Occasionally nonfeminists or antifeminists will compliment me by saying “you’re one of the few reasonable feminists!” Recently, that has started rubbing me massively the wrong way.
I feel like a lot of people feel strange about me objecting to being called one of the few reasonable feminists. After all, isn’t it a compliment? They’re saying that I’m charitable to my opponents, or not a bully, or otherwise lacking the negative traits commonly associated with feminism.
And to be fair I had a hard time for a long time putting into words why exactly I objected to it. I mean, it is true that many people who give me such compliments are not doing so due to any civility or charity on my part, but instead because I know the correct ingroup shibboleths. And it is true that a lot of them are uninformed about feminism and if they read more Julia Serano would discover I am not special. And it’s true that lots of the people who give me such compliments have an Imaginary Ozy Inside Their Head that is totally unrelated to any actually existing Ozys and are horrified to discover that I think we should burn gender to the ground and dance on the ashes.
But I don’t think any of those are enough to explain the strength of my repulsion.
But then I realized that, while “you’re one of the few reasonable feminists!” is pretending to be a compliment, it’s actually an insult.
I am a feminist. This is part of my identity. I think the feminist movement is, on balance, good for the world; that sexism exists and causes people a lot of pain and that we should try to be less sexist.
“One of the good feminists” implies that most members of my identity label are bad. That most feminists are unusually uncharitable, bullying, oppressive, or cruel, and that whatever trait they want to compliment me for is a remarkable exception. I disagree strongly with this opinion! The flaws that feminism has are no different or worse from the flaws any other large group of people has, from Catholicism to football fandom. The failure modes feminists fall into aren’t feminist failure modes, they’re people failure modes.
I mean, maybe the people calling me “one of the good feminists” agree on this point, but then I have to wonder why they’re calling me “one of the good feminists” rather than “one of the good humans”, since humans are the relevant reference class. That is, at best, a very confusing way to phrase it.
And, like, we can talk about whether the feminist movement is exceptionally bad. I am open to discussing whether feminists are evil (…probably not with random antifeminists, but at least with Samo Burja). But… if you are intending to compliment me, I assume your goal is to make me feel nice, not to initiate an emotionally laden and upsetting yet important conversation. The compliment puts me in an awkward position where if I say “thank you” I am implying that I believe bad things about a group I am proud no more than ordinarily ashamed to be part of. And that’s a pretty rude thing to do to someone you’re trying to make happy.
Thing of Things 
Thanks for writing this; it helps to clarify what you mean when you say this.
To be clear: I think it is a true fact that most feminism, aggregated in a way that’s weighted by how visible it is to nerds on the internet, has a tendency to fall into certain failure modes that you do not fall into. And I think that you understand this. But I completely understand why you wouldn’t want to take it as a compliment.
LikeLiked by 10 people
The failure modes feminists fall into aren’t feminist failure modes, they’re people failure modes.
I’ve seen this stated before and I’m not sure I entirely agree. There might not be specifically feminist failure modes, but I’m pretty sure there failure modes that are distinctive to left/progressive groups.
The old Monty Python People’s Front of Judea/Judean People’s Front joke wasn’t about human groups in general, and I don’t think it would have been particularly funny if it were. It was specifically about the factionalism and obsession with minutia and ideological purity that characterizes leftist groups.*
* I say this as a leftist myself.
LikeLiked by 11 people
My other issue is that feminists and other social justice movements actively claim to be more self-aware and self-critical than other movements, so it is more glaring when they fall into common failure modes. You’ll often hear feminists say something to the effect of “I’m more self-aware of these failures because I can apply a critcial feminist analysis to myself”.
Union movements, or environmentalist movements, don’t make such claims of extraordinary self-awareness.
LikeLiked by 13 people
I expect you only see it in leftist groups because you are a leftist.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think there’s also an element of explicitly rejecting conformity. Some groups consider authority to be, y’know, not necessarily evil.
LikeLike
I think all groups have their shibboleths and untouchable topics.
I read an article not too long ago in which the author lamented that he’d seen an anti-war veteran excoriated in an anti-war meeting for saying something carelessly and cluelessly transphobic. The author said, “look, this guy didn’t mean anything bad by it. It’s clearly just his opinion. Can’t we work with him on the stuff we agree on?”
