THE F WORD

It’s only human to make mistakes, but when our errors occur in a public space, as they so often do nowadays, forgiveness seems to elude us. By Meg Mason.

It’s only human to make mistakes, but when our errors occur in a public space, as they so often do nowadays, forgiveness seems to elude us.

In 2012, I wrote a book that ever since I’ve longed to un-write. It was my first and intended to be a light, funny memoir about ‘baby-having’ for lonely and bored and tired new mothers struggling to get out of the house or into clean-ish non-stretch clothing. Because I had been that mother myself, I put all my experiences, relationships and innermost thoughts on paper, blithely sent it into the world and sat back with a metaphorical cigarette to await the onrush of praise and reader adulation. There was some of that. But there was also me embarrassing my family and realising too late that things my children should never know about their mother permanently await them in print. And although I meant to entertain and encourage other women, according to the internet, I low-level irritated or flat-out infuriated quite a few.

To prevent me from engaging in the particular form of selfpunishment that is reading your own reviews, my husband eventually ‘net nannied’ me out of Goodreads, the book site that provides readers with a place to vent their white-hot literary fury, but I still remember descriptors like catty, pretentious, entitled and kind of mean.

The idea of opening the book now gives me the queasy, hot-face feeling of rereading a teenage diary, so I can’t look back at what I wrote to see if my one-star-awarding friends were right. Likely they were and if not, I’m still sorry. Although on a scale of regrettable choices gone public, it’s not Kevin Hart’s racist tweets or Justin Bieber wondering out loud if Anne Frank would have been a Belieber, but I still wish I could Magic Eraser it off my resumé and, even more, off the internet.

But civilian or celebrity, whiting out our mistakes, misdeeds and horrible decisions is something none of us get to do in the age of the permanent digital rap sheet. At any time, things we’ve said or done, sometimes years before, can be dredged from the depths of the internet and even if we’ve repented and changed since then, we feel the consequences all over again. That’s a reality that, by now, we’re accustomed to, but – in a fresh and deeply suboptimal twist – as social mores change and at such a rate, we can be hauled up for ‘crimes’ that weren’t crimes when we committed them. When I published that book, the concept of checking your privilege wasn’t part of the mainstream conversation. Now that it is, I have a fresh misdemeanour on my record.

“Digital media has the longest tail,” says Andrew Dodd, associate professor of culture and communications at the University of Melbourne. “Compared to the shelf-life of print and the ephemeral nature of television, it enables things to grow in the public consciousness by allowing more and more people to buy into it at any time. What was once a two-day story can now be an eternity of pain for someone.”

Although we tend to think of teenagers as most vulnerable to digital indelibility, according to social media crisis consultant Alison Michalk: “Younger generations are a lot more savvy about what they should and shouldn’t post online and, as natives in this space, they have a better grasp of how to manage their reputations. I see more mistakes made by those in their 30s and 40s, for whom all of this just appeared.”

Considering how much of our lives are lived online, it’s certain most of us will transgress at some point, if we haven’t already. In which case, why does it feel like collectively we’re becoming less and not more forgiving? We’re now quicker to condemn those suffering a microcontroversy of their own making, instead of extending the grace that, one day, we may need back.

“It’s always been human nature to find entertainment in a train wreck,” Michalk says, “but it’s also more and more a part of the current cultural Zeitgeist with its emphasis on shaming, in all forms. Because social media has made it so easy to share our opinions, whether or not we have any authority, we’ve created a very dangerous, hair-trigger environment where things can blow up quickly.”

Also human nature: gossip. It has an evolutionary function – it bonds the tribe – but science to one side, it’s also fun (especially cut with a little schadenfreude and light pontificating that makes us feel so righteous by comparison). “We’ve always shared gossip and thrived on the schadenfreude of other’s mistakes,” agrees Dodd, “but the intensity has increased. A comment, an aside, a thought bubble is now so much more powerful.” Combined, it’s those factors that lead us to join what Jon Ronson, the author of the 2015’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed described as “the pile-on”.

As a new, internet-enabled phenomenon, the pile-on is one that New York-based tech entrepreneur Allison McGuire experienced from the inside when in 2014, she co-developed an app called SketchFactor, which let users tag geographical locations where they’d experienced a “sketchy” moment. “Something out of the ordinary: be it bizarre, funny or

dangerous, so others could navigate customised walking routes in real time,” McGuire explains. The day before the app launched, now-defunct media gossip site Gawker announced it with the headline: ‘Smiling Young White People Make App for Avoiding Black Neighborhoods’.

“That kicked off the madness,” McGuire says. “Soon it was on ABC, NBC, the BBC, all over the world” – as well as all over social media, where she was branded as racist. “I was completely overwhelmed and shocked. I thought I could control it and, of course, I couldn’t. Once anger is out of the gate it is hard to rein in,” she says. “And anger leaves no room for empathy.”

