The first time I saw the hashtag #stopasianhate it was at the bottom of an email with a brief mention of ‘shootings in Atlanta.’ I thought, what a shame, another shooting – and this time it’s a hate crime against Asian-americans. I quickly googled ‘atlanta shooting’ and read the first couple articles that popped up. My immediate observation was that the very first article said something to the effect of ‘the suspect says race was not a motivating factor in the shooting.’ If that’s the case then what’s this about #stopasianhate? Upon further investigation, I would read that the suspect had a sex addiction, a porn addiction and that he had bought the gun used in the crime just hours before, but still nothing giving credence to the aforementioned hashtag. The president and vice president also commented on the issue. So why the hashtag at all? No idea.
There are a couple disturbing things that immediately warrant attention in the shooting in my opinion: 1) that the suspect was sex addicted and felt the victims were a ‘temptation he wanted to eliminate’ and 2) that the gun the man bought was purchased just hours before. Namely, the two things we should be talking about are: are we taking sex and porn addiction (not to mention mental health) seriously and should it really be legal to get a gun on such a short notice? Yet the response to the crime is a hashtag #stopasianhate – something doesn’t seem right here. Just days after the shooting we’ve already jumped on the bandwagon of #stopasianhate and consequently made that the focus of the crime. It’s natural for us to latch onto something after a tragic crime of this sort, to want to know where we should focus our efforts to stop such a thing from happening again, but how did #stopasianhate become the focus? There’s no evidence this was a hate crime. Are we really that transfixed on race in America that we want to see it as causal in every situation whether it’s there or not? The suspect said race was not a motivating factor, why shouldn’t we believe him? It’s not like he has anything to lose.
So where’d this come from? There’s an idea that the emergence of this new coronavirus from China has generated a new wave of xenophobia directed towards Asian Americans. Is this true? Likely, but how serious is the problem? This article references a study (really just a collection of data but valuable nonetheless). That study done by the Center for Study of Hate and Extremism can be found here. The data shows that hate crimes against Asians have risen an average of 150% from 2019 to 2020. I’ve attached the figures shown below.
We can see that in the some cities hate crimes against Asian Americans has in fact risen, but what does this 150% increase really look like? In New York, where the amount of Anti-Asian hate crimes have increased the most, the amount rose from 3 to 28. Now that’s an 833% increase, which does seem significant, but in a place with 8.3 million people 28 is not a huge number. That’s not to downplay the significance of hate crimes, any amount is too many – but it doesn’t seem to be an epidemic. It’s also worth mentioning that this data is just comparing 2 years, so we don’t have a good idea of what the year to year fluctuations are. The study also shows a line graph of the amount of hate crimes against Asians going back since 1996, but this data is from a different source (FBI instead of CHSE), and it doesn’t include the year 2020.
Additionally, that data does not break out the rate of hate crimes by city, so it’s a little hard to compare. All those points being considered we can see in that graph that there are year to year fluctuations that are quite large. From 2001 to 2002 the rate dropped from about 375 to about 225, that’s a change in the right direction at least, but it illustrates the point that we can’t rule out the possibility that the 2019-2020 change seen in the first table is within the noise of the year to year fluctuations, and therefore more or less random. One final piece of data from this study I’d like to take a look at is the survey asking people, “If you were out in public, how concerned would you be about coming close to someone who is of Asian ancestry?”
This survey appears (at least in context with the rest of the data) to suggest that people are experiencing levels of xenophobia against Asian Americans that is relatively high: 24% of people responding that they would be “Very Concerned” or “Somewhat Concerned.” The interesting thing is that the results didn’t really change much depending on the political party that the survey participants identified as. This in my mind indicates that the results may indicate a fear of contracting COVID-19 from people that they may believe to be from China. Since the virus originated in China, this would be a rational concern. Considering the poll was taken on April 28, 2020, when the rates of death and the expected outcome of the pandemic were uncertain to say the least, this explanation makes more sense to me than the alternative: that this survey detected racism against Asian Americans. One would expect that people outside of America would have been similarly concerned to come in close contact with someone that looked American at the time when America’s coronavirus rates were highest.
