Nobody's Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls

by Carrie Goldberg

According to Le Bon, crowds display more “primitive” behaviors than individuals. They are more violent, ferocious, and spontaneous. Le Bon wrote: “By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization.

In the days following an August 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, several left-leaning activists launched crowdsourcing campaigns on Twitter to dox the torch-wielding Nazis who’d been caught on video chanting racist slogans. One white nationalist was fired from his job after his identity was revealed;

Some of my most powerful tools are my cease and desist letters. They are also fun to write. I always open with, “I represent [my client]. I’ll be taking over negotiations from here. Negotiations just ended.” The cease and desist letters I’ve sent sextortionists have been successful 100 percent of the time.

The American justice system creeps forward at a glacial pace, stymied in part by the efforts of the same powerful men who benefit from laws that protect their interests and forgive their sins.

The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality reported in 2018 that as many as eight in ten women who’ve been severely sexually harassed at work leave their jobs within two years.

Keltner argues that the feeling of being powerful leads men to overestimate their sexual attractiveness (hello, Charlie Rose); reduces empathy and diminishes the capacity to recognize the impact of one’s behavior on other people (here’s looking at you, Matt Lauer); and prompts men to sexualize their work environments (ahem, you mean like watching porn in your judge’s chambers in federal court, perchance?). Keltner, author of The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence, says men in power are more likely to behave impulsively, flouting institutional rules and norms.

Obhi observed that a neural process known as “mirroring” functions differently in the two groups. Mirroring, which is considered instrumental in empathy, typically occurs when a person observes someone else doing an action; for instance, crying. The neural pathways associated with crying light up in the brain of the viewer, as though his or her brain is recognizing what crying feels like. It’s the same mechanism that makes you wince when you see someone else stub their toe. To measure the mirroring response, Obhi and his team had subjects watch a video of a hand squeezing a rubber ball. Obhi found the brains of nonpowerful people lit up in response to the images. Powerful people, Obhi found, did not react as strongly. It’s as though their sympathetic response was on mute.

Sexual trauma lives in your body like a curse. It takes up residence in your stomach, your throat, or the back of your neck. It keeps you awake at night and makes you want to sleep all day. Carrying the pain is exhausting. The burden makes you feel weak. Predators are drawn to that vulnerability. They smell it like a pheromone; I’m sure of it.