Here we go again, and again, and again

Ritualistically shaming public-facing women has become a cultural hobby. Moral puritanism helps us do it.

This essay builds upon concepts that I first discussed in Who’s afraid of amber heard?, an essay about social deviance, carceral feminism, and the myth of the model victim. I think this piece is enhanced by reading that one first, but no pressure!

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Let me be clear: in a fair and just society, the Adam Levine cheating scandal would have been pretty good internet gossip for maybe 24 hours. I long for a world in which we could have a good day in the group chat and then go back to admitting that we have never cared about Adam Levine, his wife Behati, or Instagram model Sumner Stroh even a little bit. However, our world is not fair or just, and so what should have been a mildly entertaining piece of celebrity drama has is now a swirling microcosm for a cycle of viral misinformation, ritualistic humiliation, and puritanical misogyny that’s become a kind of cultural hobby. It’s a cycle that feels deeply familiar and unsettlingly new each time, like a bad sitcom reboot; it’s a new girl every week, with a new face and a slightly new story, and we have to watch as she is ritualistically torn apart for her supposed deviancy in the exact same way as each girl before her.

This time, it’s Sumner Stroh, an Instagram model who was romantically propositioned by Adam Levine when she was between 19 and 21 and he was around 40. She engaged in an affair with him that lasted for about a year, and is one of four women to recently come forward about mostly-online relationships with Levine. Some of these women allege his sexual advances were unwanted; one was an employee who says she was sexually harassed and then punished for not reciprocating. Sumner is being vilified on an indescribable scale for destroying Levine’s marriage and “ruining his wife’s life”, but Levine has been cheating on various partners since as early as 2010, and manipulation and exploitation were a running theme throughout many of his affairs. This is the first piece of clear evidence that blaming one woman for actively “homewrecking” Adam Levine’s marriage is a sexist trope with remarkably limited basis in reality.

A frequent talking point claims that Sumner decided to post about the story for attention, publicity, or to nebulously “advance her career”. This belief, while common, is based in absolutely nothing; in reality, she was forced to publicize the story after finding out that it had been leaked to TMZ. Her videos on the situation, while not particularly well done, paint a straightforward and consistent story that most people have chosen to ignore in favour of picking apart all the ways in which she comes off as unlikeable or vain. Notably, she began the video by specifying that Levine was “married to a Victoria’s Secret model”, which sounds like a humblebrag because it probably sort of was (this was ultimately a bad PR move that indicated a kind-of-shitty but very human emotion; most people are treating it like a felony).

In her second video, she clarifies that Levine manipulated her by telling her he and his wife had privately ended their marriage while keeping it a secret from the press. She’s being widely mocked for citing the fact that she was “new to L.A.” as contributing to her manipulation, but within this context, the statement also makes sense — she says she assumed an under-the-table divorce was a common arrangement for celebrity couples who didn’t want to deal with a media circus, and didn’t know enough to question it. She felt exploited because of this lie and says that she cut things off once she found out he was married. This, again, is perfectly reasonable: lying to someone so they’ll have sex with you is a pretty standard definition of exploitation. She apologizes to Levine’s wife in the video and says that she doesn’t consider herself a victim.

This is a pretty clear and straightforward story that’s entirely in line with Levine’s documented behaviour. It’s been publicly available since day one, but it’s probably pretty new to you, given that it’s not mentioned in 99% of the discourse surrounding the affair — many people relied on hearsay when drawing their conclusions, and it seems that the general consensus among those who did hear her story was to disbelieve it in favour of a more hateable narrative. Unless I somehow missed something big in my research, though, there is absolutely zero tangible evidence that anything she said is false. It’s a very believable and commonplace explanation for a series of statements that have been wrenched out of context and used to paint her as a fake-woke self-victimizing homewrecking manipulator.

