A few weeks ago, a Yelp employee wrote about her financial struggles, and was fired. I won’t stake my reputation on claiming that those events are related, but that seems to be the general consensus. She spoke negatively about her company, and then, two hours later, no longer worked for that company.
I don’t want to talk about employee rights or the minimum wage or the first amendment, because, well, I haven’t gone to law school (yet? maybe I’ll go eventually, dad) and generally anything posted about the Bill of Rights will be bombarded with some encouraging and discouraging examples of internet users freely utilizing the hallowed first item on the Anti-Federalist’s itemized list. I want to talk about the response to this story.
As a complete sucker for clickbait, I followed a link on my newsfeed titled “29-year-old millennial rips 25-year-old Yelp employee who got fired for complaining about her salary.”(Note: it was picked up by Business Insider). I was sad to read the kind of hostility towards a woman who reported as struggling, lost her job, and then received unexpected internet fame/infamy overnight. The author of the “rips” piece, a writer named Stefanie Williams, mocked the millennial for not being poor enough to classify herself as destitute, and not doing enough to get out of the situation. She compares her own story to that of the Yelp employee, and even though the stories are surprisingly similar, she makes outlandish conclusions about how the Yelp employee is probably mooching off family, has no work ethic, and, strangely, is immodest and unskilled.
She starts off:
“It sounds like you’ve hit some real post Haitian earthquake style hard times, so maybe some advice will help while you drink the incredibly expensive bourbon you posted on your Instagram account and eat that bag of rice, which was the only other thing you could afford!” Logic being, if any poor person has anything worth any amount of money, regardless of how they got it, they deserve to be in the financial situation they’re in, because they’re bad with money. Even if this girl spent her first paycheck on a celebratory bottle of booze, which probably wasn’t the best financial decision, it doesn’t change the fact that 80% of her wages were going automatically allocated towards her rent. And, who knows, that could have been a gift, something she also brought with her with the ten pound bag, or not even her possession. In any case, the fact that she took a picture of some bourbon, doesn’t mean she’s not hungry.
She goes on:
“The issue is that this girl doesn’t think working a second job or getting roommates should be something she has to do in order to get ahead after three months of an entry level job in the most expensive city in the country. She believes Yelp should cover the cost of the financial decisions she’s made which include living alone and accepting that salary, two options that any sane person would never make.” Read: if you make little money, you shouldn’t have taken that job, and, since you’re poor, you don’t deserve a living space of your own.
Obviously, I found Williams’s piece infuriating. But, even if you completely agree with what Williams wrote, I think you should be troubled by the manner in which she writes her response. Stefanie Williams reads a blog post from some girl she’s never met who is unhappy with her compensation, draws unwarranted conclusions based on very limited evidence, and then writes a scathing, smug, and patronizing piece about her. She attacks her for the decisions she’s made, and mocks her for being in her situation that she’s in. Williams assumes that if only the girl had made better choices–if she made the kinds of choices this successful, humble, health-insured writer had made–she’d be better off.
Here’s what this has to do with Rape Culture. While, of course I am not likening the kinds of attacks made on the former Yelp employee to anything akin to rape, it is important, I think, to recognize that the underlying attitudes and assumptions that went into Williams’ “rip” are those that are both symptoms and perpetuations what could rightly be identified as Rape Culture. Victim-blaming is a product of Rape Culture. Deciding who is and isn’t allowed to identify as a victim, or even as a person struggling, is a product of Rape Culture. A lecture to stranger about how they deserve everything they receive without exception, is a product of Rape Culture. Publicly shaming individuals for their negative situations is product of Rape Culture. Rape Culture says the person in power (i.e. professional writer) gets to tell the story without even making any attempts to understand the story of the person not in power (i.e. unfamous aspiring writer/former Yelp employee).
And probably a good number of people who recognize that a culture where rapes and sexual assaults are wildly underreported, underprosecuted, and undersentenced for a number of reasons, where the process of accusing someone of a sexual crime opens the plaintiff up to an unreasonable amount of scrutiny and ridicule, and where 1 out of every 6 women and 1 out of every 33 men will be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes, would agree that that culture is one that promotes, or at least tolerates a Rape Culture. But Business Insider picked up Stefanie Williams’s response, and Forbes writer Liz Wiseman wrote an article about what the former Yelp employee could have done differently, and this girl, who says she’s so hungry she can’t sleep, is bombarded by individuals advancing their own writing careers by condemning her.
Fortunately, for the former Yelp employee, she’s already received at least one job offer as a direct result of her letter. Her story may just have a happy ending. But as for the larger problem? Our attitude towards suffering cannot be that all misfortune is justified or inauthentic. We have two options when someone asks for help: to help them, or not to help them. Anything else is aggressive, unwarranted, and unacceptable.
erinstidham 