Stop The All

I.

A group chat leaked recently. Inside it, FH UI students from the class of 2023, future lawyers, future judges, future legislators, were sharing degrading conversations about their female classmates, their lecturers, even their own girlfriends and sisters. The contents are bad enough that I’m not going to quote them here. If you haven’t read it, trust me, it really is as bad as you’re imagining.

I want to start with something very clear. What they did was wrong. Full stop. Not wrong because it “contradicts feminist values”. Not wrong because it “reproduces rape culture”. Not wrong for any theoretical reason. Wrong because they degraded real human beings who never consented to being talked about that way. This isn’t an ideological question. It’s basic decency that should have been settled the moment we learned other people have feelings.

But this essay isn’t about them.

This essay is about what happened next. The wave of Instagram stories, Twitter threads, and LinkedIn posts that flooded in after the news broke. About the people who suddenly felt the need to declare their moral position on sexual harassment, as if anyone was confused about where they stood. About the men who wrote long paragraphs about rape culture, toxic masculinity, and “we as men need to introspect”.

And about the fact that I happen to know, not suspect, not assume, but actually know, that a non-trivial number of those men do the exact same thing in their own group chats.

The only difference is that nothing of theirs has leaked yet.

II.

There is a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii. Its life cycle goes like this. It starts in a cat’s body, exits through the cat’s faeces, gets eaten by a rat, and once it reaches the rat’s brain, it rewires the rat’s behaviour. The rat becomes attracted to the smell of cats. The rat gets eaten. The parasite returns to its host. A perfect cycle.

This is a useful analogy for how outrage works on the internet. The Toxoplasma of Rage. The mechanism roughly goes like this.

A case appears. Say, a harassment case. One side shouts, “look, this proves rape culture is real.” The other side responds, “wait, what’s the context, why wasn’t this addressed internally?” The first side, “you’re defending the perpetrator.” The second side, “no, you’re distorting the facts.” Each side shares its outrage to its own timeline. Echo chambers fire up. Followers get angry. They share again. The cycle repeats.

The interesting part, and this is the important one, is that the clearest cases are not the ones that go viral. The most ambiguous cases are. Why? Because clear cases leave no room for signalling. If there’s CCTV of a father beating his daughter in the street, everyone agrees it’s wrong. Nobody needs to post anything. But if the case sits in a grey area, was that cat-calling or a compliment, was that harassment or awkward flirting, suddenly everyone has something to prove.

And proving your moral position on the internet is free. Free. You don’t have to do anything except type a few sentences and hit post. You don’t have to take on any risk. You don’t have to confront your friend in the group chat. You don’t have to leave the toxic circle. You just post, get likes, and feel as if you have contributed to the cause.

This is what people call virtue signalling. And before you write off the term as something centrists use to discredit activism, hold on. I’m not saying everyone who posts is a hypocrite. Plenty, maybe most, are genuinely well-meaning. The problem isn’t individual intent. The problem is that the system cannot distinguish sincere from performative. Instagram has no honesty sensor. The algorithm doesn’t care whether you’ve ever actually confronted your friend. All social media knows is that the post is generating engagement, so push it to more people.

The result. A man who shares content about “raising awareness on rape culture” can be the exact same person as one of the FH UI guys in that group chat. Without a trace of irony, he posts a thread about “dismantling patriarchy” and collects five hundred likes. Not because he’s evil. Because the system allows it. Even rewards it.

These people have no skin in the game. They aren’t carrying any risk from the moral positions they take. A person who is genuinely anti-harassment and willing to confront a close friend, at the risk of being cut out of the circle, has skin in the game. A person who posts an Instagram story but stays quiet when his friend harasses someone in front of him, that isn’t morality. That’s PR.

III.

Now we enter the trickier part.

One reason the discussion of harassment, feminism, and “woke culture” feels so exhausting is that the terms involved don’t have stable definitions. Or more precisely, they have too many definitions, and people switch between them depending on the rhetorical need.

