(updated)

Late Wednesday night, long after I’d promised myself that I would sign off the Internet, I found myself Googling Keith Olbermann’s Twitter feed. He had retweeted a link to an article alleging that one of the women accusing Julian Assange of rape had “ties” to the CIA. That article also gave the name of the accuser. This, I understood to be a universally acknowledged no-no, when it came to subjects of an ongoing sexual assault investigation. So Keith Olbermann, one of the biggest names in left-wing journalism, was publishing unsubstantiated claims that smeared the subject of a rape investigation, and he was failing to uphold basic standards. I thought this was worth sharing. I found the link to the tweet, and I clicked through, and that’s when I saw it: the big yellow box with the padlock.

“This user has protected their tweets,” it read. I sent out a brief, confused tweet about Keith Olbermann locking down his Twitter rather than face online criticism — which would soon turn out to be eerily psychic — and Anna Holmes, formerly of Jezebel, corrected me: “He blocked you?” Amaditalks, a user who’d been debating the Assange case with Olbermann, confirmed: “No, he didn’t lock it, he blocked you.” Soon, I’d confirmed it myself.

First thought: Keith Olbermann blocked me?

Second thought: Keith Olbermann knew who I was?

Wednesday morning, I was a girl who ran a moderately trafficked feminist blog. I had about 1,500 Twitter followers. I was frustrated with the way the Julian Assange rape case had been treated by fellow left-wing media figures, including Keith Olbermann, but especially Michael Moore, who minimized the accusations while pledging bail money to Assange. I didn’t know yet that he had also misrepresented the accusations against Assange  (they’re for rape, not that his “condom broke”) on Olbermann’s show. I tweeted a joke, about hoping a bunch of rape survivors pulled a “Roger & Me” outside of Michael Moore’s office, and directed it at Moore’s Twitter. Then it hit me: The dude’s on freaking Twitter. He can hear me. More accurately, he can hear us.

I suggested that people frustrated by Moore’s actions tweet at him until he responded. Anti-rape activist Jaclyn Friedman suggested we use a hashtag, and came up with one, #MooreandMe. I wrote a blog post. And it was on. Thousands of tweets, links from every corner of the blogosphere, and — surprisingly — a response, that evening, from @KeithOlbermann himself.

But not, you know, a response to me. Because he blocked me.

Olbermann was incensed. He went on for two hours, accusing Mediaite reporter Tommy Christopher of being a “hatchet man” with an anti-MSNBC agenda because Christopher asked him whether he knew the charges against Assange, demanding that Amaditalks provide him with “the charges” (a court reporter’s account is here), demanding “retractions” from another user, and otherwise lashing out. Me, I wrote a blog post about how he’d blocked me. The next morning, he was at it again, tweeting frantically, attacking and swerving and dodging and blocking more protesters. When I saw someone say he’d blocked them, I retweeted it. (My colleague, Amanda Hess, noted later that he’d responded to her tweet on the matter, then blocked her too.) And then: Well, then the pressure apparently got to him. That’s when Keith Olbermann, one of the most well-known figures in left-wing journalism, just up and ran away.

“I will thus unblock all blocks,” Keith Olbermann said, “wish you all a Merry Christmas and I’ll suspend this account until this frenzy is stopped.” Soon, he amended it to “until/if this frenzy is stopped.” The word “frenzy,” apparently, was consistent.

Except that it wasn’t a frenzy. It was a protest. Olbermann had no problem with describing the notoriously unruly Anonymous as “online activists,” and yet, when online activists who happened to be feminists took issue with him, well … they’d gone FRENZIED! They were like sharks in the salty sea water of Twitter, thrashing and chomping at Keith Olbermann’s tender, online flesh!

They had reason to protest. One of the chief objections, from fans of Moore and Olbermann, is that Assange isn’t being charged with rape. “He was accused ONLY of consense.sex w/o a condom,” wrote Twitter user MariahWestwind. “u r all fucking retarded, really fucking dumb……….it was consensual sex and his condom broke which is a crime in sweden u fucking retards,” wrote a commenter on my blog, “Ralph,” who was sadly deleted. This is demonstrably wrong. It’s untrue. But Ralph, Mariah and all the others have reason to believe it. Because they got the information from the news. They got it from Michael Moore. And they got it from Keith Olbermann.

People trust journalists: If a journalist says something, like “the term ‘rape’ in Sweden includes consensual sex without a condom” (Olbermann’s own, demonstrably false, as-yet-unredacted words), most people will believe that what he has said is true, and act as if it is true, without doing further research. Because the job of a journalist is to tell people the truth, to give them all of the information they will reasonably need, and to redact and correct his statements if they are later proven wrong. Statements made by journalists, particularly those as prominent as Olbermann, have measurable impact on how people make decisions: MariahWestwind is basically quoting Keith Olbermann. There’s a rape investigation going on, and Mariah doesn’t know it. Because Mariah trusted Keith Olbermann to tell her the truth, and Keith Olbermann failed to honor that.

