Earlier this year Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the oscars. This was in the middle of the event; Rock was hosting, making jokes about people in the audience. He made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith being bald, at which point Smith came up onstage, slapped Rock, and went back to his seat, where he proceeded to yell obscenities at Rock.

All kinds of interesting things came out of this from my perspective. I would say the majority response to what Will Smith did is negative, and as people expressed their negative feelings about what Will Smith did, they made a number of thought experiments and comparisons along the lines of what I have been doing in this blog.

Here’s a list of those:

1. There is a big difference between telling a joke and physical violence, and physical violence is far worse. Specifically I hear lots of people calling out the idea that “words are violence,” and correcting that to “no, violence is violence.”
2. Will Smith is a larger man, hitting a smaller man. This makes the assault extra bad.
3. We would clearly be upset if a man had gone up onstage and hit a female comedian (several observations along the lines of “what if it had been Amy Schumer? Would he get away with slapping her?”).
4. Chris Rock was at his place of work when this assault happened; so he is expected to do exactly what he did, gently roast audience members, and he ought to be able to expect to do so in safety. This makes the assault extra bad.
5. Chris Rock handled the assault very well; he maintained his composure and finished his job.

That’s not a complete list; there are some observations that might be interesting from some other perspective, but not relevant to mga.

Here’s an ethical presumption I glean from above list:

Violence of any sort is rarely ok, and it isn’t any more ok when the victim is a man, or if the perpetrator is “standing up for a woman.” Further, violence is way less ok than, for example, rudeness, jokes in poor taste, insults, etc. The size, sex, gender etc of the victim doesn’t matter; a male victim is no less a victim than a female victim, and a female has no more right to protection against violence than a male. Further, there seems to be an unspoken assumption among some in our society that it might be ok to physically hurt Chris Rock because he is male, and this needs to be corrected; it’s no more ok to hit him than it would be to hit Amy Schumer or any other person, male or female. This goes as well regardless of their conduct, short of the extreme (like self defense).

That seems to me to be the gist of what those thought experiments were getting at…like “what if it had been Amy Schumer up there? Would THAT have been ok?” I think if that question and it’s intention were fleshed out, it would be something like the above.

The last observation I listed, Rock handling the assault “well,” is interesting to me, although I’m not sure I can put my finger on exactly why. Why are we proud of or impressed with Chris Rock for finishing the show in a composed and professional manner? I guess I don’t mean to ask why that’s impressive, it certainly is. Rather I mean to ask why we’re praising it without imagination, amendment or qualification. I didn’t hear anyone say “it would have been totally appropriate for him to simply leave” or “he should have left the area and not resumed until Will Smith was escorted out,” so on and so forth. It’s not that I’m suggesting any of those courses of action are the answer. I have no idea what he “should” have done, and the way he chose to handle it is indeed impressive, and certainly does not reduce my estimation of him. My observation really isn’t about him, it’s about the public conversation. I do think, if he had been a woman, we would have heard people saying things like that. It seems like we are proud of him shrugging off the assault, taking it like a man, and essentially acting like it didn’t happen (apparently because he’s a man).

Finally, there were a number of public voices praising Will Smith for “standing up for women.” So there’s that. I think it’s clear that this perspective embraces the idea that women are more valuable and more human than men, to enough of an extent that a man making a joke about a woman’s hair justifies physical punishment. These voices were a minority, as far as I can tell…but they did have the support of institutions like the New York Times.

SO what I take to be the majority public reaction to this assault gives me hope, but also clarifies to me part of the problem. When this happened, people stumbled through just a few of the very first things you have to think about to answer the question “is it OK to randomly hurt guys?” And they came to conclusions I agree with, as they apply to this specific situation, which is great. Then they stopped. So I doubt that that incident is making lots of people take a closer look at how boys and men get treated in popular media, for example, or to question the prevalence of mga…but at least it’s something.