There is a logical fallacy called motte-and-bailey. Here’s how it works.

Imagine a medieval castle. It has a bailey, a wide, comfortable open area that’s pleasant to live in but hard to defend. And a motte, a small tower on a hilltop that’s easy to defend but cramped and unpleasant. When attacked, the residents retreat to the motte. When safe, they return to the bailey.

In social discourse, this happens constantly.

Motte. “There are social patterns that make it hard for victims of sexual harassment to speak up, and they need to change.”

Bailey. “All forms of heterosexual sexuality under patriarchy contain coercive elements, and every existing institution needs to be dismantled.”

Both get called “feminism”. Both wear the same label. But they are very different claims. The first is hard to argue against. Of course victims should be able to speak. The second is a radical claim that requires extraordinary evidence. But if you attack the second, you will appear to be attacking the first. And who wants to look like they’re attacking victims?

Another example, closer to home.

Motte. “Toxic masculinity refers to specific norms of masculinity that harm men themselves, like the pressure not to express emotion.”

Bailey. “Masculinity itself is toxic, and men need to fundamentally change the way they exist in the world.”

Or the one most relevant to the FH UI ‘23 case.

Motte. “There is a culture in which sexual harassment is normalised and perpetrators don’t face adequate consequences.”

Bailey. “Every sexual interaction not explicitly and repeatedly consent-confirmed is a form of violence.”

People who use these concepts usually aren’t running motte-and-bailey consciously. They genuinely believe both versions are the same thing. And sometimes the two really are hard to tell apart. Reality is rarely as neat as logical categories. But the effect is the same. Discussion becomes almost impossible, because every time you try to criticise the radical claim, you are confronted with the reasonable one, and you have to retreat, because the motte is “true”.

This produces something very dangerous. Immunity to criticism. If every critique can be deflected with “oh so you’re pro-harassment?”, then the movement, any movement, loses its internal correction mechanism. It becomes unfalsifiable. And something unfalsifiable, said Karl Popper, isn’t science. It’s dogma.

IV.

Here is a question that’s rarely asked because just asking it is socially dangerous. Where did the FH UI boys come from?

Not in a literal sense. We know they are from Jakarta, from upper-middle-class families, from good high schools. The question is deeper. How is it possible that a group of law students at one of Indonesia’s best universities, surrounded by progressive discourse, exposed every day to narratives about consent and respect and gender equality, ended up in a group chat like that?

The easy answer. They were already bad.

The satisfying answer. Toxic masculinity, deeply rooted.

The answer that lets us feel safe. This is an individual failure, not a system failure.

I suspect the real answer is more uncomfortable than any of these.

Imagine you are an eighteen-year-old male student. You’ve just started university. You aren’t a monster. You’re a normal guy with the normal confusions about gender, sexuality, and relationships. You want to be a good person. You genuinely want to understand.

Your campus environment tells you the following things, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by implication.

You, as a man, are part of a structurally oppressive group. Your masculinity is toxic until proven otherwise. If you feel uncomfortable with this narrative, that’s your privilege talking. If you want to push back, that’s your fragility. If you stay quiet, that’s your complicity.

Notice. Every response you might give has already been pre-labelled as evidence of your guilt. Uncomfortable? Privilege. Pushing back? Fragility. Silent? Complicity. There is no exit. This isn’t dialogue. This is a kafka trap.

I am not saying the concept of privilege is wrong, or that men don’t have certain structural advantages. I already said at the start that the asymmetry of experience is real. But there is a large gap between saying “there’s a social pattern you need to understand” and saying “you’re guilty by virtue of what you are, and every reaction to this accusation only proves the accusation is true”.

The first is education. The second is indoctrination. I’m using that word carefully.

The effects of indoctrination, we know from every other context where it happens, are not sincere compliance. The effects are one of two things. Submission filled with resentment, or unfocused rebellion.