And as much as I feel his frustration on that, I couldn’t help but wonder what the reaction would be on the right, if, in a discussion of tax policy, someone got up to speak and prefaced their remarks with, “as we all know, Jesus was clearly not the son of god … *insert tax policy discussion*.” Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m guessing he’d be driven from the room.
All groups have their factionalism, and all groups have their shibboleths.
LikeLiked by 5 people
Are you referring to the Freddie deBoer blog post from January in response to Chait and the debate surrounding his NYT article?
The “transphobic” statement was that other anti war vets need to “man up” and speak out against war, instead of staying silent from social pressure.
That was it. The statement was merely the use of a common ideomatic expression that associated masculinity with bravery in the face of social pressure. A minor example of chauvinism, perhaps, but… Transphobia?
Do you really consider it reasonable to call that carelessly transphobic? Do you think the fact that this is being considered as a shibboleth on the same order as denying the divinity of Christ is a conservative policy discussion might, ya know, kinda make the point you’re trying to refute?
Unless I’m wrong and you’re referring to some other anti war veteran driven from an anti war meetup.
LikeLiked by 9 people
No, sure, that’s what I was talking about, but I was referencing it from vague memory, so I got the details wrong. Your objection to calling “man up” transphobic is reasonable, and I don’t think that the reactions of the person excoriating him were reasonable.
I think it’s lunacy to think that similarly out-of-proportion reactions to things of similar scale don’t occur across the political spectrum, though.
In order to compensate for scale, insert “carelessly and casually using pro-gay language,” or referencing white privilege or something.
LikeLiked by 4 people
That’s an extremely specific question, for which I have an extremely specific anecdote. Revilo P Oliver reports that Robert Welch, at the meeting where he founded the John Birch Society, announced that he was an atheist. Of the fourteen others at the meeting, three withdrew from the project, at least one due to this announcement. But Oliver said that it convinced him of Welch’s sincerity in all other matters.
LikeLiked by 1 person
So yeah, it’s still funny applied to people other than leftists.
LikeLiked by 7 people
This is even more obviously true in the real world: left-wing movements produce revolutions, right-wing movements produce coups.
LikeLike
Gonna go ahead and disagree with this as matter of history. Although the Bolsheviks affected to refer to the Fevral’skiy perevorot and the Oktyabrskaya Revolyutsiya, the reality was the reverse. (Though both were leftist, in some sense)
LikeLike
So, is there a good way to determine the average moral status of a given group?
Personally, I disagree with Ozy. I don’t think that the average feminist (in America, across most suburban and urban areas) is good, but I don’t think they’re bad either; I think that feminism has reached a level of cultural prominence and commonality that precludes easy judgement about what the average feminist is like, much like Christianity.
My own observations is that there are four broad categories of feminists along the moral axis. On one hand, we have the feminists like Ozy, who pay attention to the source material, and bring up concerns even when they’re not landing on popular or approved victim groups. On the other hand, we have…well, let’s just call them bad feminists; people who use the affects and shibboleths of feminism to pursue their own personal agendas, which are very frequently anti-feminist. Then there is a very large group of feminists who have absorbed the affects and shibboleths but have never really thought about feminism, and who have strong opinions on the wage gap and the college enrollment gaps, but can’t tell you why one is a problem and the other isn’t, for example.
This is not a bad thing! It is not ideal, obviously, but feminism, as a movement, has done much more good than harm. But if a majority of people who identify as feminists had nothing to do with those various movements, I don’t see how I can give them moral credit just for being members, especially when there are also some not-so-savory parts of the movement.
I see where you’re coming from, but to me at least, calling something good doesn’t mean that not-that-things are generally bad, but that they are generally-bad or generally-neutral. And, as you say, feminism is a group of people, and one thing that groups of people do when they go past a certain size is regress very strongly to the mean.
LikeLiked by 7 people
I mean, maybe the people calling me “one of the good feminists” agree on this point, but then I have to wonder why they’re calling me “one of the good feminists” rather than “one of the good humans”, since humans are the relevant reference class.