Asian Americans have the highest median income of any ethnic group in the United States. While that’s obviously not the sole determining factor in quality of life, it does not seem that there are many barriers in America to Asian Americans succeeding. Asian Americans seem to also be the least likely to be offenders in violent crime (see Table 1) and the least likely to be victims of violent crime (see Table 14). All these figures withstanding, let’s assume that xenophobia directed towards Asian people is on the rise, and let’s assume, as many suggest, that this has increased because of Trump’s response to the pandemic. That still gives us no reason at all to call the Atlanta shooting a hate crime against Asians. There’s no evidence for it. So why #Stopasianhate, why not #stopquickgunsales or #stopppornaddiction? Could not porn’s degradation of women and proclivity to make men see them as objects have had something to do with this? The suspect bought the gun hours before, why aren’t we talking about common sense gun law reform? Is gun control no longer an edgy enough political fetish? Additionally, it’s not even clear that this movement had been gaining traction and that this event was the catalyst for it to rise to popularity. #Stopasianhate had pretty much no popularity prior to this incident. See the google trends search below (y-axis is relative interest over the time period).
We can see that while “asian hate crime” began to see some popularity beginning in February, #stopasianhate was virtually non-existent until around the end of February. Now again, this is not to downplay the tragedy of the Atlanta shooting, in fact it’s to highlight it’s significance even more. If we throw this in with other Anti-Asian hate crimes, we’re missing the point. If we try to address the problem with a solution that’s not even congruent with the motivation for the crime (again – no evidence this was racially motivated), how do we expect any of our efforts to address the problem will be successful. So then why #StopAsianHate?
The reason as I see it is this, #stopasianhate draws attention to the person hash-tagging it. It says look at me, I’m opposed to mass shootings of innocent Asian people, but the truth of the matter is though, that unless you’re a homicidal psychopath – so is everyone else. #Stopasianhate in addition to glorifying the person who types it and proudly displays it on their wall, also requires no action or conversation on the part of the person posting it. Does it require difficult conversations about Asian racism in America? Not likely. Does it require us to look for steps we can take to prevent such a catastrophic event from occurring again? No, it doesn’t. Regardless of the race of the people involved (which were not all Asian), #stopasianhate doesn’t do anything to move towards solutions. Why? Because there’s no evidence that Asian hatred was involved in this crime. If evidence arises showing it was involved then so be it, but there’s no point in jumping to conclusions only because it fits our narrative and tendency to see all events through a racial lens. Even if the crime was racially motivated, how will #stopasianhate do anything to improve the situation? No one who actually hates Asians will ever be swayed away from their hatred by a hashtag. #StopAsianHate is just a self gratifying way to make one feel virtuous and better about the whole situation – it’s only natural. We have to respond some kind of way. We have to do something in response to such a tragedy, to feel like we’re taking some action to improve the world, but let’s at least take a second to get our facts straight, and let’s try to think intelligently about the situation.
What intervention could best help this problem? Gun control, raising awareness about porn addiction and its effects, helping people seek treatment? Many have suggested that Long’s ‘porn addiction’ was an out growth of purity culture, but that’s just an easy way to dismiss the problem and turn it into a critique of religion. While there are certainly issues with purity culture’s tendency to see sex and sexual feelings outside of marriage as evil, there’s no shortage of evidence on the ill-effects of porn use and of the level of the prevalence of porn addiction among young adults (and younger) males in the modern world. One study estimated that around 30% of males (average age 29.5) were addicted (their use was ‘problematic’) to online sexual activities, of which the vast majority was pornography in some form.
While it’s a stretch to say that porn could motivate someone to commit such a crime – it’s not a stretch to say that porn teaches men to devalue women and to treat them as objects that can be used for pleasure. If it’s not hurting, it’s at least not helping the situation. How can we really have a serious conversation about the fetishization and sexualization of asian women without discussing the degree to which porn reinforces these stereotypes? This Washington Post article was skeptical of porn having anything to do with it, but considering that the suspect was allegedly on his way to commit more crimes against businesses tied to pornography when he was caught, it seems like this was an obvious factor. Is this just a conspiracy by the police department to redirect the focus against the real motivation of the crime: Asian hatred? Not likely. The article from the Washington Post cites the DSM’s failure to include sex addiction as support for skepticism about porn addiction, however, this very move in 2013 by the APA (American Psychological Association) to not include ‘hyper-sexuality disorder’ (porn addiction wasn’t formally considered) even though it was suggested by the DSM-5’s Work Groups has been criticized academically. Later in this article, it states “In a peer-reviewed study at the University of California at Los Angeles, Prause found significant differences in the brain’s response to sex when compared to behaviors like smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol or gambling.” The link to the study is here. The irony is that at least five different research articles have tied this very paper cited in the Post article to supporting the porn addiction model. (Study 1, Study 2, Study 3, Study 4, Study 5)
There are in fact studies that link brain changes found in addictions to sex addiction. The website “Your Brain On Porn” tracks studies of this nature and has a list of 100’s of studies that support the evidence of porn and internet addictions. A review of studies on the subject states that, “The review leads to the conclusion that Internet pornography addiction fits into the addiction framework and shares similar basic mechanisms with substance addiction.”
