From “The Ethicist” column: A perfect example of why capitulating to preferred-pronoun bullying is madness, sending human communication back to grunts and squeaks. Here’s the inquirer’s story:
I went on a date with someone, and we went back to their apartment. In the middle of sex, I caught this person, who uses they/them pronouns, recording me on their phone. For my safety, I chose to pretend I did not notice, as I did not want to be stranded in the middle of the night. In the morning, I confronted them, and they apologized and deleted the video. They said that was their first time recording someone during sex and a spur-of-the-moment decision, albeit a bad one.
When I arrived home I felt more dehumanized than angry, as if I were a sex toy. I told my friends what happened, and they were very upset, and urged me to file a police report. I dismissed this at first, but I looked online and found that capturing imagery of a person’s private parts without their consent, when there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, is a violation of state and federal laws.
I decided to contact my date and inform them of the gravity of their actions and told them never to do it again. I also decided that I didn’t want to press charges. I do not want to subject myself to a lengthy legal process, repeating and reliving this story over and over, as well as having to tell my family or put my life on hold. My friends are concerned that I don’t feel upset enough, and they assume that this was not my date’s first time recording someone, and will not be the last. They think I should file a police report to prevent my date from recording others in the future. I chose to assume that my date is a normal human being who made a stupid decision and does not necessarily deserve a criminal record because of it. By informing my date of the severity of their actions, they now know to never make that mistake again.
My friends don’t agree with my decision, despite understanding why I would not want to press charges. We all agree that it should not be my responsibility to prevent my date from committing future crimes, but they think I should do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do. I fear that they think less of me now because I am ‘‘protecting’’ my date by giving them the benefit of the doubt, and that I’m being selfish because I do not want to sacrifice myself to the legal system on the chance that my date is a morally reprehensible person who will continue to record people without their consent. — Name Withheld, San Diego
Never mind the substance of the question. Making her use the stupid and confounding “they” for “he” or “she” AND filming the sex without her permission? No mercy.
If you care what Prof. Appiah thought, you can go here. I didn’t bother to read his advice because I was so disgusted with “Name Withheld” I couldn’t see straight. This whatever-it-was didn’t respect a sex partner’s dignity and privacy enough to eschew secretly recording their ( I mean two people’s by “their”, because I write sanely) intimate relations, but the victim feels bound to respect this asshole’s pronoun preferences?
People like “Name Withheld” go through life with big, virtual “Kick Me!” signs on their backs. I have no sympathy for them.
Added: After reading Curmie’s essay, it occurred to me that nothing stopped “The Ethicist” or The Times from editing this politically-correct gibberish into something coherent, or not publishing it at all as a matter of principle. “The Ethicist” and the Times are weenies to enable this kind of groveling at the Altar of the Woke.
Ethics Alarms 
Wait–because someone respects someone else’s preferred pronouns, you have no sympathy for them when they are secretly videotaped during sex? Did I understand that right? Seems like a strange position for an ethicist. And grammar isn’t fixed, it’s constantly evolving, like the larger institution, language, to which it belongs. You can make a fetish out of the grammar you learned as a child, like how I still put two spaces at the end of each sentence, but it’s just going to make you unhappy as you age, because inevitably, the language will change. Remember in the 70s, when so many conservatives lost their minds over Ms. BFD. They insisted it be Miss or Mrs., just like they grew up with. But, predictably, they lost. One might as well hold back the tide on the beach as try to stop language from evolving. Even the French failed and they tried REALLY hard to freeze French in amber and preserve it. I have a lot of skepticism about transgenderism, and there are serious policy issues worthy of debate, from MTF transexuals in sports to appropriate age for treatment. And I screw up pronouns all the time unintentionally, but I don’t have a problem with trying to abide by what people request.
No, you didn’t understand it right. His main point was his frustration with people who fail to administer immediate, forceful corrective action to low-lifes like this. He underscored her subservient, wet-noodle mentality by pointing out her tip-toing around the pronoun crap. Really, she should have cut his junk off and made him live up to it, but at the very least he should have been cuffed and thrown into a cell.
Okay, okay, point taken, I should have written, “my sympathy is limited for people like this.”
I abide by what people request in dealing with them directly. When I write, or communicate to others, my duty is to make the content clear. Using “they” to simultaneous mean many people and one in the same story isn’t “language evolving,” it’s language devolving. The idea of language is to communicate, and ambiguous pronouns don’t. Hey, if you want to be called a cheese, I’ll accommodate you; it’s a Golden Rule thing. But I won’t tell a third party that I was arguing with a cheese. That may confuse him (or her).
My lack of sympathy is far more general than how you stated it. The writer is a victim ready, even eager,
to be victimized. She won’t hold people who mistreat her accountable. She’s worried about “ruining the life” of an asshole because of “just one mistake,” which experience tells us that he or she will keep repeating until “they” are shown that there are consequences. Capitulating to woke pronoun bullying is a symptom, not the disease.
Fair enough.
Is it “old man screaming at the clouds” to be disappointed that language, in general, is going pidgin? Communicating less in the name of efficiency (or just as likely, as a thumb in the eye of existing society as the pronoun police are doing) is a loss, just like music evolving from the Brandenburg Concertos to bass-heavy club music is a loss of culture.
First the moral stanidng and personal judegment of this person is highly questionable when she begins her story with “I went on a datea and we went back to thier apartment. While we were having sex….”
Second the attention given during the sex cannot be very personal or intimate if there is occasion to hold up your phone during the coital act.
Third, I agree the use of plural pronouns, improperly, does indeed complicate communication.
How do we know the sex of either of these two sack artists?
Well, we don’t, though the illustration attached to the post suggest that the inquirer is female. “Them”? Who knows.
That occurred to me as well. We don’t from what has been posted, unless there was something in the original column that revealed it.
I think the assumption is that the writer is a woman and the person recording is a man — because stereotypically we’d think of a man being more likely to record sex acts than a woman.
But that’s a stereotype and not evidence.
We really don’t know if the writer was a woman — or, for that matter if they were both women or both men.
Or WNBA players.
What if the ‘other’ was a ‘he’ and was exclusively recording so that he couldn’t subsequently be accused of rape?
For the record, I’m a lifer who is just playing Devils Advocate!
Great question. And the fact that it’s a reasonable question shows how screwed up the latest turns in the sexual revolution have made human relationships. Better would be to have a notary on hand and require a consent form to be signed by both “thems.”
And a consent form would be useless if either of them changed their mind half way through the act.
“In the middle of sex, I caught this person, who uses they/them pronouns, recording me on their phone. For my safety, I chose to pretend I did not notice, as I did not want to be stranded in the middle of the night.”
I have some difficulty with the idea that one would continue to engage is sexual activity once the recording is known. This suggests implied consent given that the activity continued once known. My take is that the person was saying my privacy is not as important as cab fare, or I found out that I wanted to find out if could leverage this to achieve victimhood by telling my friends that I hooked up with a stranger last night.
I have to wonder if some of this is completely made up just to get eyeballs on the column.
You think an ethicist at the New York Times would allow a fake story in his column??? Oh FIE, sir! FIE!