Keith Olbermann failed to honor the trust of people who depend upon journalists to tell them the truth, over an issue (WikiLeaks) that is about the right of people to know the truth. Chew on that one for a while. Because it tastes real, real funky.

I’m working myself up into an Olbermannesque lather — you, SIR, have been proven WRONG, SIR, and to the extent that you are unwilling to corRECT your STATEments, they are rendered LIES, SIR! — so maybe I’ll point out something else: Even though Olbermann is influential on Twitter, he’s running away from it largely because he doesn’t know how it actually works. On the Internet, Olbermann’s style of old-media authority doesn’t hold up. He selectively responded, and thought no one would call him out on it; he was wrong. He blocked protesters to shut out their voices, and apparently thought they wouldn’t be able to tell a wide audience about it; he was wrong. He attempted to control the discourse, to sit at the center of it like a news anchor behind his desk, to exercise a centralized, access-dependent control; he was on the Internet, where hierarchy breaks down, where people are able to interact with each other and influence each other without the buffer of celebrity, but he didn’t get it. Even his voice — that booming, stentorian instrument — was gone; without the immediate gravitas it tends to lend his statements, he sounded like a kid who had gotten in over his head.

Wednesday morning, I was nobody much. Today, I’m apparently responsible for the biggest celebrity Twitter meltdown since Matt Lauer pissed off Kanye West. Because that — SIR — is how the Internet works.

Olbermann may be back. He’s tweeted a friendly message at fellow media superstar Larry King. One can’t imagine that his inglorious retreat rests well with him. But he might have learned a valuable lesson: On the Web, there are no anchormen. There are just a bunch of people giving the news. Status is given to those people, but only to the extent to which they can consistently get it right.

Me, I’ve got better things to think about than Keith Olbermann. I still haven’t heard from Michael Moore.

Update: The original version of this piece stated that Assange has been charged with sexual assault. But as of now, he has only been accused of it — not formally charged. The piece has been altered to reflect this.

In a phone interview, Harper Jean Tobin, the National Center for Transgender Equality’s policy counsel, explained there’s a growing recognition that “hormone therapy is medically necessary for transgender people. It’s not cosmetic, it’s a serious medical need.” That much is apparent from looking at the case: Andrea Fields, one of the plaintiffs in the case, had her hormone dosage cut in half, and reported “nausea, weakness, loss of appetite and hair growth,” as the Washington Post reports.

Aside from the physical effects of having one’s body chemistry rapidly changed, transgender authors and advocates consistently stress that being unable to bring one’s body in line with one’s gender identity can be deeply traumatic. Which is why mandating access to hormones for trans prisoners is, according to Tobin, “increasingly settled law.” ”We have a constitutional commitment to providing adequate health care to people who are in prison, regardless of their offense and regardless of their identity,” said Tobin. The Wisconsin law was apparently unique, and was struck down specifically because it violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

But, again, healthcare is not the only issue at play. Even for inmates who are able to keep their bodies in line with their gender identities, the way that inmates are sorted into women’s or men’s prisons — according to which medical procedures they’ve had, or what sort of genitalia they possessed at birth — can lead to transgender women being incarcerated in men’s prisons, and vice versa. Citing the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, Tobin says “the hard and fast rules that are used to classify transgender inmates often subject them to greater danger” — namely sexual and physical abuse. Imagine being the only girl in the men’s prison. It’s not pretty.

Gabriel Arkles, an attorney at the Silvia Rivera Law Project who works directly with transgender inmates, made the same point. “Most of the violence that trans people experience in prison is actually perpetrated by prison staff,” he said. And then, according to Arkles, there is the fact that
“trans people, particularly trans people of color, are disproportionately incarcerated because of discrimination, poverty, police profiling, and bias in court proceedings.”

So, having one more state in which hormone access for transgender inmates is mandated is a big step. But it’s not a cure-all. For one, someone could convince the Washington Post not to refer to the transgender women in the case as “male inmates.” That might help.