Additionally, the Post article’s logic falls short because one of the people he quotes give credence to the idea that sex/porn addiction is real. Reference the article for context. The article quotes Robert Weiss, who works for the Seeking Integrity Programs treatment center in Los Angeles:
But he also cast doubt on Long’s claims for a different reason: The patients he treats in Los Angeles show there is no connection between sex addiction and violence, he said.
“They’ve ruined their lives, their partners’ lives, and their families’ lives, all because they can’t control their behavior,” he said. “But they’re not killing people.”
Washington Post
So these people have “ruined their lives, partner’s lives, and their families’ lives, all because they can’t control their behavior”, yet they don’t have a sex addiction. I’m no expert, but if those aren’t characteristics of addiction, I don’t know what is.
In fact, one of the characteristics of addiction is ‘continued use despite harmful consequences’ (from drugabuse.gov). Is not the above statement about sex addicts ruining their lives an example of that? The DSM-5 similarly lists ‘impaired control’ as a characteristic of addiction.
It’s worth mentioning that heavy porn use has been implicated in predicting sexual aggression. And if that’s still not enough to convince one of the possibility of porn use having an effect, porn use can escalate to things much worse. Gabriel Dance in his interview with Sam Harris suggested that much of the rise of the popularity of child pornography online could be attributed to the tastes of ‘normal’ porn users escalating to illegal material when legal porn is no longer satisfying. Research supports this idea (Study 1) (Study 2). In the former study, 5.2% (33/630) of the subjects polled reported use of child pornography.
So it’s at least possible that porn use can motivate people to do illegal things, while we are fortunate as a society that this does not happen for the vast majority of people, it’s still something we should be aware of.
Another Washington Post article criticized the faith-based addiction treatment that Aaron Long received. It mentions that Long used a flip phone to avoid pornography use, again further evidence that at least he believed he had a problem. This article demonstrates among other things that Long obviously had a problem, and would hate himself for indulging his sexual desires. The truth is that if porn and sex addiction were well recognized phenomenon, perhaps people such as Aaron Long would not have had to rely on unproven methods to overcome his situation. The book ‘Your Brain on Porn’ touches on this (emphasis added):
It would be reckless to claim that the full story is known, as far as the brain chemistry of addiction is concerned. But this biological frame of neuroplasticity – and the computer analogy in the idea of rebooting – gets much closer to the facts of the matter than either conservative angst about visual sexual stimuli per se or liberal complacency about the harmlessness of porn. Interestingly, people (including religious ones) on the forums we monitor often make rapid progress in rebooting after they re-frame their porn challenge in biological terms:
I no longer see my addiction as the influence of demons or the natural expression of my wicked sinful heart, but as a very human, very natural (albeit misplaced) desire for sexual intimacy. It was a bad habit, reinforced by neurochemicals, but nothing mysterious or ethereal. I realized that I already had the power to control my actions. And so I did. I realized that the life I wanted to lead was incompatible with porn use, so I made that decision. ‘Simply’ doesn’t mean easily, of course.
Forum User’s post quoted in ‘Your Brain On Porn’ by Gary Wilson
The book ‘Your Brain on Porn’ by Gary Wilson is a great resource on the research on pornography addiction, or as an intro, his TEDx talk, “The Great Porn Experiment.”
A final note on this issue, this third Washington Post article suggests that Long wants us to believe that he’s the real victim here and that he had no choice because of the ‘overwhelming sexual power over men’ that women have. He implies that this idea is an outgrowth of a movement (influenced by Jordan Peterson and Warren Farrell) to believe that men are the real victims of the modern world. The article quotes Warren Farrell, author of several books concerning men’s issues:
When a straight man sees an attractive woman, Farrell recently told fans on Reddit, it “takes the power out of our upper brain and transports it into our lower brain,” rendering the man more or less powerless.
