What an unexpectedly irritating piece!

It presents a (false) choice: constructive criticism is to help the criticized improve, while bullying is to exploit them. The problem is that I think a lot of what people conceive of as unhelpful public criticism isn’t really for the target, it’s for the greater body: censure is a term you can only dispense with if you’re willing to dispense with all idea of shared ethics. Saying “What you did was bad, and you shouldn’t do it!” isn’t necessarily because you think that person needs to hear that from you, because you think you can convince them. It’s about maintaining the tone of a space. If someone calls someone else a f****, you have to *say something, or else the target (and any actual queer people around) will understand the dead air to be silent agreement.

Now, can this whole concept go to bad places? Of course it can, it has, and it does regularly. But to pretend that public speech is either for the benefit of the addressed or exploitative, to set this up as a definitional dichotomy–ugh.