Perhaps in the abstract. But not from a particular individual’s point of view, because salience is a thing.
For me, your blog generates functionality-impairing anger and/or emotional pain far less frequently than the median feminist blog[1][2]. There are numerous topics for which the median blog generates little or no emotional reaction from me. This is not necessarily because feminist bloggers are less reasonable than bloggers in general; it is quite possible that it is purely a consequence of my caring less about unreasonableness on many other subjects. Nevertheless, it matters, to me.
I have also commented on this blog, without censoring myself or getting banned, for far longer than I expect that I would be able to on the median feminist blog. There are numerous topics for which the median blog would be unlikely to ban me, whether because my opinions on that topic are uncontroversial or because they’re in line with those of the median blog writer. Again, this matters, to me.
[1] In the sense of blogs that focus heavily on discussing issues from a feminist (or SJ, with gender as a frequent topic) perspective, not just blogs whose author identifies as feminist.
[2] Based on my encounters with various feminist blogs of both high and low cultural prominence.
LikeLiked by 12 people
Osberend: Will you consider that the average feminist blog is not actually representative of the average feminist? My own experiences is that Internet culture isn’t necessarily representative of the median of a group of people if there is a large cohort who is in the group, but doesn’t feel any real desire to talk about it publicly.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Robert: many of the people who read ozy’s blog probably have most of the rest of their interaction with feminist thought through blogs. So “feminist bloggers” is a pretty reasonable class of people to compare ozy with, and it’s not totally outrageous to shorten that to “feminists” in conversation.
This especially holds since people do, in fact, frequently use qualified forms like “tumblr feminism”, which imply there is awareness that some aspects being critiqued are specific to the medium.
LikeLiked by 10 people
Certainly so, but my own experiences are such that Tumblr feminists and so forth aren’t representative of feminists in general. I know a lot of people who are feminist in the same way that Easter-and-Christmas Christians are religious, who don’t have aggressive and polarizing opinions on gender relations because they don’t care to dig into the material and take a stand one way or the other.
On the other hand, I am doing a whole lot of internal estimating about my own availability heuristics here. I’d love to see some demographic surveys done about how many people consider themselves feminists, and what beliefs and actions that is specifically correlated with. (I’m almost certain that ‘having a terrible blog’ isn’t one of those, but I’m ready to be corrected if so!)
LikeLike
Robert: That’s coming close to what was referred to before here as distributed motte-and-bailey. When it comes to saying that feminism is a big movement and everyone reasonable and non-deluded is a feminist, people who are the equivalent of only going to church on Christmas are feminists. But when it comes to deciding what counts as feminist belief and who is a true feminist, those people are excluded.
And even ignoring that, it still is sensible to use “reasonable feminist” to mean “reasonable, among those feminists who actually have opinions on or try to do things about feminist issues”. It’s the opinions and issues that non-feminists are worried about, after all.
LikeLike
Excluded by whom? I mean, one of the many ironies of the Bad Feminists is that the vast majority of them disagree with each other about who’s a true feminist.
And I think we will have to agree to disagree on that usage, because as I said, in my experience, there are a load of feminists who don’t have opinions beyond “The freedom to be a doctor or lawyer is good.” and “Sexual assault is bad.”, and who don’t really take actions to support either proposition
I think that a lot of people do tend not to think of this demographic when they think about feminists, because they are indeed numerous and quiet. I guess I’m with Ozy more than I thought I was on my first reading; I don’t think that just because there is a cohort of loud, awful feminists that being awful is particularly common in feminism, and I do think that it’s important to qualify “Of the set of Internet feminists whose blogs I follow.” if that’s your heuristic.
LikeLike
“there are a load of feminists who don’t have opinions beyond “The freedom to be a doctor or lawyer is good.” and “Sexual assault is bad.”, and who don’t really take actions to support either proposition”
But that’s part of my point. Feminism is an ideology; it’s defined by opinions. Someone who thinks it’s good to let women be doctors and lawyers, but has no opinions on most other feminist topics, is a feminist in the same way that someone who once painted a single sign is a painter. Technically they are, but it’s not really who you’re talking about when you make statements about painters.
