The Streisand effect and the pragmatics of oppressive speech

Dr Robert Simpson (Monash Philosophy)

In the ongoing culture wars over free speech, one key battleground is the idea – recently reinvigorated in the popularisation of the concept of ‘microaggressions’ – that everyday racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, transphobic, (etc.) speech is not merely offensive, but is in some sense positively oppressive, i.e. contributes to unjust and systematic social hierarchy.  I begin by presenting and sympathetically elaborating the most sophisticated and plausible account of how such speech effects oppression, namely, McGowan’s account of “conversational exercitives.” I then explain why this account of the causal mechanics of oppressive speech calls into doubt the punitive responses to everyday prejudicial speech that are favoured by many who regard such speech as oppressive. The local salience of identity-prejudicial associative schemas is a crucially important part of the causal mechanism via which everyday sexist (etc.) speech oppresses. And punitive responses can entrench the salience of such schemas, thus obstructing their own purposes. I discuss how this kind of backfiring is akin to the ‘Streisand effect’ (i.e. the phenomenon in which an attempt to hide information x inadvertently publicises x), and I conclude with some suggestive remarks about what might be done instead.