We have no trouble understanding why Palestinians become radical. We see their living conditions, the constant pressure, the powerlessness, the normalised violence, and we say, “I don’t agree with Hamas, but I understand how people got there.” We have analytic empathy. We can separate understanding from justification.

The question is, why is that same analytic empathy never extended in the other direction?

If you keep telling a group of people that they are categorically guilty, not because of what they do but because of who they are, and you close off every legitimate channel for response, don’t be surprised when some of them retreat into closed spaces where they can express that frustration without consequence. Don’t be surprised when that frustration, deprived of a healthy outlet, mutates into something far darker than you imagined.

The FH UI group chat is not an anomaly. It is a product. Not a product of masculinity that failed to be reformed, but possibly, at least in part, a product of the way we are doing the reform.

I can hear the objection from here. “So you’re blaming feminism for the harassment men commit. Classic.”

No. I am blaming the perpetrators. They are adults. They have agency. They made choices. No social narrative forces anyone to harass anyone else.

But if the question isn’t “who is at fault” but “how do we prevent this from happening again”, then we have to be honest about the feedback loop that’s running. A culture that categorises an entire group as guilty by default does not produce better men. It produces men who are better at hiding. Who use the right language in public, and in the closed group chat behind it, become the worst versions of themselves.

And this, ironically, is the most tragic failure of all. Not that the movement failed to change behaviour, but that it succeeded in changing the surface while pushing the substance further underground.

A better analogy might not be reform but prohibition. The United States banned alcohol in 1920. The result was not a sober society. The result was the speakeasy, an underground bar even wilder than the legal one it replaced. When you ban something without addressing the reason people do it, you don’t eliminate the behaviour. You only eliminate its visibility. And something invisible is much harder to address.

V.

“Kill All Men.”

“All Cops Are Bastards.”

“All Men Are Trash.”

“Laki-laki tuh emang ya.”

I know the counter-argument. I’ve heard it a hundred times.

“It’s hyperbole. Nobody literally wants to kill all men. It’s an expression of frustration from a less powerful group.”

I’m willing to accept that this is hyperbole, that it’s an expression of frustration, and that the frustration is rooted in real experience. Women really do experience harassment on a scale men generally don’t. Women really do often get dismissed when they speak up. The asymmetry is real, and I’m not trying to minimise it.

But I still have a problem with it. Several, actually.

First, consistency. If “Kill All Men” is acceptable hyperbole because it comes from a less powerful group, then we need to ask who decides who is less powerful. For example, who is less powerful here, a poor man from a village in NTT, or a wealthy woman in Jakarta Selatan? Is “power” a single dimension that can be ranked linearly? Intersectionality, a theory that came out of feminism, says no. But somehow, when the slogan happens, the nuance disappears. Suddenly “All Men”, including the poor ones, the queer ones, the disabled ones, the one who just lost his mother, is a monolithic block that can be targeted.

And if we allow the logic of “the less powerful group may use absolutist language against the more powerful group”, then I have to reluctantly point out that the exact same logic can be used to justify “All Muslims Are Stupid” from someone in France who sees Islam as a threat to secularism. Or “All Jews Are Evil” from someone in Palestine looking at AIPAC and illegal settlements. Or, closer to home, every flavour of anti-Tionghoa sentiment in Indonesia, which is always justified with “but they control the economy”.

Are you comfortable with all of that? If not, and I hope not, then the principle isn’t “the weaker group may use absolutist language against the stronger group”. The principle is that nobody may use absolutist language against any group, because once you open that door, you cannot control who walks in.

Second, precision as a moral obligation. This might be the most underrated argument. When you say “All Cops Are Bastards”, you close off the questions that actually matter. Police in which region? Which policy is broken? Is the problem in recruitment, training, or accountability? Are there police who are genuinely trying to reform from the inside, and you just put them in the “bastard” bin?

Rhetorical absolutism feels powerful. “ACAB” looks more badass than “certain aspects of the police system in certain jurisdictions require structural reform”. But the first sentence has no analytic content. ACAB doesn’t tell you what to do. ACAB only tells you what to feel. And feelings without direction are energy that just circulates inside an echo chamber.

