By Joy Pullman
Wednesday, November 02, 2016
More than a decade ago, a hip Californian friend told me
about this sweet couch-surfing website you could use to travel the world
inexpensively. It eventually morphed into Airbnb (then
“airbedandbreakfast.com”), which I came to prefer over booking hotels when I
travel (which is regularly).
For one thing, I liked the atmosphere of a home over that
of a hotel. Hotels are sterile, anonymous, isolated, and boring. They are also
more expensive and somehow rarely near a nice sidewalk that takes you to an
interesting little street. I also like to have a kitchen available, because I
hate travel food. I have had so many good experiences meeting new and very
different people as my Airbnb hosts that my husband and I have even discussed
listing our own guest room just as a social experiment, to meet even more
people from around the country and globe.
Well, not any more. In a supremely arrogant act of
needless virtue-signaling, the short-term-rental website has banned people with
either religiously or scientifically informed views about human sexuality (or both).
Sunday—a day of worship, of course—it informed me that to continue using their
services I would have to sign their religious creed:
In sum, you are only allowed to use Airbnb if you agree
that race, sexual preference, disabilities, and so forth will have no bearing
on your decision to live with someone for a few days. Beyond that, it is a
pushy, socially conscious way to weed out of the Airbnb “community” anyone who
doesn’t agree with the Left’s identity politics.
So now Airbnb refuses to do business with anyone who
doesn’t agree with them politically. (I bet Airbnb brass support forcing
wedding vendors to participate in gay weddings though, eh?) Irony of ironies,
they’re running around telling everyone, “We’re going to discriminate against
our customers, but our customers aren’t allowed to do the same!” Discrimination
is not only normal but a necessary part of human life, as Airbnb implicitly
acknowledges by, well, discriminating. It’s just lying to itself and all of us
about this reality. As a private company, Airbnb should be free to
discriminate. But when it tells me they get to do it and I don’t, I’m going to
call their leaders ignorant hypocrites.
I’ll also come out of the closet as someone who is not
comfortable signing Airbnb’s weird faith pledge. And it’s not because I’m a
bigot. It’s because sharing one’s home is a very intimate thing to do, and
people have a right to discriminate about who they let into it and why. A
Muslim family should have the freedom to decline to put a transgender person in
their spare bedroom, and someone who lives up six flights of steps should be
free to say “We can’t accommodate people with heart conditions.”
Besides, people openly discriminate on Airbnb all the
time, and have essentially as long as Airbnb has existed. Just check out all
the descriptions saying “No kids, please” or “No smoking.” Aghh! BIGOTS! Or
not.
This is stupid. It’s none of Airbnb’s business why people
book or accept a booking. It’s only their business to facilitate the
transaction.
I Discriminate on
Airbnb—So Sue Me
Every single time I’ve used Airbnb I have discriminated,
and I feel no qualms about it. For example, as a woman typically traveling alone
(or sometimes with a nursing baby), I feel especially vulnerable. I can’t check
a gun or pepper spray in my typical travel bag, a small carry-on. And I don’t
know martial arts. Even if I did I would have a tough fight against a big,
pushy guy.
So I am especially scrutinizing about not only what
neighborhoods I choose to stay in, but also what hosts look like. I prefer to
rent from couples or women, not single men, although I have rented from single
men. If it’s a single man and he looks like a creep, I won’t request to use his
place.
Is that bigotry? No. Is it discrimination? Absolutely.
And I am not a bad person for discriminating against single guys who look like
creeps. I know fully well that a picture doesn’t tell me who a person really is
and I could have foregone plenty of great listings purely by judging a fellow
exclusively on his looks and profile.
It may be totally unfair to prejudge a person this way.
But it’s also utterly rational. Even if
it’s not, it’s my right to discriminate in whatever way I want, and Airbnb
should not attempt to get into my head and imperiously determine whether I have
the proper motives for clicking “request a booking” or not. I should be free to
do what makes me comfortable, and not have to apologize for whatever that
happens to be.
Another example. Once I stayed with an Indian family, and
their house smelled strongly of curry. If I were pregnant at the time, I would
have been quite sick. Even though I wasn’t pregnant then, the smell made
sleeping there more difficult for me. Is that bigotry? Not at all. My husband
attended a boarding school with lots of international students, who were always
telling the Americans we smell like red meat. It’s just a food-culture thing.
I have no grudge against Indian folks for cooking up some
delicious curry. Of course their house smells like what they eat. So does mine.
We just typically eat different kinds of foods. So we had a minor cultural
difference that did affect my comfort while staying in their home. The hosts
were very welcoming to me and we enjoyed each other’s company as I came and
went for a professional conference. I rated them well, and they rated me well.
But am I a bigot for thinking to myself, “Maybe skip the Indian house next
time”? I don’t think so.
Airbnb’s Totally
Counterproductive Pushy Politics
My feelings about and ways of evaluating the people I
will let into my home or whose homes I sleep in are none of Airbnb’s business.
All they need to do is facilitate our private transaction, and leave the
personal preferences entirely up to us. Airbnb is not my church or confessor.
It’s a short-term rental business. Keep your policies professional, and don’t
dictate my private life, thank you.
Perhaps even more irritating is that Airbnb did better
for the world when it did let
individuals make up our own criteria for how we will associate with others.
Airbnb’s very format of facilitating interactions between people who have
nothing more in common than hopping over to this one weird website is itself a
much greater contributor to cultural exchange than its sanctimonious new
policy. Thanks to Airbnb, I have stayed in the homes of union members,
straight-up socialists, and of people with different ethnicities, lifestyles,
and religions.
The financial transaction Airbnb facilitates itself
constitutes an opportunity for cultural exchange, but on the terms of the
people participating, which makes it much more likely. With others, I spent a
lot of what I thought was mutually enjoyable time chatting. I and my hosts were
free to talk to each other, to build some rapport with a very different person
or not, as we so chose. Some of my hosts left the keys in a lockbox and I never
saw them. That’s fine. Their prerogative. A relationship is a dance. You
invite, you signal, you check for mutual interest. You don’t push or shove.
When people say no, the polite thing to do is back off, not grab their shirt
and yank.
Ironically, Airbnb’s “diversity” policies reduce the
diversity of its community and the possibilities that people on all sides of
every different “identity” can positively interact. Now I’m shut out from
renting from a transgender person who might, like my many other hosts, humanize
the “other.” Airbnb’s new policy pushes me to think of identity
politics-mongers as insulated crybabies whose political lobby divides and
attacks people. It teaches me to fear them because they use their power to push
me into possibly unwanted interactions, which increases my threshold of
resistance, rather than letting me decide to take a risk because I feel safe
and uncoerced.
This is a loss for community, diversity, and tolerance,
not a gain.
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