LikeLike
“I mean, maybe the people calling me “one of the good feminists” agree on this point, but then I have to wonder why they’re calling me “one of the good feminists” rather than “one of the good humans”, since humans are the relevant reference class.”
I think feminist, not human, is the relevant reference class if you’re talking about feminism. “You’re one of the reasonable feminists” means you’re reasonable with respect to feminism, that ingroup biases haven’t destroyed your capacity to reason cogently about it. I think it’s generally pretty reasonable (har har) to call someone “a reasonable x”, regardless if ‘x’ is football fan or republican or animal rights activist or what.
LikeLiked by 10 people
In my experience (which is admittedly limited), I’ve found that social justice internet communities tend to be unusually hostile to opposing ideas. There are certainly groups that are worse, but most of them are labelled as “people I almost certainly don’t want to interact with”, like Nazis and religious extremists.
I engage in a lot of political discussions on reddit, and I’ve posted on a wide spectrum of political subreddits, often with content that runs counter to the mainstream of that particular subreddit. Some of them are generally willing to engage with unpopular opinions, and some of them are generally hostile, but the social justice subreddit (SRSDiscussion) is the only one that has repeatedly banned me with no warning for statements that were fairly innocuous even from a SJ viewpoint. I’ve been banned for using the term ‘civilized world’, which is problematic, but seems like a fairly minor offense. I was also banned for noting that the age of consent in most countries is lower than 18, even when I went out of my way to state that I was not offering an opinion on whether or not that was a good thing.
This is only my own personal experience, but I’ve talked to other people who notice the same kind of thing. There are plenty of social justice people who are reasonable, and plenty who have good ideas, but I have found that they don’t tend to be charitable toward opposing viewpoints. You, Ozy, are charitable by any standard, but it’s somewhat more noteworthy considering my past experience with social justice.
LikeLiked by 15 people
There’s a term used by a lot of gun rights blogs, and has crossed over to some red tribe authors: “reasoned discourse”. Apparently, blocking, banning and deleting anything which disagrees in any way and/or especially which points out factual inaccuracies is how the left encourages reasoned discourse.
The authoritarian streak that runs through the online left-leaning community is ridiculous, and the inability to deal with being proven wrong is pathetic.
LikeLiked by 5 people
I don’t think most people who say such a thing are referring to feminists in the abstract. They’re referring to feminists they’ve specifically known or met. I have no doubt that many good feminists* exist, but I often find it hard to find them. It is a breath of fresh air when I do. So when I call someone “one of the good feminists”, I consider it implicit that I mean “that I have personally experienced”.
*By this, I do not mean “good people who are also feminists”. I mean “people who manage to avoid the specific failure modes common to much mainstream feminist activism and rhetoric”. By this criterion, you can certainly be a bad feminist without being a bad person.
LikeLike
I do think that any organization that focuses on bettering the lot of an out-group can end up accreting a fringe that turns hostility to the in-group into a virtue. So it’s not that I disagree that these are ‘people failure modes,’ but I think that they’re people failure modes surrounding a particular sort of organization.
Like, I think the vicious transphobia of some radfems is a reflection of this in the same way the vicious islamophobia of some atheists is. It’s hard for some people to get intersectionality, and that just because you’re a member of an out-group doesn’t mean that everyone in the in-group isn’t.
Come to think of it, I think that’s one of the failure modes MRAs fall into too. Huh. Maybe Ozy’s just plain right.
LikeLike
Eh, I wouldn’t take the MRAs as evidence of much. As best I can tell, they seem to have copied most of their terrible habits from feminism. So it’s not independent. Though I’ll admit to not really knowing the history — I’m not sure to what extent such a thing can be known, but if somebody does, it would be interesting to hear.
LikeLike
So, I don’t think your the only “reasonable” feminist or one of a small group of reasonable feminist, but I do think you are one of the few mainstream blog which explicitly present themselves as a pro-social justice which happen to not regularly follow into certain pro-social justice failure modes
You don’t seem to assume that the only reason anybody would disagree with you is that they don’t listen to marginalized people
You don’t seem to think that bullying people is okay just because they belong to marginalized groups.