Third, friendly fire. This is the saddest one. “Kill All Men” injures the men who are already on your side more than the ones who aren’t. The men who are actually misogynists and don’t care about feminism, they also don’t care about your slogan. They scroll past. The men who get hurt are the ones who care enough to listen, who are genuinely trying to understand, who might be in the middle of learning, and who get told that they, by virtue of their chromosomes, belong to a group worth killing (hyperbolically, sure, but still).

If your goal is to change behaviour and build alliances, this isn’t a strategy. It’s self-sabotage.

VI.

At this point a sympathetic reader might ask. “OK, but if there are no absolutist slogans, if everything has to be nuanced, how do we mobilise people? How do we make them angry about the things that are actually worth being angry about?”

It’s a valid question.

Look at how moral labels, “racist”, “misogynist”, “bigot”, have become so elastic that they can mean anything depending on what’s needed. And when a word can mean anything, it effectively means nothing. But those labels still function. Not as descriptions. As weapons. You don’t have to define “racist” with any precision if your goal is not to understand a phenomenon, but to win a social fight.

The problem is that a weapon has no target button. A weapon can be aimed at anyone. And in a world where the accusation “racist” or “misogynist” can destroy a person’s reputation without verification, imprecision is not just an intellectual problem. Imprecision is a moral problem.

Then who draws the line between “legitimate criticism” and “hate speech”? Between “harsh joke” and “harassment”? Between “a comment on a consented thirst trap” and “objectification”?

The honest answer. Nobody. And whoever claims to know with certainty, whether he is a feminist activist, a traditionalist conservative, or a rationalist on the internet, trust me, he doesn’t. He’s selling something.

There are two ways of looking at the world. The conflict theorist believes that these questions are answered by power. Whoever is stronger decides what’s true. The mistake theorist believes the answers can be found through honest discussion, data, and good argument. That “truth” doesn’t belong to any group but is something we search for together.

I default toward mistake theory. I want to believe we can reach consensus through reason. But I am not naïve either. Sometimes conflict theory describes the world more accurately. Sometimes there really are sides who use moral narrative to defend power. Sometimes honest discussion really is impossible because one side isn’t interested in honesty.

But here, and this might be the only hill I’m willing to die on. Even if conflict theory is correct about how the world works, that is not a reason to adopt it as a description of how the world should work. Knowing that power often defines narrative doesn’t mean we have to surrender to that logic. The opposite. It’s a reason to fight harder for precision, consistency, and honesty, because without them, all that’s left is endless tribal warfare in which everyone is sure he is right.

VII.

At this point I have spent thousands of words condemning virtue signalling, dismantling motte-and-bailey, exposing the inconsistencies of absolutist slogans, and analysing cultural feedback loops. I have been using phrases like “kafka trap” and “unfalsifiable” and “conflict theory”.

If I’m honest, really honest, I have to admit all of that is also a performance.

Not a performance in the sense that I don’t believe what I’m writing. I do believe it. But writing an essay this long that criticises other people for signalling moral superiority via Instagram story, while I myself am signalling intellectual superiority via essay, is an irony too big to ignore.

I am aware that this entire essay, which feels above-it-all, very rational, very un-tribal, is actually an expression of Grey Tribe tribalism. I’m not above the game. I’m inside the game too, just wearing a different jersey.

In writing this, I am also picking a team. My team isn’t “All Men Are Trash” and it isn’t “men’s rights”. My team, if I’m being honest, is the people who are proud of their ability to see both sides. The people who feel slightly superior because they are “not caught in tribalism”. The people who, ironically, are very tribal about their non-tribalism.

And whoever the audience of this essay is, you, reading this, are probably part of the same group. You’re reading this and nodding, not because the argument is irrefutable, but because the essay confirms something you already felt. That you are more rational than most people. That you can see hypocrisy that others cannot. That you are above all this.

