcome when “alot,” “aswell,” and other questionable adverbial compounds don’t?

I’m no knee-jerk prescriptive reactionary; I don’t give a shit if you say ain’t or irregardless in informal conversations, and AAVE is fine by me. And I probably won’t say anything to you if you do spell it “alright,” to be honest. Unfortunately, most anti-“alright” arguments are little more than “Because I said so!” I think there are perfectly valid reasons to avoid “alright,” but they’re difficult to find in most usage manuals. The pro-“alright” arguments are even weaker, however. I’ll address the most common “alright”-defending arguments here.

Argument 1: But “alright” is like already and although!

I understand why people spell it “alright” instead of all right. When people hear common phrases, they may process them as units even if they’re not written that way. That kind of thinking results in spurious fusions like “alot” and “ofcourse.” When I was about four, I thought may as well was “mayas well” before I actually saw it in print. “Alright” beguiles the unwary writer through its superficial similarity to standard adverbial compounds like already and although. The analogy is less justifiable than it seems at first glance. The already merger makes sense, since all ready and already have very different meanings. The same applies to always and altogether, neither of which are the same as all ways and all together. “Alright” can be safely replaced with all right in all cases. You can’t, however, replace all all right instances with “alright.” I’m not the first to make this argument. In Good and Bad English, a British usage manual from the mid-twentieth century, the authors make clear that “alright” is merely a substitute for all right without its own meaning:

NEVER—never—write “alright.” It is all wrong (not alwrong), and it stamps a person who uses it as uneducated. “Alright” joins two words only to weaken both. It cannot be defended on the analogy of “almost,” “already,” “albeit,” etc. In these words the fusion of two ideas is complete, whereas “all” and “right” do not lend themselves to this welding process; the two ideas co-operate better than they unite. Even “already” does not express “all ready,” nor does “almost” mean the same thing as “all most.”

“All right” (not allright) is alone correct.

—Wilfred Whitten and Frank Whitaker (1946), Good and Bad English, 3rd ed.

Spelling it “alright” implies a greater degree of abstraction from all right than actually exists. All right can mean either all correct or satisfactory, but its relative OK shares its meanings. The ambiguity exists in the word right, not in the spelling of all right. Fine has a dual identity, too: it can mean “satisfactory” or “exemplary.”

If you look up “alright” in Merriam-Webster or the ODE, it’s shown as a synonym for all right. Modern lexicographers—people who study how words are used and record those uses in dictionaries—record “alright” as a variant of all right, but it usually comes with a usage note saying that it’s less appropriate for formal writing than the two-word form. I’d go further and say alright shouldn’t be used at all. “Alright” is as different from all right as center is from centre, though regional spelling differences are defensible on cultural grounds. “Alright,” however, is no more acceptable than thru and irregardless are. Dictionaries show how people actually use words, not how they should use them, which is why common nonstandard expressions such as “alright,” “irregardless,” and “ain’t” appear as entries.

All right doesn’t function the same way as already and although. All right is short for the expressions “all is right” or “is all right?” All is a pronoun in this sense, and right an adjective. According to Wilfred Whitten, all right

…is very modern English, and […] the earliest example of its use quoted in the “New English Dictionary” is from the “Pickwick Papers” (1837): […] “‘It’s all right, Sam; quite all right.’” The origin of the phrase was undoubtedly its common use by the guards of mail-coaches. Charles Lamb has a note on it in his “Table Talk,” published in the Athenaeum in 1824. He refers to the cheerful recurrence of the cry of the London omnibus conductors—“All’s Right.” (Wilfred Whitten, 1924, Is It Good English and Other Matters)

Nowadays, it’s an adjective or adverb that behaves like other intensifier + right combinations such as too right and quite right. Neither of these expressions has become tooright and quiteright. Furthermore, already, always, and although are fixed expressions that can’t be treated as separate words; all right can. The all and right of‘all right can often be replaced with other words without altering the meaning. It’s easy to imagine the idiom being totally right instead of all right, for example, when using the phrase to signal agreement, correctness, or acceptability. “That’s totally right!” “Are you totally right?” “Totally right. Let’s move on.” The same applies to all correct, the source phrase for the ubiquitous OK. Fine would work, too: “Are you all fine?” “The answers are all fine.” If all right were an inseparable phrase like already, although, or always, we wouldn’t be able to joke about it being “all wrong” or “alwrong.” We wouldn’t be able to replace all with totally or right with fine. We can’t change always to “no ways” or already to “all unprepared.”