I’m not saying all this because I need everyone to believe that she’s a saint; begging people to lend women basic empathy based on something as precarious as personal opinion is a fool’s errand, and I’m not here to waste my time. I don’t even need you to agree that the disproportionate persecution of the “homewrecker” over the man who actually chose to wreck his own home is an unjustified and morally bankrupt project, no matter how plainly I believe that to be true. You don’t need to remind me that she may have cryptically bragged about the affair on TikTok six months ago or bring up that she was mean at summer camp, as people rushed to allege for dregs of TikTok clout. You are allowed to think that any or all of her actions, proveable or theorized, are distasteful, selfish, vapid, or even cruel; it might be true, it doesn’t matter, and most importantly, I can’t stop you.

What does matter is the fact that the internet decided she was lying for ostensibly no reason other than to make her a more entertaining and morally justified target for mass misogynistic harassment. It’s genuinely scary that I saw so many self-proclaimed feminists eat up and defend the entirely unverified story of Jezebelian caricature, finally deserving of our hatred and revulsion — it’s even scarier when you realize how neatly her story fits into a misogynist playbook that we should all be able to recognize immediately.

One-dimensionally evil women are invented, not born. All of the facets of the Sumner story that are being used to moralize her humiliation and defend the right to burn her at the stake — the idea that she knowingly pursued a married man, that she threw around buzzwords like “exploited” to play the victim, that she singlehandedly ruined Behati’s life, that she only publicized her story for personal gain — are pure conspiracy, proven by nothing but the perpetual motion machine of social media speculation. That speculation was bolstered, as usual, by run-of-the-mill sexism that could be applied unilaterally to nearly any woman in her place: her makeup, her voice, her OnlyFans account, and her body were all used as a twisted kind of proof that she was exactly who people wanted her to be.

In this way, moral impurity is forced onto women by virtue of our existence. This is why we must learn to resist the spectacle of public shaming and mass misogynistic humiliation regardless of whether its victims are morally pure or not. Feminist principles that are subject to change based on whether or not individual women can be proven to be objectively and ontologically good are not principles at all — they’re fashion accessories, as flimsy and permeable as tissue paper.

A few days ago, I tweeted about the fact that Sumner was facing misogyny. Aside from the obvious features of a system of ritualistic public shaming first described in the 170-year-old novel The Scarlet Letter, here is a short and wildly incomplete list of reasons why I believe that to be the case: Countless comments on her Instagram and TikTok compare her to Amber Heard in a derogatory way, using the tactics developed during the Heard trial to shame and discredit her in similarly baseless ways. Videos, comments, and tweets call her a cheap hole whoring herself out for attention. Viral TikToks analyze her lip shape and vocal fry as proof that she’s making false allegations in service of furthering her career (yes, really). When you search for “Sumner whore” on Twitter, you mostly find tweets calling Sumner a whore, among other, worse things; when you search for “Adam Levine whore” on Twitter, you also mostly find tweets calling Sumner a whore that happen to use his name to identify her. When you start looking up the name “Sumner” on Twitter, the first recommended result is “Sumner Stroh OnlyFans”, because of the volume of people looking for her leaked OnlyFans images. Many of the tweets under this search term are either calling her a low-class slut or making vulgar sexual comments about her body. The level of blame being placed on her shoulders because a man twice her age actively pursued her to be his fourth mistress can only be described as Lewinskian.

I found most of this information during the world’s most cursory two-minute internet search and then tweeted about my frustration. The tweet did not mention anything about the scandal itself, in defence or otherwise — all I said was that I had seen people being aggressively misogynistic towards her and found it upsetting. Nevertheless, the tweet instigated a landslide of vitriol towards both her and myself, a great deal of which came from self-identified feminists and people who had supported my work up until the point where I dared to lend a fifteen-word defence to an unlikeable woman online.

rayne fisher-quann @raynefq

people are engaging in like 90s style misogyny around this adam levine girl & it is so infuriating to watch

“This is your first bad take!” exclaim the quote tweets, opposing a position that is objectively supported by every essay I’ve ever published except this time it’s about a woman they don’t like. “So you think cheating is good?” they go on to posit, rationally. Even the slightest suggestion that Sumner was facing anything other than righteous punishment from a rational and well-reasoned arm of justice was read as an explicit endorsement of any and all bad behaviour, real and imagined — the need to reiterate that she was a whore and therefore deserving of everything she got seemed almost compulsive.