But you are not. And neither am I.

Tolerance only means something when it’s directed at a group you genuinely find disgusting. Not the group you pretend to tolerate because they are abstract and far away, but the group whose presence makes your stomach turn.

For me, that group isn’t the FH UI boys. I already condemned them long ago. Condemning them is easy. Everyone agrees they’re wrong. The group that genuinely tests my tolerance is the activists I think are running motte-and-bailey. The people who post “Kill All Men” and genuinely believe it’s a defensible moral position. The people who, in my view, are wrong, but wrong in the way they believe is right.

Can I understand why they got there, with the same analytic empathy I demand from them toward other groups? Can I apply my own principles, precision, nuance, consistency, to people who I think don’t apply them themselves?

If I can’t, then this essay is just a longer Instagram story. Smarter, maybe. More references and footnotes. But functionally identical. A public declaration of where I stand, designed more to show who I am than to actually change anything.

That is the possibility I, and you, have to sit with uncomfortably.

Because maybe, in the end, nobody is really above this game. Maybe the best we can do isn’t to escape tribalism (probably impossible for a species whose evolution depended on coalitions), but to notice we are playing it. And that noticing, while it doesn’t change the game, at least changes how we play.

Or maybe not. Maybe this awareness is just another layer of signalling. “Look, I am even aware that I am signalling, how meta of me”, and we are stuck in an infinite regress where each layer of self-awareness is only a new layer of performance.

If that is the case, then fine. At least we have come far enough to see the regress. And that, I hope, I really do hope, is a little better than not seeing it at all.

VIII.

Let me come back to FH UI ‘23.

What they did was wrong. I have been saying this since the first paragraph and I will not change my mind. Not because of “toxic masculinity” as a theoretical abstraction, but because they degraded real human beings who never agreed to be treated that way. You don’t need gender theory to know this is wrong. You only need the basic empathy you should have had since you were five.

But I want to close with a challenge. Not for them. They’ve already faced consequences. For you. For us.

If you are one of the people who posted an Instagram story condemning them, ask yourself honestly.

• Is your group chat clean?

• Have you ever stayed silent when your friend talked about a woman in a way you knew was wrong?

• Have you ever laughed at a joke that shouldn’t have been funny, not because you agreed, but because pushing back was hard?

If the answer is yes, and for most men the answer is yes, then posting an Instagram story isn’t a solution. It’s an anaesthetic. Posting a story makes you feel like you’ve done something when you have done nothing.

The real solution is expensive. It requires you to confront your close friend, at the risk of being shut out. It requires you to leave the toxic circle, at the risk of being alone. It requires you to be honest with yourself about when you were part of the problem, and that might be the hardest part of all.

Notice. None of those things require a slogan. None require “Kill All Men” or “All Men Are Trash” or a hashtag. What is required is something simpler but also harder. Consistency between what you post and what you do when nobody is watching.

The word “all” is comfortable. It frees you from the burden of nuance. It makes the world feel tidy. Some people are good, some are bad, and you know which side you’re on. But the world is not tidy. The woman who posts “All Men Are Trash” sometimes dates men who treat her badly, and she knows it. The person who shouts “ACAB” sometimes calls the police when his house is broken into. The person who says “Kill All Men” sometimes has a father, brothers, male friends she loves deeply.

“All” is a lie. We all know it’s a lie. We keep using it because a tidy lie is more comfortable than a messy truth.

Stop the all.

Not because the anger is invalid. It is valid. A woman angry about being harassed has every right to be angry. A person disgusted with police brutality has every right to be disgusted. Frustration with a broken system is correct.

But anger wrapped in “all” stops being productive anger. It becomes identity. And when anger becomes identity, you no longer want the problem to be solved, because if it gets solved, you lose part of yourself.

Stop the all. Not because you have to stop being angry. Because you deserve more than just being angry. You deserve precision, nuance, solutions that actually work, not slogans that only feel like working.

And start from the smallest, hardest place. Your own group chat.