The Extremely Dumb MeTooing Of Harry Sisson

I stand with Sisson

Edit 3/24: It’s not even clear Sisson did lie to the women. The revealed screenshots never indicate that he said he wasn’t sexting with other people.

God help me, I’m actually defending Harry Sisson.

I’m joining the ranks of Sisson defenders who include Cartoons Hate Her’s Trump impression, libertarian journalist Robby Soave, failed Democratic presidential candidate Marian Williamson, and Fukuyamaist Drew Pavlou. Williamson, of course, was sure to note that Sisson’s castigation in the public square was like the repression she experienced from the mainstream for being anti-establishment and wanting to defeat Trump with the power of love.

Harry Sisson, for those who don’t know, is a young TikToker who comments on politics. Sisson is mostly unremarkable—distinct from other Democratic activists only because of his youth and his almost unfathomable willingness to toe the party line. For instance, after Biden’s debate faceplanting, Sisson was one of the people furiously insisting that Biden was still the towering mental giant he’d always been, and that Trump was the real one facing cognitive decline. He even claimed Biden won his debate against Trump! This would be like if Trump had a boxing match with a baby and you declared the baby the winner—while Trump likely didn’t do great, the baby surely did worse!

Harry confidently predicted that Biden wouldn’t drop out, and then after Biden did, made no indication that his guess had been unreasonable. So even though I’m broadly on the same political team as Sisson, I think he’s a propagandistic hack and find him hard to tolerate except in small doses—except as a source of comedy. I also do not trust him because of his youth and inexperience. No one should take seriously the musings of people who are less than 23. :)

But recently Sisson has been MeToo’d in perhaps the dumbest conceivable way. This scandal has led brain geniuses like Catturd to declare that Sisson should be jailed, even while defending Trump who has 26 accusers and has admitted to walking in on the changing room of women during Mrs. USA contests.

So what has Sisson been accused of? What is it that should lead to him being in prison—that caused several of his friends to disown him? What did Sisson do that was so immoral that people thought the appropriate response was sharing his sexting all across the internet?

Sisson has been accused of flirting with multiple women (shock!!!)—none of whom he was in relationships with—at the same time. He requested nude pictures of some of these women who, once again, he was sexting with. Many of these people willingly sent him nude photographs. He had never spoken with most of these women—he just exchanged flirtatious and sexual text messages with them. Apparently some of the women asked him if he was sending flirtatious messages to other women and he (falsely) said that he was not.

This is the big bombshell, the scandal, the wrongdoing of allegedly epic proportions. Sisson was flirtatiously texting multiple women while he was single. These women, despite Sisson making it clear he was not in anything like a relationship with any of them, were misled into thinking that Sisson was only flirtatiously texting with them.

This doesn’t seem great. But people shouldn’t be cancelled for being a bit of a jerk when they’re 22. I’d imagine that Sisson’s malfeasance is likely at about the median level young men engage in to get sex. Actually, in Sisson’s case, it wasn’t even to get sex but to sexts. As Cartoons Hate Her notes “Personally, I find it worrying that our current generation’s sex scandals don’t actually involve sex.”

This is not in the same universe as a serious MeToo allegation. Sisson’s crime was lying to people who he was not in a relationship with about information that they did not have a right to, on account of his not being in a relationship with them. About half of men cheat at some point; what Sisson did was significantly less bad than cheating. If your behavior is not even in the top third of shittiness done by men, you should not be crucified for it. If a person’s behavior isn’t abnormally bad, it shouldn’t be maliciously exposed to hundreds of millions of people.

The people Sisson was chatting with are not “victims.” They are people who consensually sexted with him in something they knew was not a relationship. The real person who is a victim as a result of this is Sisson himself, who now has had his private sexual messages blasted across the internet.

Everyone has flirted in some pretty cringy ways (except me, of course). Imagine your cringiest flirting was sent out across the entire internet so that millions of people could debate whether you were shitty and make fun of you for it. If I did have a policy of flirting with strangers—as much of my generation seems to on dating apps—I’d much rather be lied to about whether the strangers were flirting with other people than have hundreds of millions of people see the messages I sent. Sharing embarrassing and private messages with hundreds of millions of people is an extreme violation of privacy. While I don’t think this is the main reason Gen-Z is lonely, it does seem like people’s tendency to go public with minor dating infractions makes people worried about dating. If you approach someone in the wrong way, or even don’t seem adequately enthusiastic when you see your girlfriend in the eyes of TikTok strangers, you might just be castigated by a sizeable portion of the world.

