The walls of individual stalls in public bathrooms can offer some interesting reading material. As a cisgender woman, I can only speak to what is available in women’s rooms but, in addition to the motivational comments and check-ins (“You Got It, Girl!” and “X was here”), the writing in bathroom stalls sometimes warns women about men who they identify as sexually predatory. These comments, appearing mostly in the restrooms of neighborhood bars and schools, fulfill a social value of potentially protecting local women from victimization and assault. Needless to say, some people are uneasy with this kind of warning because it lacks accountability or proof of evidence, but others respond that this kind of cautionary message implicates a system that fails to adequately address sexual assault and violence. Along those same lines, some women express gratitude for these kinds of warnings because of the strong sense of gender solidarity they represent: women looking out for one another through subversive political activism.
Small-scale activism, like warnings in bathroom stalls, normally doesn’t receive much theoretical attention because of its localized and clandestine nature, but larger manifestations of this kind of activism on social media are fueling debates about how to regard this kind of speech. Recently a man in Chicago named Nikko D’Ambrosio found out that he was discussed in an online Facebook group called “Are We Dating the Same Guy.” While no posts seem to have identified him as a sexual predator, D’Ambrosio’s image was shared along with descriptions of reportedly bad behavior like ghosting women after sleeping with them and insulting a woman who refused him. Defenders argue that groups like this organically arise because dating sites do such a poor job of verifying users’ identity and whether they are safe. D’Ambrosio is suing individual group commentators as well as different segments of Meta with accusations of defamation and emotional distress. His claim is that various women who posted and commented knowingly said things about him that are false. In the era of #MeToo, when women are fighting a culture that takes sexual assault lightly men are anxious about being falsely accused, social media spaces of this nature represent the tense collision of multiple competing social factors.
What is of particular interest to me is that these spaces (whether physical or virtual) of clandestinely sharing information emerge because of perceived gaps in the system that leave different groups feeling vulnerable. While it is always possible that some women make accusations in bad faith, it is also true that victims of sexual assault and violence seek ways to hold perpetrators accountable because the criminal justice system has consistently failed to.
Eighty-one percent of women in the U.S. report experiencing some kind of sexual assault and/or harassment. Less than 10% of sexual offenders are convicted at trial. Why assault is so common, but accountability is not, is beyond the scope of the discussion here; suffice it to say, however, it leaves both victims and potential victims searching for grassroots sources of protection. Exploiting the blind spots of unjust social norms through epistemic subversion is one way.
Epistemic Injustice
The understanding that we are “socially situated” knowers is the basis for some deeply insightful theorizing on the concept of epistemic injustice. The term refers to the understanding that who we are negatively and positively impacts perceptions of our credibility or expertise and our ability to contribute to what is considered knowledge. Miranda Fricker describes how some are given greater credibility and are listened to more than they deserve while others are given less credibility and are silenced. Various philosophers like Charles Mills, José Medina, and Kristie Dotson have explored how epistemic injustice perpetuates race and gender marginalization by harming different groups as knowers and as contributors to knowledge. Related to the issue of women as victims of sexual assault, manifestations of epistemic injustice are that women aren’t believed because alleged male perpetrators seem more credible. Fricker uses the example of how throughout much of Western history, sexual harassment was understood as harmless flirting—a position informed and produced mostly by men. Fricker believes that allowing women to contribute to how we understand sexual harassment from the beginning would have included a much more complex characterization, one that would likely include the victim feeling humiliated and afraid.
Sadly, one of the most troubling forms of harm from epistemic injustice is that marginalized people can distrust their perceptions and understandings because they have internalized a disregard for their own interpretations. It is easy then to see how unjust epistemic norms remain intact and self-perpetuating, as the epistemically marginalized are both silenced and doubtful of their own voice. Thus, nothing is disrupted. José Medina argues a kind of cognitive immaturity and “epistemic laziness” develops in the entitled group because they don’t face resistance to their worldview and their positions are never contested. They become almost entirely closed off to anything that challenges their perspective.
However, this willful, self-serving blindness offers unexpected opportunities to marginalized groups. Medina and Mills both argue that the epistemically marginalized are forced to master the perspective of the epistemically privileged if, for no other reason, their own survival. Mills cites James Weldon Johnson as saying, “colored people of this country know and understand white people better than white people know and understand them.” What results is that marginalized people not only frequently have a better grasp of a situation than their entitled counterparts, but that marginalized people can use the epistemic laziness of the privileged to their advantage in covert ways. Medina writes,
The oppressed may occasionally feel obligated to exploit the hermeneutical and epistemic disadvantages of the oppressor in order to resist the situation of oppression. Although it may seem counterintuitive, ignorance and incomprehension can be a means of protection and empowerment for the sociopolitically oppressed, who may be justified in preserving whatever epistemic privilege and hermeneutical superiority they may have as a means of social survival.