In fact, anyone who even mentioned that misogyny might play a role in Sumner’s public shaming became subject to an onslaught of women calling them desperate SJWs, cheating apologists, or fake feminists appropriating the language of anti-sexism in order to prevent a woman from being “held accountable”. (The only way to effectively hold Sumner accountable, it seems, is to call her a slut on Twitter.) At some point during the day, I started to feel like I’d slipped into the back rooms of an alternate universe.

It’s absolutely true, by the way, that the facade of feminism is frequently appropriated in defence of systemic power. Hillary Clinton, for example, is a woman who effectively uses allegations of misogyny to silence meaningful criticism; the same can be said for female billionaires or racists. However, it’s become increasingly popular for people to claim that feminism is being misappropriated whenever it’s used to criticize the public degradation of a woman they don’t like. To defend a young woman from sexualized mass-shaming due to a perceived moral transgression is, in fact, a textbook application of feminism — and, ironically, to insist that feminist ideals would demand anything otherwise is the very kind of misappropriation of the movement that these people claim to be against. To pretend as though the women’s-rights pendulum has swung so far that it now warrants systemic resistance is to ensure that it will never swing at all: the idea that we are anywhere close to a world in which average women are not criticized enough for moral impurity is a collective delusion that allows people to feel morally superior for submitting to the most basic of misogynistic impulses.

To dispute that a woman in Sumner’s position is facing misogyny — worse, to imply that her ritualistic sexual degradation is a morally justified part of a process to “hold her accountable” — is an opinion so openly reactionary and regressive that it’s nearly indistinguishable from the rhetoric shared on incel forums. This twisted version of moral righteousness is eating us alive: I can think of few people more directly useful to the patriarchal machine than those who believe themselves to be on the side of social progress even while participating in the most institutionally-aligned public shaming campaigns imaginable. What power could you possibly be fighting when you take the same philosophical and political position as the puritan churches of the 18th century — that there is no end to the humiliation and punishment that a “sexually deviant” woman can deserve?

What unsettles me the most, however, is the fact that people found it genuinely impossible to engage with any criticism of Sumner’s punishment without reading it as a de facto denial of any wrongdoing. When someone says, “this woman does not deserve mass public shaming and targeted misogynistic harassment”, many people are unable to hear anything but “this woman did absolutely nothing wrong at any point”. This kind of projection stems from a fundamental social paradigm that many of us find impossible to escape, even in our internal dialogues: our society is obsessed with the correlation between crime and punishment, and will manufacture causation between the two even when there is none. It seems genuinely inconceivable that one could oppose violent degradation unless the victim is morally pure, so much so that people often don’t even process it as a logical leap. After all, how could we possibly believe in crime without punishment? And why would we ever restrain ourselves from punishment if a crime had occurred?

It’s worth noting that this is the exact same rhetoric that was used to discredit anyone who lent any degree of empathy to Amber Heard during the early days of her trial, and while Heard’s and Sumner’s circumstances are not the same — Heard was a victim of abuse, for instance, while Sumner was not, and the scale of their harassment is vastly different — the waves of sexualized degradation, physical scrutiny and surveillance, and “feminist” opposition to their cases are nearly identical. This leaves me with a question: why, even within our own community, is history repeating itself?

Of course, there are many people who still think Amber Heard is a lying, manipulative monster. Their participation in Sumner’s online abuse is no surprise. But I’ve seen many people who saw the horror in Amber’s case participate in (or defend) what’s happening to Sumner, and it leaves me concerned that many people failed to internalize one of the case’s most important lessons: that we cannot ignore misogyny just because its victim is publicly flawed. I worry that instead of recognizing that any woman can be demonized, scrutinized, and manipulated into villainy, some just came to see Amber as an exception to the rule — they decided that she could be morally absolved and therefore defended. That left room for the same playbook to be applied to another woman in her place.