Already had a reason to be distinguished from all ready, but “alright” is no different from all right. It’s an impostor that apes the appearance of a legitimate word by dropping the second l. If people were routinely writing “allright” instead, I can’t imagine anyone would give it the time of day.

Argument 2: Well, I like “alright” better than all right!

I must confess that I hate “alright.” Hate hate haaaaaate. (Unless it’s in a song title, then I’ll let it slide. But all right still looks better.) I think it’s an ungainly Frankenstein’s monster of a “word.” But my opinion is far from universal, and “alright” has its fans. There’s no accounting for taste, I guess, but if you must use “alright,” be prepared to defend your decision.Convention makes the use of “alright” more trouble than it’s worth. For at least 120 years, usage commentators, editors, and stylists have warned against the use of “alright” for all right, and copyeditors (or subeditors) routinely change “alright” to all right. Though it’s common in unedited prose, fiction written in non-standard English and some popular media, it’s rare in printed books. I’ve only read a handful of books containing “alright,” and countless ones with all right.

While “alright” appears frequently in unedited writing and popular media, it’s still considered nonstandard. And most people who spell it “alright” don’t even know that it’s supposed to be all right, anyway; usage-minded “alright”-ers are rather less common.

Sometimes I worry I’m fighting a losing battle, but then again, people have been trying to make “alright” standard for more than a hundred years. I don’t think all right is going anywhere anytime soon.

Moreover, the majority of British and American literary and journalistic style manuals actively proscribe the use of “alright.” Journalists consider saving space when devising standards for spelling, punctuation and typesetting; if “alright” were worth the trouble, journalistic style guides would have countenanced it years ago. The editors of style guides and usage manuals have accepted other compounds over the past century—the formerly hyphenated today and tomorrow come to mind—which suggests that there may be reasonable grounds for rejecting “alright.” Plenty of spellings have multiple acceptable variants, but “alright” doesn’t pass muster.

The following style manuals forbid the use of “alright.”

  • The Associated Press Stylebook, the standard manual for American journalistic writing, says, “all right, never alright.” The rule still stands in the 2021 version, released only a month ago. Newspapers love to save space, but they’re not trimming the space and “l” from all right to do it.
  • BBC News isn’t particularly stuffy with usage, and it’s been quicker to adopt certain one-word compounds (e.g., the positively Teutonic “styleguide”) than other outlets have been, but “alright” is still off limits. The wording is similar: “all right, never alright, except for the television programme It’ll Be Alright on the Night.” The emphasis is theirs.
  • The US Government Printing Office’s style manual lists all right as the preferred spelling.
  • The New York Times is no friendlier to “alright”: “all right, never alright.”
  • The Chicago Manual of Style says that all right should be written as two words, and to “avoid alright, which has long been regarded as nonstandard.”
  • The Economist, which lists all right among its two-word phrases.
  • the UK’s Daily Telegraph (aka the Torygraph), which dubs “alright” an “abomination.” I wouldn’t go that far. I think John Scalzi would, though.

Some style manuals, such as The Guardian’s, equivocate about the acceptability of “alright,” but even these will note that “alright” is unacceptable to traditionalists. As far as I know, no style guide recommends “alright” over all right, and I’ve only seen one—the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s manual—that explicitly allows both. All right is unimpeachable, but “alright” is a much dicier proposition.

If you still really want to use “alright” despite all the warnings, be consistent about it. Don’t use all right in one paragraph and “alright” in the next. Go big or go home, y’all.

Conclusion: “Alright” isn’t all right, but who am I to stop you?