Here is one of my favorite examples from the radical abolitionist John Brown. In a speech to the League of Gileadites, Brown advised abolitionists aiding those escaping slavery how to more successfully carry out their acts of rescue, resistance and subterfuge: “go into the house of your most prominent and influential white friends with your wives; and that will effectually fasten upon them the suspicion of being connected with you, and will compel them to make a common cause with you.” Brown is cleverly recommending that Black people essentially borrow the credibility from their respected white peers by counting on the predictable racism and classism present in larger white society. Not only will being in their presence lend respectability, but the prominent white people in question will be motivated to protect their Black friends in order to maintain their own reputations. In other words, if common biases assume “respectable” white people are law-abiding, Black people helping fugitive slaves can exploit those biases to their benefit.
The Epistemic Subversion of Sexual Violence
There exist pockets of opportunities in everyday life for the epistemically and hermeneutically marginalized to take advantage of the dominant group assuming certain things and not noticing other things, like Brown advised free Black people. Biased epistemic norms that privilege certain groups and disadvantage other groups could be used in addressing the prevalence of sexual assault and sexual violence. Women can take advantage of private spaces like public bathrooms—beyond the purview of male eyes—to provide protective warnings to one another. Where Brown advised abolitionists to exploit assumptions of larger white culture in helping enslaved people’s escape, women can take advantage of assumptions about seemingly benign women-exclusive spaces to warn about sexual predators. There even exist humorous tropes about women going to the restroom in groups, with the implication that this tendency is silly feminine behavior and never assumed to be a means through which women carry out subversive practices.
As noted earlier, this is not without its controversy in that especially anonymous accusations lack accountability. Scholarship about the virtues of gossip can be helpful here. Several scholars have argued for the social value of gossip in communities. Gossip provides various benefits like helping community members bond and reinforcing to group members what’s considered acceptable social behavior, thereby warning prospective offenders to avoid certain behaviors. Philosophers have also argued that, because gossip is shared among community members, people will be held accountable for false information and risk becoming the subject of gossip themselves. This social corrective applies to the social media groups who call out bad male behavior but is missing with the anonymity of claims made in bathroom stalls. Is there any way to defend these accusations as “virtuous”?
I believe there is. On their own, anonymous accusations lack any accountability, but the real-life manifestation of such claims is that women talk to each other about them and test their veracity. That is, warnings on bathroom walls prompt discussion among the people who see them, which can help dispute bad faith accusations. Casey Rebecca Johnson explores how gossip is one way that marginalized groups create “safety” if “it can be risky to share information about persons in privileged groups.” Johnson writes that gossip “lends a degree of security to what might otherwise be dangerous talk” in the “transmission of risky information in a private and relatively safe way.” The fact that women resort to this furtive option of sharing the names of men in bathroom stalls is, again, an indictment of a system that fails to adequately address sexual assault. In other words, why would women choose that option if they instinctively felt supported and heard when they’ve been victimized? Therefore, while controversial, I believe these subversive epistemic practices aimed at protecting vulnerable groups like women who might be victimized by sexual assault provide a valuable and empowering social service.
That is, however, with this caveat: philosophers like Fricker and Medina draw attention to the injustices done to us as knowers because some people are unfairly advantaged, which creates conditions for epistemic vices in those dominant groups. Yet there are virtuous epistemic habits they can adopt to help create more just epistemic spaces. Fricker encourages becoming a “virtuous hearer,” in order to “detect and correct” for biased assumptions. Epistemic virtue also involves making a habit of “critical awareness” about how knowledge is produced and maintained. While this advice is aimed primarily at dominant groups, marginalized groups might also develop virtuous epistemic habits related, in this context, to subversive epistemic practices. An epistemic virtue of a vulnerable group secretly sharing accusations is the responsibility to do one’s due diligence and investigate further. Of course, the nature of sexual assault is that there isn’t always evidence pointing to obvious conclusions. But just as John Brown recognized people helping escaped slaves were working to protect them in an unjust situation, the instinct to use these practices emerges because they are attempting to address real harm without perfect solutions.
Brown’s advice and the accusations on bathroom walls aren’t entirely analogous, however: Black abolitionists were entering white-only spaces in order to co-opt their epistemic legitimacy. Women’s restrooms, on the other hand, are places off-limits to their potential perpetrators, which allows for the protected space of accusations in the first place. This reveals how epistemic subversion may have different expressions and occur in different contexts. Nonetheless, Fricker compares the epistemic injustices any group suffers to be like holes in the ozone layer in that “it is the people who live under them that get burned.”
Margaret Betz
Margaret Betz is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. She is the author of The Hidden Philosophy of Hannah Arendt and, the recent book, Modes of Protest and Resistance: Strange Change in Morals Political.
