Barbie, Disability, and the Death of Formal Rhetoric

Ben Shapiro expresses his well-thought-out opinion in a totally reasonable manner.

Aristotle defined rhetoric as “the capacity to discover the possible means of persuasion concerning any subject.” Pointy-headed and abstruse, yes, but a reasonably concise description of what I tried to teach in Freshman Composition. When structuring our language around contentious issues or painful controversies, we must think in terms of what will persuade our intended audience. That standard is often subjective, and moves almost whimsically.

Two recent events have re-centered this difficult process for me. I recently witnessed an unpleasant online dispute quickly spiral out of control. A disabled person noticed that a friend’s anecdote about helping a disabled stranger contained certain ableist prejudices. The story was well-intentioned, but fit a genre of short narrative sometimes disparaged as “inspiration porn.” All such stories mean well, but misfire by showcasing able-bodied generosity over disabled autonomy.

As sometimes happens when disadvantaged persons ask for consideration, some observers saw this criticism as personal attack. Like The Former President, who saw kneeling football players as disloyal “sons of bitches,” the OP’s friends closed ranks defensively, lambasting the critic for “attacking” their friend and “ripping him to shreds.” The defensive posture became so energized that they persisted even after the OP cautioned them to back off and cool down.

When Ben Shapiro, the massively online full-time professional offense-taker, protested Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie this summer by lighting two Barbie dolls on fire, he apparently thought he was making a serious point. The entire internet, however, responded with aggressive disdain. Shapiro evidently thought this fire was an appropriate synecdoche for his internet-friendly outrage. But even his staunchest allies had little support for a petulant boy destroying his sister’s toys.

Shapiro makes most of his living doing personal appearances on college campuses, engaging undergraduates in “debate.” He organizes his public persona around the motto “Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings.” Superficially, Shapiro seems to advocate Aristotelean rhetoric as persuasion through evidence. Yet the Barbie incident demonstrates something Shapiro’s critics have long noted: he cares only about winning, usually by personally demolishing anyone who disagrees with him.

Proof of the standing stereotype
of what constitutes a disability

The disability debate pushed me into an awkward position. Both the OP and his critic are friends, whom I respect dearly. I struggled to triangulate a position where I supported both while clarifying that I considered the criticisms justified. This meant finding ways to say “you’re wrong” without making the statement personal, and managing the feelings of defenders whose emotions already ran high. Therefore my participation mainly consisted of overthinking and extended paralysis.

Rereading the debate afterward, I noticed something I missed in the moment: the critic and the defenders kept talking past one another. The critic offered copious evidence, including cited sources and hyperlinks. The defenders hand-waved all the evidence, focusing on the perceived personal slight in the original callout. Because the critic intended no personal slight, she never addressed it. Therefore, both sides’ core concerns never got addressed.

When Ben Shapiro mistakes destroying toys for pitching an argument, the core problem probably resides in who he thinks his audience is. Shapiro has garnered acclaim by performing stunts designed to embarrass progressives and dissidents. Such displays help unify his hard-right audience and create a base primed to listen (and, importantly, to buy his advertisers’ sketchy products). But it’s more likely to alienate anyone who doesn’t already agree.

In other words, Ben Shapiro, his Daily Wire media company, and similar massively online conservative outlets like Daily Caller and The Blaze, create loyalty to an ideological brand. As I’ve noted before, these outlets generate an almost religious sense of unity. Sure, the ideological sense of aggrieved White masculinity coaxes new converts through the door. But once inside, the politics generally matter less than the sense that we’re traveling together.

That, I realized (with some pain), happened with the disability debate. While the critic attempted to structure a formal argument supported with evidence, the OP’s defenders formed a perimeter around group loyalty. Rereading the previous sentence, I realize it sounds pejorative. Not so; when disadvantaged groups face systematic challenges, group membership enables them to organize and support one another.

Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not here to call out or condemn anyone individually. Rather, to return to classical rhetoric, I believe the two groups had “mixed stases,” that is, they were having two different arguments. But that’s become the problem with online ideology. Too often, we care more about defending the group than seeking the truth; that goes double for us White able-bodied cishet males. The group becomes paramount; the truth gets lost.