My verdict: Don’t even bother with “alright.” It’s a distraction. Would you use “alot,” “eachother,” or “aswell”? Then don’t use “alright.” Rest assured I won’t correct you if you use “alright” in a Facebook post. Promise. Pinkie swear. I was just talking to a friend the other day who spelled it “alright.” Want to know what I said to them about it? Absolutely nothing, because I’m not an asshole. If I’m editing your work professionally, however, it’s going to be all right. In these unprecedentedly troubling and uncertain times (insert mawkish piano music here), I think we need a full-bodied all right, in any case. All right? Good.

Nonprofit/Advocacy Jargon and Plain-Language Equivalents

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Sometimes nonprofit organisations and advocacy groups use language that’s hard to understand. This even happens when organisations work with people who have a hard time understanding the kinds of words they use. What do capacity-building and stakeholders mean? This is a list of words that these groups sometimes use. I’ve explained what these things mean in simple words. I will be updating this list every so often, so make sure to check back.

Best practices

Doing things that work. That’s what it’s supposed to mean, anyway.

Capacity-building

Teaching, training, education or mentoring. Sometimes ‘capacity-building’ can also mean hiring more people in an organisation so they can get more done. Just say what you mean: teaching, hiring and mentoring are much clearer than ‘capacity-building’.

Development

When organisations talk about ‘development’, they often mean ‘raising money’. They use the money to help run their organisations. They can hire more people with extra money. They can also get new supplies. They can help more people if they have more resources.

Dissemination

Sharing information with people or organisations.

Engagement

Getting people’s attention.

Interventions

Ways to help people. Sometimes these interventions really do help, but some can hurt. It’s important to listen to the people you’re trying to help.

Knowledge transfer

Teaching, training or education.

Knowledge-translation activities

Making things easier for people to understand. A kind of teaching. Some examples of knowledge translation include plain-language versions of articles, videos, and infographics.

Stakeholders

People who care about what you’re doing, or vampire hunters. Stakeholder engagement just means talking to people who care about your project, or getting them interested in what you’re doing.

Strategic planning

Planning.

Technical assistance

Answering people’s questions to help them run their organisations. Not to be confused with tech support. You won’t be able to call Microsoft Technical Assistance to fix MS Word.

This article on the Southern Poverty Law Center is everything that’s wrong with class-reductionist leftism

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A screenshot of the Southern Poverty Law Center's website
A screenshot of the Southern Poverty Law Center's website

Last year, Nathan J Robinson of Current Affairs published an article entitled ‘The Southern Poverty Law Center is Everything That’s Wrong with Liberalism’. While the first part of the article is excellent—it’s a well-sourced exposé that highlights the flaws of the SPLC under its former head, Morris Dees—the second part left me wanting, to say the least. Robinson’s reporting of the endemic racism, sexual harassment, venality and hypocrisy of the SPLC’s management are legitimate criticisms of a deeply flawed organisation that has often failed to fulfil its ostensible mission. I even agree that the use of the Hate Map as a fundraising tool is deeply cynical. That said, however, Robinson’s critique of the SPLC’s hate map exemplifies an insidious form of class-reductionist leftism and unexamined privilege that diminishes the threat some of these profiled groups present.

Robinson’s criticism of the SPLC’s hate-group designations omits a key part of the definition they list on the website. He says:

One problem here is that the definition of “hate” is very unclear. It supposedly means having “beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people,” but in that case I’m a member of a hate group myself, since I despise bourgeois liberals.

That’s not the full definition. From the 4 October 2017 SPLC FAQ about hate groups, archived on 21 February 2019:

The Southern Poverty Law Center defines a hate group as an organization that – based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities – has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. We do not list individuals as hate groups, only organizations.

That’s a pretty glaring omission. He doesn’t even have the excuse that the FAQ was updated, because the line about immutable characteristics was there over a year before Robinson published this piece. He also failed to mention that the SPLC uses similar guidelines to the federal government’s definition of a hate crime:

Traditionally, FBI investigations of hate crimes were limited to crimes in which the perpetrators acted based on a bias against the victim’s race, color, religion, or national origin. In addition, investigations were restricted to those wherein the victim was engaged in a federally protected activity. With the passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, the Bureau became authorized to also investigate crimes committed against those based on biases of actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or gender.