For example, Sisson at one point said to one of the women “The verdict is you are sexy as fuck. Court adjourned.” Several legal scholars I spoke to confirmed this was not a real legal proceeding. Now, I would probably not say something like what Harry said (I’d be much smoother, and probably mention the self-indication assumption. For instance “hey girl, are you the self-indication assumption? Because I can’t stop thinking of you, and if we assume that awesomeness comes in discrete units, your existence gives decisive evidence for there being some large cardinality of infinity of those awesomeness units—at least Beth 2. You can really see why I exert such a magnetic pull on women). But if I did say what Harry said, I’d be quite embarrassed if the entire world learned about the contents of private messages that I intended only to share with one person.

Now, Sisson’s conduct is sufficiently a nothingburger that he doesn’t need further context to vindicate him. But the shittiness of the attempted MeTooing is exacerbated by how young he is. Sisson is only twenty-two.

Now, I don’t think being young exonerates you from all wrongdoing. If you are 22 and you kill someone, you should be locked up for quite a while. But it’s particularly shitty to attempt to ruin a person’s life over fairly minor wrongdoing when he’s pretty young. Because of this scandal Sisson has become politically toxic; all his future employers till the day he dies will know about his behavior. It will follow him wherever he goes. And call me crazy, but I don’t think that a person should be permanently tarred based on fairly minor and typical wrongdoing when they were just 22. What Sisson did is much less wrong than the meat eating most people engage in three times per day.

Of course, the reason that Sisson became a pariah has little to do with his behavior. Sisson could have been accused by one woman of being rude to her at Walmart and this likely would have blown up. On the right, there’s a popular narrative that male feminists are really the most predatory people in society. The left seems willing to cancel people over wrongdoing—no matter how minor.

So, because Sisson is a male feminist, with male feminist friends whose online persona is built around respecting women, everyone had an incentive to throw him under the bus. His friends had to in order to maintain their image. The right did because it was convenient for their narrative. Others on the left also threw him under the bus to show they were Very Serious About mistreatment of women. It was the same reason Al Franken was cancelled. He did nothing particularly egregious, but everyone has to play it up because doing so fits their narrative.

So great is the extent of the nothingburger that when you read and translate the articles attacking Sisson, they don’t actually allege any particularly egregious behavior. All the punch in these articles is in the language they use rather than the conduct they describe. One article, for instance, is titled “How did Harry Sisson, a University student and a Joe Biden fan, lure women to share explicit videos?” Um, I’m pretty sure that requesting that women who you are sexting with share nude photographs of themselves is not a crime. All this sinister language about luring women is used to describe consensual sexting. What is going on? As for how he did it, well, he used this sinister technique called asking!

Another article says Sisson “allegedly lured several women on Snapachat to share explicit photos of themselves with him.” What? Convincing someone to send you nude photographs is not a crime! It does not become a crime by the use of ominous language like lured. The fact that articles all have to use words like lured to make his behavior sound predatory, rather than just a bit shitty, shows just how much of a nothinburger this is.

Jeremiah Johnson

put it well:

The scandal seems to be that an extremely famous single guy in his 20s flirted with a lot of women on Snapchat. And was too good at it? He was too convincing and charming in being able to get women to send him nudes, I guess, and now there’s remorse. Trying as hard as I can to be charitable to the women involved, the most damning thing you could say about Sisson is that he lied to some of them that he wasn’t texting other women at the same time. Lying is uncool, sure. He might be kind of a jerk? This is moderately bad behavior for someone who calls himself a champion of women, I guess? Like a 2 out of 10 on the badness scale.

Other people have later begun claiming that Harry and his friend and defender Chris Mowry are “red flags.” Evidence for their sinister character is that they (mostly Mowry) made some jokes about one of their friends looking like slenderman. Chris also joked to a guy named Parker about having been called up by Parker’s girlfriend. If you think these jokes are egregious, then you have not spent any time with Gen-Z. Jokes of the form “I had sex with your mom/girlfriend” (note: I do not mean to suggest that these are the same person, and I very much hope they are not) are just about the most common genre of joke among Gen Zers. They’re not at all offensive. The attempt to retroactively dig up dirt and spin innocuous behavior in a maximally negative light is completely deranged.

Sissongate is thus totally ridiculous. The people spreading it should be ashamed of themselves.

Also, while this is not the most important part of the story, one of the most common responses to Sissongate from those on the right has been people saying they’re shocked to learn Harry is not gay or claiming this is a psyop to detract from allegations that he’s gay. I’m sorry, the people who are saying this have terrible gaydars. Sisson is obviously not gay. This is especially obvious now that it’s been revealed that he was sharing sexual messages with about a dozen woman and that he now has a girlfriend. But it was obvious before. Sisson does not seem gay. The people saying he is are unable to distinguish between gay people and Democrats.

The Sisson scandal is a sham of the highest order. The primary victim is Sisson. Those spreading it cannot be trusted and have either been driven insane by politics or were always insane. Cancelling Sisson would involve deep and shameful puritanism of the highest order.