Washington Post
Note when the quote of Farrell ends. “Rendering the man more or less powerless” is the author’s addition. In fact Farrell never makes this claim. The context:
i chose that to illustrate that the heterosexual man’s attraction to the naked body of a beautiful woman takes the power out of our upper brain and transports it into our lower brain. every heterosexual male knows this. and the sooner men confront the powerlessness of being a prisoner to this instinct, we may earn less money to pay for women’s drinks, dinners and diamonds, but we’ll have more control over our lives, and therefor more real power.
it’s in women’s interests for me to confront this. many heterosexual women feel imprisoned by men’s inability to be attracted to women who are more beautiful internally even if their rear is not perfect.
Warren’s comment from his Reddit AMA
Farrell’s point seems to be that men need to be conscious of our unconscious desires, so that we can move beyond them and not be controlled by them.
Even if it turns out that Long was an obvious racist, it would still be impossible to disentangle his porn addiction from the whole situation. It’s foolish and even dangerous to dismiss Long’s struggle with pornography use, and pornography use as a whole, as not a problem we should worry about. Others have argued that (parentheses added) “blaming the suspect’s mental state on his actions (I suspect that should say actions on his mental state) distracts from the larger dynamics at play”, but this is nonsense. Are we at the point of inventing motives for criminals? As Andrew Sullivan pointed out, Trevor Noah went so far as to suggest that he knew the suspect’s motives better than the suspect himself, saying, “You killed six Asian people. Specifically, you went there. Your murders speak louder than your words. What makes it even more painful is that we saw it coming. We see these things happening. People have been warning, people in the Asian communities have been tweeting, they’ve been saying, ‘Please help us. We’re getting punched in the street. We’re getting slurs written on our doors.’” If we can’t separate our ideological ideas about the world from the actual facts then we are lost.
Onto the next issue in question: gun control. As Reuters reported, the U.S. House has taken gun control action in response to this, and the bills they are attempting to pass do seem like a step in the right direction on that front. The first bill would expand background checks to gun shows, internet sales, and ‘certain private transactions.’ The second would give 10 days to authorities to complete background checks before a gun sale is finalized. Regardless of your position on gun rights, and I support them, it doesn’t make sense that someone can buy a gun in the heat of passion just hours before they commit a crime. If these bills actually do what they claim to do, this will be an improvement. While the results from the research on background checks is not consistent, there is evidence to show they have some positive effect.
So why #stopasianhate? Why do companies like Spotify feel compelled to display “Stop Asian Hate” on their apps? Was it just the first noodle that stuck to the wall? Was it the catchiest hashtag on twitter after the news of the crime? Who knows, but the scariest thing about the hashtag is that it has no basis in reality, at least with respect to the tragic Atlanta incidents. Not only that, but literally the first news story clicked on regarding the shooting stated that race wasn’t a factor in the crime – so it’s not even a hard fact to come by. It’s not buried in far-right media websites on the dark web, it’s right on the front page. While it’s okay to raise awareness about an issue, it’s unwise to do so in a way that makes it seem much greater than it is in reality, and also without acknowledging the facts of the situation. The insistence on race as the primary focus in every situation is not helping anyone. Let’s stop and think before we act. Let’s not let the twitter mob rule our understanding of events, let’s take a step back and think about what the best reaction to such a crisis should be. Because #stopasianhate is disrespectful. It’s disrespectful to the victims and the families affected by this crime by refocusing the conversation on something that won’t help their situation, it’s disrespectful to the journalists who reported on the crime (when their information can be blindly ignored), and it’s disrespectful to our American community, because it makes us all into tribes that don’t think for themselves and instead focus on whatever the mob says we should focus on. We can do better America, and it’s unfortunate that we aren’t already.
There’s nothing wrong with protesting against Anti-Asian hate crimes, and I’ve appreciated seeing the moving stories about the victims and the outpouring of support for them, but let’s get our facts straight. I want to be careful not to suggest that this man’s actions are justified by his motivations, the crimes he committed were truly heinous. But if we ignore his motivations and instead project our own racially charged motivations onto his, we’re at best missing the point and at worst we’re doing nothing to stop such a tragedy from repeating itself.
Sam
Trader Joe