This is disingenuous. ‘Bourgeois liberal’ isn’t an immutable characteristic. Race is. Sexual orientation and gender identity often are. Robinson also claims that most of the groups listed on the SPLC’s well-known Hate Map don’t belong there, mostly because they’re skeleton crews of working-class racists with a small following and minimal influence. He writes,

If you trawl through the Hate Map for a little while like I did, you may also feel uncomfortable for another reason. Most of the people they’re listing as threats seem as if they are poor and unschooled. I bet if you compared the average annual salary of the SPLC staff to the average salary of the people in these hate groups, you’d find a massive class divide. Whether it’s poor Black people joining weird sects like the United Nuwaupians, or poor white people getting together and calling themselves things like the “Folkgard of Holda & Odin,” these are people on society’s margins. A lot of this seems to be educated liberals having contempt for and fear of angry rednecks.

While this does apply to many of the groups he highlighted in his article—a tiny cadre of neo-Nazis going on canoeing trips, an old Confederate-memorabilia seller—this doesn’t hold true universally. Robinson’s characterisation is ill-fitting for the very first group he mentions: the Family Research Council, which he describes as a ‘mainstream conservative’ organisation that has disputed its inclusion on the SPLC’s hate map. What he fails to acknowledge is that mainstream American conservatism would be considered far-right or outright fascist in other countries. The FRC is far from being a gaggle of harmless old yokels who haven’t updated their websites since 1995; they’re a well-funded Christian Right organisation that is hellbent on stripping LGBTQ people of our equal rights. They promote conversion therapy and conflate homosexuality with child molestation. The FRC’s head, Tony Perkins, has been an adviser to Donald Trump since his election, and was named chair of the US Council for International Religious Freedom in 2019. An organisation with White House access is not a bunch of ‘angry rednecks’. Robinson is also aware that American political views tend to skew to the right compared to those espoused in other countries, making his characterisation of the FRC as being ‘mainstream conservatives’ especially inappropriate. An organisation that dedicates itself to limiting others’ rights based on immutable characteristics based on outright falsehoods is the very definition of a hate group.

The Family Research Council isn’t the only group that gets off scot-free in Robinson’s article: he characterises Daryush ‘Roosh V’ Valizadeh’s Return of Kings, labelled a male supremacist group by the SPLC, as the work of a small-time pick-up artist and his friends, but that grossly minimises his reach. David Futrelle of We Hunted the Mammoth has catalogued Valizadeh’s abhorrent behaviour for years. The man peddled manuals on how to rape women for years before his conversion to conservative Orthodox Christianity. In 2015, Valizadeh sicced his followers on Aurelie Nix, a feminist activist who successfully campaigned to cancel a demonstration he was planning to hold in Montreal. Roosh is not harmless. Roosh has shed his old pick-up-artist ways, but he’s still a snake-oil-peddling misogynist, homophobe and antisemite. I don’t give a shit that Roosh is ‘just one guy’. He built a following selling books that glorified sexual abuse. He’s encouraged rape and death threats against women and their allies who stand against him. By describing Roosh as a ‘pick-up artist and his friends’, Robinson is in effect telling his victims, ‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about a man who encourages rape and death threats.’

Robinson’s accusation that the SPLC is a group of ‘educated liberals’ targeting ‘angry rednecks’ exemplifies the class reductionism that is common among some progressives and leftists. There are plenty of working-class white people who abhor racism. Their class does not absolve them of their responsibility to their fellow human beings. This claim is the classic ‘Trump voters voted for him because of their economic anxiety’ canard. Robinson’s claim that uneducated white nationalists are on the margins of society, and the insinuation that they are sympathetic figures, makes him look as though he’s making excuses for racists. Some of these people may be poor, but it doesn’t matter how much money they have if they’re going to kill me.