I saw something fascinating happen after the release of my article about the case. When the piece was first released, the general response (even from people who were sympathetic to my position) was that I wasn’t being critical enough of Amber’s behaviour. As time passed, though, and public opinion shifted to her defence, I saw a fascinating change in the response — suddenly, I started getting comments and tweets that my article was unnecessarily harsh. To be clear, the thesis of my article was that women are constantly vilified for behaving imperfectly in torturous circumstances; that we hold victims to a deeply unrealistic moral standard that ensures all women are too imperfect to deserve our faith or our defence. The extent of my “criticism” of Amber was this single paragraph:

…this is not to say that Amber Heard is perfect. She was cruel. She was callous. She’s lied… Like many, many women trapped in long-term abusive relationships, she absolutely engaged in emotional toxicity and a degree of physical violence. For anyone familiar with cycles of domestic abuse, this is nothing new — reactive violence is an extremely common result of the psychological degradation and fear responses that come with sustained abuse. …the complete dehumanization of women who behave imperfectly in torturous circumstances is just one half of a Catch-22 which conspires to keep all women silent.

When people thought that Amber deserved punishment, my analysis of her actions as complex but understandable felt overly lenient; when they felt she didn’t deserve punishment, some read the acknowledgment of her complexity as an unjustified dig at an infallible person. While I certainly prefer a world that empathizes with her, I worry about where this kind of black-and-white, crime-and-punishment thinking could lead. I cited these moments not to discredit or blame Amber, or to make my support of her less radical; rather, I fundamentally believe that the only path toward women’s liberation is to recognize that we can have moments of imperfection (which is to say, moments of humanity) without it making us deserving of punishment, violence, or disposal. It is not a dig to point out that a woman has done something “wrong”; to pretend otherwise is to make her inhuman.

I am overjoyed that Amber’s name has become less demonized in the cultural consciousness. I am grateful, fundamentally and eternally, that there are finally tens of thousands of women in her corner. But when I saw women start to defend her and vilify Sumner in the same breath, I began to worry that something had gone very wrong. The same culture that now supports Monica Lewinsky and Britney Spears continues to use the exact accusations once levied against them (slut, homewrecker, manipulative, crazy) to demonize new women with no recognition of how their circumstances overlap. Rather than criticize the larger structure that encouraged their punishment, we’ve learned to absolve individual women on a case-by-case basis; saying “we were wrong because she didn’t do anything to deserve that” instead of “we were wrong, and nobody deserves that” always leaves room for someone new to take her place (that is, of course, until we realize she didn’t really do anything that terrible either). The reality that I’ve always tried to point towards is this: we will never reach liberation in a social landscape obsessed with the spectacle of punishment unless we accept that one can be deeply flawed and still deserving of empathy and redemption.

Because, of course, there will always be a woman who we feel deserves to be punished. There will always be a woman placed between the public crosshairs who reminds you of the girl who bullied you in middle school, or who you think talks like a liar, or who did the one thing by which your personal moral compass cannot abide. If she ever gets absolved of her crimes, there will be another worse woman waiting to be next.

And despite what their dehumanization campaigns try to tell you, these women will not be so different from you. Part of the psychohorror of womanhood is the ultimate truth that there will always, always, be someone for whom you seem too cruel, too manipulative, too sexual, too angry, too whorish, too morally impure. There will always be someone who looks at the way you move your lips and sees evidence that you are a monster; there will always be someone who hears your voice and thinks it proves that you deserve pain and suffering. There is no level of purity you can reach that will make you too good to be punished unless we resist the urge to punish at all.

Virtue is a commodity that is hoarded by those with power, and it can and will be taken from you. The cycle of seeking and destroying imperfect women one by one is a merry-go-round that seemingly never stops spinning; we have to make the choice to step off.