Unfortunately, cruelty between girls can’t really be measured with the hard crime statistics on which Males and Lind’s argument relies. That’s part of what makes it so insidious. As Rachel Simmons wrote in “Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Teenage Girls,” bullying between teenage girls expresses itself as physical fighting less often than it does as relational aggression, a soft and social warfare often conducted between girls who seem to be friends. You can’t measure rumors, passive-aggressive remarks, alienation and shaming with statistics. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t damaging or common — or, you know, mean. There’s a difference between being cruel and being violent — a difference that the Times piece seems not to recognize, actually — but cases like that of Prince, or Megan Meier, who committed suicide after being harassed by Lori Drew on MySpace, show that the consequences can be distressingly similar. Girls may not murder people very often, but neither Prince nor Meier were murdered; they were taunted and bullied to the point that suicide seemed like their only option.

The Times Op-Ed is right that girl-on-girl violence does attract a disproportionate amount of attention. The Prince and Meier cases made national news; lesser but still serious offenses, like a string of beatings by girls posted on YouTube, are headline grabbers and commentary bait. So, why do female bullies get so much more airtime than male bullies? Well, the most obvious answer is that they’re more visible to us these days: on YouTube, on MySpace in Meier’s case, and on Facebook in Prince’s. (One of her alleged tormentors posted “accomplished” as her status message on the day she died.) The Internet doesn’t increase cruelty so much as make it more transparent and searchable; actual crime rates may be going down, but the aggression between girls is more visible than it has ever been. Then, there’s the fact that, since we don’t expect violence from teen girls — those silly, sweet, kittenish creatures, all of whom are imagined, somehow, to possess a vague temperamental resemblance to Ann-Margret in “Bye Bye Birdie” — it’s shocking when we see it. And “shocking” translates to “reportable.” Show some teen boys in a fistfight, and no one is surprised; show girls doing the same thing, and it’s news.

It’s easy to poke holes in Meyer and Lind’s argument, with its reliance on hard crime stats. Still, they have one thing right. Focusing on cruelty committed by girls is sensational, and more than a little cheap. People, and often young people in particular, often make life hellish for each other. Instead of focusing on woman’s inhumanity to woman, maybe we should point out that a regrettably large portion of the world can be inhumane. Including many boys.

The problems of this latter statement have been endlessly rehashed. One of the more obvious is that there is an entire population of people, some of them high school students, who cannot actually get married unless they happen to be in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, or Washington, DC; something tells me the programs aren’t precisely built with those students in mind. The other is that those “harmful psychological and physical effects” can apparently include things like being blamed for your own sexual assault: One Ohio program, Abstinence ‘Till Marriage, offered a game in which you were asked whether or not to believe a girl who said she’d been raped, considering that she’d had sex in the past. (Answer: No.) This seems like an outlier, but sexist undertones and overtones and just plain tones in the abstinence movement are well-documented, up to and including the infamous Purity Balls, in which girls pledge their virginity to the safekeeping of their fathers. Because who doesn’t want to revisit the era in which your dad owned your ability to consent to sex, and could trade it, possibly for a goat? It’s like a Renaissance Faire for your vagina.

And then, there’s the fact that abstinence education programs don’t work, and the many, many studies which state that they don’t work. One study recently touted that abstinence-only education works; what this one specific program worked at, apparently, was delaying sex for a period of over two years for two-thirds of the sixth and seventh-grade students who took it. So, an eleven-year-old might conceivably wait until fifteen to have sex, possibly without working knowledge of which birth-control methods are the best at preventing disease and pregnancy. Fantastic. In our current economic climate, spending $50 million a year on anything is a big deal; spending $50 million a year on provably ineffective programs is like allocating a national fund for the deposed Prince of Nigeria. Our nation has received your e-mails, and they are prepared to extend American aid in this time of crisis!

The extensive funding for abstinence education seems like one of the Democratic administration’s many compromises in the name of “bipartisanship,” a concession to an openly conservative agenda, an egg broken to make a more or less satisfactory omelet. The problem is, what is being given up here shouldn’t be negotiable: It’s the continued welfare of American children. Abstinence education, to be quite blunt, is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects. Knowing that should be very much required.

Of course, intimate violence affects both genders. And it’s true that ideas about masculinity — that men have to be strong, in control, unafraid, invulnerable — can keep men from acknowledging the seriousness of their situation, or from reporting it. However, it’s unlikely that a man who feels his masculinity will be compromised if he reports abuse is going to be persuaded otherwise by an ad that basically says, “so, being hit by your partner made your dick fall off.”

And then, there’s the other implication: That having a penis is a sign of power, that not having one is a sign of powerlessness, that penises are nature’s way of signifying a totally-not-abused person. An ad that means to tell us that men can be abused, and that this is serious and deserving of attention, is equating penises with invulnerability and the lack of them with victimization. It ends up reinforcing the same gender dynamics it protests. People who have dicks aren’t abuse victims; people who are abuse victims don’t have dicks. Being a man without a penis is terrible, largely because it makes you like all those other natural-born victims out there with a reputation for dicklessness. You know: women.