(Also, Robinson can’t speak for the working class: he seems to have grown up upper-middle-class and attended elite private universities like Brandeis, Yale Law School and Harvard, all of which are in the US News and World Report Top 50. It would be one thing if he’d grown up working class, but that’s not his experience. This dude is a lifelong member of the fucking bourgeoisie himself! I myself have a lot of educational privilege, but I grew up working class—my father was an enlisted airman and my mother did random clerical and retail jobs. Neither has a college degree. My parents had lower-middle-class aspirations, but I think they were still working class. My grandparents were unambiguously working class.)

Robinson has posted excellent long-form takedowns of the odious conservative talking head Ben Shapiro and the now-disgraced Jordan Peterson. Shapiro is a bog-standard Republican who spouts the same nonsense as Ted Cruz or any other rank-and-file GOP functionary. He espouses similar views to those of the ‘mainstream conservative’ Family Research Council, though he’s Orthodox Jewish rather than evangelical Christian. Jordan Peterson isn’t a large organisation; he’s a Canadian psychology professor with an online cult following. Why are Shapiro and Peterson a threat, while Roosh is just an insignificant nutjob with a blog?

It’s clear that Robinson neither knew nor cared about the real-life harm that the FRC and Roosh V have caused. If he had, he would have found out that Roosh sold rape manuals, or that the FRC has worked assiduously to impose theocratic norms on a pluralistic society by abrogating the right of LGBTQ people to participate fully within the community. He would have known that Roosh used Gamergate-like tactics to silence those who opposed him.

Finally, Robinson claims he knows the biggest threat to people of colour:

This is not to say that neo-Nazis aren’t fucking terrifying, or that they don’t pose any threat. The Daily Stormer is a real thing, and there is a lot of dangerous white supremacist nonsense believed by a lot of people. But the “hate” focus is all wrong: The biggest threats to people of color do not come from those who “hate” them, but from those (like the contemporary Republican Party) who are totally indifferent to whether they live or die. This is the frightening thing about contemporary racism: It does not come waving the Confederate flag, it comes waving the American flag.

As far as I know, Robinson is white or white-passing. He cannot speak for those of us who encounter racism day in and day out. This is the kind of rank paternalism he’d happily attribute to ‘bourgeois liberals’. You are not our voice. His definitions of real threats to PoC reflect his cluelessness. He wrote this not long after the Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ rally, the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, the Christchurch shooting and other incidents in which ‘lone-wolf’ far-right domestic terrorists gave vent to their hate by murdering people in broad daylight. Indifferent Republicans may pose a systemic threat through their promotion of deregulation, robber-baron tactics, healthcare rationing and other capitalistic evils, but domestic terror attacks are designed to make us afraid to go out of the house lest we be gunned down by hatemongers with far-too-accessible guns. Hate crimes are intimidation tactics that are designed to whip us into submission, as lynchings were in the post-Reconstruction, pre-Civil Rights era. Subprime lenders are a threat. So are neo-Nazis. It’s not an either/or proposition. (And in many cases, the plutocrats and hatemongers are one and the same: Steve Bannon was an investment banker at Goldman Sachs; the father-daughter duo of conservative billionaires Robert and Rebekah Mercer bankroll Breitbart; Trump was born with a silver spoon in his mouth; Richard Spencer comes from a rich family). Furthermore, he highlights the Republicans as a significant threat to PoC while pooh-poohing the threat of the ‘mainstream conservative’ Family Research Council. If the Republicans are a threat, so are their think tanks, especially when their operatives have the ear of the President of the United States. The Family Research Council is the very epitome of suit-and-tie bigotry. I do agree, however, that contemporary racism comes waving the American flag. It can also come waving Confederate flags or swastikas.

It’s one thing to criticise the SPLC for its objectively abhorrent actions; it’s another to cover for bad-faith actors like Roosh and the Family Research Council. While Robinson has performed a valuable public service through his enumeration of the Dees-era SPLC’s faults, his attempts to speak for people of colour, co-optation of working-class narratives, and minimisation of the threats posed by the Family Research Council, Roosh V and other far-right agitators, are ill-advised.