As the pitch kept rising, McGuire held her front, even though, she says, “I was an emotional wreck. I couldn’t eat. My nerves were so out of control that I couldn’t swallow anything.” In two weeks, she lost nearly 10 kilograms. But at no point was she given the chance to defend herself or explain her positive intentions in creating the app. “I felt bad and I was very sorry that it triggered people. I don’t see myself as a victim, but I was angry at the bullshit articles being written by people who weren’t trying to get the story straight.” For a long time, she says, “I felt that my story wasn’t really out there.”

Dodd agrees. “In the frenzy, people don’t get an opportunity to talk with nuance about what they did, what they said and meant and that compounds the problem,” he says. “Social media has wreaked havoc on how we interact with each other in this complex society we’ve created. But at what point is someone allowed to live past their error? What are the rules around our right to be forgotten? We’re still working those things out.” Maybe in civilian cases we can let things go, but when it comes to celebrity, it seems like we’ve already decided they can never live past their mistakes and that there are no rules.

Even though rationally we know public figures are real people, as likely to err as we are, evidence shows that when they do, we intrinsically struggle to forgive them. In part, that’s because as much as we feel like we know them, they’re primarily products of our own invention and it’s difficult to empathise with an adult version of an imaginary friend.

And, while we’re motivated to practise forgiveness in real-life relationships, because there are concrete consequences to not forgiving, it’s hard to see the personal downside to withholding grace from Kanye West because he ruined Taylor Swift’s Grammy experience 10 years ago or staying anti Barbra Streisand forever following her recent remarks regarding the two men at the centre of the Michael Jackson abuse scandal.

Experts say that even when public figures do apologise, as West and Streisand both have, we’re naturally suspicious of their contrition. On that, it doesn’t help that the celebrity apology has become such a trope – “sincerely regret my actions” … “the pain I’ve caused” … “seek to make amends” and so on – or that because there are so many and constantly more ways for celebrities to slip up, we’ve developed forgiveness fatigue.

Beyond such judgment failures, there’s so much opportunity for social media missteps – think Lorde posting a picture of a bathtub in reference to Whitney Houston or Kim Kardashian West using ‘anorexic’ as a positive adjective and ‘retarded’ as a negative one on Instagram.

There are displays of tone-deafness, too, like Benedict Cumberbatch’s use of the word ‘coloured’, bin-fire admissions made in public – Liam Neeson’s shame concerning his past views, as well as amorphous, unproven maybe-crimes. Did Aziz Ansari commit sexual assault, as some believe, or go on a horrible, horrible date just like others have?

Then there is the crime of just existing – one that Gwyneth Paltrow and Lena Dunham are so serially guilty of that Dunham recently said: “I tend to go around being: ‘Guys, I’m really not as bad as everybody thinks I am!’”

In passing judgment, we make little distinction between recent and historical offenses. Barack Obama suffered for smoking pot despite the fact that it was decades before he became president, while Meghan Markle’s pre-Harry divorce is a strike against her, as is her television career, once acceptable, now not.

Celebrities, of course, commit real crimes that are rightly unforgiveable, and mass campaigns like #MeToo have brought about justice and powerful change. But in contributing to the culture of calling out, they’ve also made the whole concept of forgiveness more fraught. Either we’re so perma-angry there’s no margin for grace or we fear that in forgiving we might be seen as condoning bad behaviour and off-key opinions. “It’s so corrosive to create that kind of society,” Ronson wrote. “Not only wrong but damaging” to individuals and the collective.

When former Victorian Greens candidate Joanna Nilson posted to a private Facebook page in 2015, she could not have anticipated that four years later, her meant-to-be-funny comments about shoplifting would bring an instant end to her political career. Last year, that’s what happened when a journalist found and published them. “It’s something I can’t erase or get rid of,” Nilson says. “It wasn’t to do with my work, but now I worry about finding employment and how that will be affected just by Googling my name.”

But having apologised in a newspaper piece, Nilson says: “I have to go forward believing that most people will see it for what it is and hope that we’ll get to a stage that when people make mistakes we let them grow and improve, instead of just ‘cancelling’ them as people.”

Surely we have to. And if we decide to, the good news is that while judgment is a contagious behaviour, so is forgiveness, and it’s also a practice we can hone over time. “Research has shown that,” says psychologist Dr Samantha Clarke. “By starting conversations and pausing before we join the pile on, we create space to wonder: ‘What might the person be going through to make the choice they did?’ ‘How would they explain it if given the chance?’ ‘What might the media not be reporting?’ This ability to perspective-take is the first step towards empathy.”

And as a positive flip side to the truth that we’ll all fail at some stage is that having done so we become much more inclined towards that way of thinking. “Empathy is so powerful,” says McGuire, who having gone through her experience, proffers: “I empathise with others regardless of what they’ve done or said, no matter how bad. I’m not interested now in pointing fingers. I’m more interested in: ‘Okay, we all have problems. Let’s figure out a way forward.’ I’m hopeful, I’m eternally optimistic, that it’s going to work out.”

In the meantime, I promise that should you ever accidentally write a truly ill-conceived memoir, I will assume you meant well and say so, in all caps, on Goodreads.

“Social media has wreaked havoc on how we interact with each other … but at what point is someone allowed to live past their error?”