Johnny Depp and the Things We Believe Without Evidence
The trope of the emotional, aggressive woman, and how men convinced everyone anger isn't an emotion. Plus, Feminist Advice Friday and the real reason men don't do their fair share of household labor.
In This Newsletter:
Johnny Depp and the Things We Believe Without Evidence
Feminist Advice Friday: Things Are Unequal, But My Husband Keeps Bragging About His Contributions
The Real Reason Men Don’t Do Their Fair Share of Household Labor
What do you need no evidence to believe? It’s a recurring question on my two favorite podcasts, Maintenance Phase and You’re Wrong About. Our willingness to believe certain things without any real evidence is how we got the Satanic panic, and why we blamed Monica Lewinsky at least as much, if not more, than Bill Clinton.
I’ve come back to this question a lot this week, while watching coverage of the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation trial. I don’t know anything about Johnny Depp or Amber Heard. I don’t know who is telling the truth. I don’t know who, if anyone, is a good person or an abuser.
Neither do you. Neither does anyone else. Both of them are actors—skillful at fooling others, at studying a character and then pretending to be that character.
Despite that, my timeline is filled with people making confident assertions about the two of them. Based on listening to a few hours of testimony, with little to no actual evidence, they feel certain they know what really happened.
That sort of absolute certainty is how we get moral panics. It’s how we get victim blaming and false allegations. Folks are getting swept up in their emotions, charmed by their preferred party, completely unaware of the ways they’re being charmed and how little evidence there actually is.
What’s most striking to me, though, is how hateful people are about Amber Heard—how much aggression I’ve seen directed at her. How absolutely confident people are that she is the abuser, and that Johnny Depp is her poor, hapless, innocent victim.
In reaching this conclusion, people keep drawing on familiar stereotypes: the hysterical, highly emotional, out of control woman who will stop at nothing to control her mate. The calm, rational, debonair man who loves her, who just wants to be happy, who will put up with all of it out of love.
These are widely accepted social roles. Which is weird, because they have almost no basis in reality. Men kill tens of thousands of their romantic partners each and every year. They are disproportionately the perpetrators of rape, domestic violence, stalking, every manner of violence. And they perpetrate these crimes because of their emotions. The reason we don’t see it that way is that we’ve allowed men to convince us that anger is not actually an emotion.
I’m especially pessimistic about the nature and behavior of men in relationships because I’ve just finished compiling the data from the State of Marriage survey, and it’s overwhelmingly awful for women. And as a result, I am unconvinced by calmness, which is something anyone can perform. We already know from recordings that Johnny Depp is anything but calm in his real life. Yet people are still buying this calm character he’s playing.
What do you believe without evidence?
That men are unthreatening if they’re calm?
That anger is not an emotion?
That hysterical, emotional women are the real threat?
As a friendly reminder, I’ll be releasing that data on the state of marriage on May 1 to paid subscribers only. You can see it first, support my work, and read the rest of this paid newsletter (including the rest of my thoughts on Johnny Depp) by clicking the link to become a paid subscriber.