This is a public plea to the author: Please acknowledge that some of the organisations listed as hate groups by SPLC are real threats. Recognise your own position in this argument: an upper-middle-class white man does not have the direct experience to deliver a verdict on what is or is not harmful to PoC and working-class people. And finally, do your research to avoid making these kinds of errors in the future. We’re all fallible. But this is irresponsible journalism that downplays the threat of far-right groups and online ‘thought leaders’.

7 Observations about Super Tuesday and the Democratic Primary Race

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A close-up photo of a finger with an 'I voted' sticker on it. Photo by Parker Johnson on Unsplash.
A close-up photo of a finger with an ‘I voted’ sticker on it. Photo by Parker Johnson on Unsplash.
  1. I voted for Warren last Thursday, a few days before both Klobuchar and Buttigieg dropped out. If they’d already dropped out and moved their support to Biden, I might have voted for Bernie instead to prevent Biden from being nominated. When I voted, though, there were multiple choices for progressive and moderate candidates. I live in Massachusetts, where the primary was actually competitive.
  2. I think all the major candidates have flaws that have prevented them from consolidating the entirety of the Democratic base. Biden is…Biden. Sanders had difficulty attracting older Black voters. Warren failed to respond adequately to the issues surrounding her claims of Indigenous heritage. Older Black voters tend to vote strategically and went for Biden thinking he was the most electable. Younger voters went for Sanders. While Warren’s plans would have benefited people of all social backgrounds, the media’s erasure of her candidacy, Sanders’s stronger name recognition and Biden’s connections made it more difficult for her to make inroads with constituencies beyond her urban, highly educated base. While Obama was less progressive in practice than he was in theory, he was remarkable in his appeal to the majority of the Democratic base in ways that Warren, Clinton and Sanders lack.
  3. While Biden is a lacklustre candidate, he is still less likely to appoint hard-right Supreme Court justices, pick actively destructive Cabinet members, or stoke the ire of racist domestic terrorists who act in his name. I’m not excited about voting for him if he becomes the nominee, but I will vote for him to stop Trump’s rapacious attacks on democracy, civil rights and inclusion. I will not vote third party, since I would rather hold Biden accountable than continue to scramble to protect our basic needs under an emboldened Trump. Blunting Trump’s influence can in turn blunt the influence of the alt-right. I felt similarly about Hillary Clinton; while a Clinton presidency wouldn’t make the widespread systemic change that American society needs, she would have still been preferable to Trump or any of the other Republican candidates.
  4. Neither Biden nor Sanders should have run this cycle. I voted for Sanders in 2016, but the circumstances in which he ran in 2016 are different from those of 2020. Biden’s time has passed, and Sanders’s campaigning style makes more sense when we’re talking about building on the progress a Democratic president has already made. He’s running after Trump now, not Obama. Also, Biden and Sanders are the oldest candidates in the race, surpassing even their fellow septuagenarians Warren and Trump. Bernie and Biden are pushing 80 years old.
  5. I think a combination of factors hurt both Sanders and Warren in the primaries. Misogyny undoubtedly hurt Warren. Klobuchar and Buttigieg dropping out allowed the moderate vote to be consolidated. Bloomberg made sure everyone knew who he was by dumping hundreds of millions of dollars in to the race. Though he only won American Samoa, he was still able to scoop up delegates who would have otherwise gone to other candidates (probably Biden, Buttigieg or Klobuchar). And as I mentioned before, both Sanders and Warren struggled to reach some important demographics, despite their policies being more favourable to them than Biden’s or Bloomberg’s.
  6. I think Trump can be defeated, but only if the nominee takes active steps to reconcile with the other factions of the Democratic Party that didn’t back their candidacy. Obama did this by choosing Biden as a VP and nominating Clinton. Biden himself can do something similar by choosing Warren, Stacey Abrams or another progressive as his VP, and appointing other progressives like Bernie as advisers or cabinet members.
  7. Whatever you might think about Warren, I think she was instrumental in neutralising the threat of a Bloomberg presidency. Bloomberg would have only been marginally better than Trump. Even Biden is better than he is.

Youth Rights and Wrongs

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As a teenager and young adult, I used to be active in online youth rights advocacy. I wanted to see young people be treated like human beings, not their parents’ property. I was involved with the National Youth Rights Association from the ages of 17 to 21, but I left in frustration after growing tired of unchecked racism, misogyny, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia amongst some of the membership. I felt as though I was constantly on the defensive, as though I had to prove I was equally deserving of civil rights. One of the only people who actually managed to get banned from the NYRA forums for an extended period of time was an outright Nazi who adulated Hitler and ranted about the “Zionist-owned government.” If you managed not to be a Nazi, the erstwhile executive director would let you stay around in the interest of protecting the Open Marketplace of Ideas. In particular, misogyny, xenophobia, ableism, and transphobia went almost entirely unchecked. News flash: people defending behaviour-modification programmes, spewing vitriol about queer people, or claiming that women are inferior aren’t acting in good faith. They want to be monopolists in the market of ideas. In retrospect, the proliferation of unchecked bigotry on the NYRA forums feels rather like Twitter and Facebook nowadays. Free-speech absolutism can result in Nazis, alt-righters, and MRAs pushing everyone else away. It’s a textbook demonstration of Karl Popper’s tolerance paradox.

The youth rights movement didn’t just have a problem with proto-alt-righters and MRAs. There were plenty of people who hung out in youth rights spaces who made excuses for child molestation, calling it “youth liberation.” There are a few radical youth rights activists who repeatedly advocate for the “right” for adults to have sex with children and underage teenagers. It doesn’t take a lot of research to find out there’s a clear reason why society frowns upon so-called intergenerational sex, and it’s not because opponents of child molestation are a bunch of uptight prudes. When I was involved with NYRA, I remember seeing a fair number of adults in their 20s making sexual advances to younger teenagers. People routinely defended teachers who slept with their students. These people weren’t part of NYRA’s leadership and the forum moderators—including me—tried their best to shut down discussion of adult-child sex, but it was still a recurring problem.

Why do people make these arguments?

I suspect that many of these radical youth rights advocates were labelled precocious, gifted, or prodigies as children. Their atypical development unconsciously influences their attitudes toward children in general, even if typically developing children have radically different experiences. If you learned how to read at 3 years old, you may very well think that it’s reasonable to encourage 4-year-olds to sue their abusers; after all, since they knew how to do it, so should other children. If you followed politics intently at 10 years old, you may think that all 10-year-olds can understand political discourse geared toward typical adult audiences. If you had the same reading comprehension as an adult at 8 years old, you might think, “Hey, if I can understand this stuff, so can every other child.” This kind of reasoning leads them to think that allowing 7-year-olds to file lawsuits against adults who have molested them is a viable option for protecting them from harm. This is the same kind of justification that child abusers make to themselves: “She’s so mature for her age.” “He’s intelligent enough to get it.” Even if these advocates may not intend to sound like child molesters trying to rationalise their harmful acts, they end up using the same self-centred arguments. It’s the old “mental age” concept lurking underneath: if precocious children can consent to sexual acts, does that mean that adults with intellectual disabilities with more life experience cannot because of their lower “mental age”?

Of course, some of these molestation defenders could just be wannabe child abusers themselves. In any case, if you think Roy Moore, Michael Jackson, Kevin Spacey, and Jimmy Savile did nothing wrong, there’s probably something deeply flawed with your argument. On top of that, there are also organisations that actively lobby to discredit the narratives of child abuse survivors by labelling efforts to protect children from predators as “moral panics” or “hysteria.” One can oppose Perverted-Justice-style vigilantism and still advocate for children’s safety.

Child sexual abuse is an unambiguous moral ill. Couching the right of adults to molest children and adolescents with impunity in the cloak of youth rights is not youth liberation. Civil rights encompass both positive and negative freedoms—freedoms to and freedoms from—and children and adolescents have the right to avoid exploitation by self-serving adults.