You don’t assume anybody who disagrees with you is disagreeing all Trans People or all Mentally ill people and only doing that because they’re a privileged person.
You in general, don’t vigorous defend the virtues of being an asshole to someone.
You don’t tell people to “educate themselves” when they are confused on a point or are unconvinced.
You generally act with principle of charity somewhat in mind.
Jezebel regular falls in all of these and while possibly worse than the average self described “social justice” blog, doesn’t seem that far off.
I also don’t buy at all that social-justice failure modes are always human failure modes, My friendgroup is not very anti-gay or anti-kink, people who self describe as pro-social justice are far more likely to dislike gay men as “more misogynistic than straight men” or view kink as inherently abusive. They’re more likely to scream at queer people about how homophobic they are.
These might not be social justice failure modes among the general population, but compared to the socially liberal nerdy people I know, they are specifically feminist/social justice correlated failure modes.
LikeLiked by 10 people
(to clarify, the feminist who qualify here are feminist who use feminist as a primary identifier/interest when talking to people which is the more vocal subset of feminist an has a higher concentration of people who are unreasonable)
LikeLike
That’s funny, because I think of Ozy as one of the few good rationalists, although I would only ever say so with the intention of making a cheap shot, not with the intention of a compliment.
It seems to me the issue is merely that Ozy is both a feminist and a rationalist. So to a primarily rationalist audience, Ozy seems like “one of the good ones” simply because they conform to rationalist values (or more cynically, because of good rationalist signalling). Likewise, Ozy seems to me like “one of the good ones” because they conform to feminist values.
LikeLiked by 5 people
Same!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Most members of most (ideological) groups are bad, but they’re bad in different ways. While there are some common human failure modes, the way in which a typical feminist is bad is different from how a typical libertarian is bad, and both are different from the ways in which a typical anti-theist is bad, and I say this as someone who thinks feminism, libertarianism, and anti-theism are correct. Also, the flaws of Group That Adheres To Ideology X are not necessarily the flaws of Ideology X – “feminism is good but most feminists are bad” is a completely coherent sentence.
LikeLiked by 8 people
““feminism is good but most feminists are bad”
cf. Gandhi (exact wording is disputed): “I like your Christ. The trouble is with you Christians.”
Although I feel like accepting this sort of thing tends naturally to lead to “Communism cannot fail, it can only be failed” problems.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I think that you are one of the good humans.
LikeLiked by 8 people
““One of the good feminists” implies that most members of my identity label are bad. That most feminists are unusually uncharitable, bullying, oppressive, or cruel, and that whatever trait they want to compliment me for is a remarkable exception.”
Most of the feminists around here *are* bad, at least for reasonable values of “around here”, such as “vocally on the Internet” or “within social justice”.
LikeLiked by 4 people
You wrote a short thing on Tumblr about this a few months ago. At that time, I answered the following, which I think held up quite well to what I read from you since.
“Here was my gut answer to that:
There was a few comments on your blog on how few feminists (in the sense of visible Internet feminist columnists/bloggers from the example given) address the abuse of men. In contrast, you have Valenti, the “Slap-Happy” Guardian columnist Barbara Ellen, this infamous Jezebel article now supposed to be a joke, the article pulled from the Good Men Project explaining men should not flee or fight back, but apologize, when their female loved ones turn violent, and so on… and I am selecting from well-known websites or kinda Internet-famous authors. I am convinced most of this is signalling and pandering for cheap outrage-bait.
In this context, people like you, Ally Fogg and a few other stick out enormously (and the comments below Ally Fogg’s articles are often painful). And certainly not only on the abuse of men.
Here was the more thought out answer:
It is not about your behavior (in the private sphere¹) or convictions. It is your threshold for “won’t speak with you or even consider your arguments” which is unusually high and your unwillingness to use cheap rhetoric devices or erroneous facts².
Now a good question would be to check if the people telling you “you are one of the good X” have beliefs closely aligned to yours (in which case they are just disgusted with the methods of other “Visible Internet X” but you will not have an impact on them) or not (in which case your online demeanor is instrumental in influencing people). Testing for disgust reactions on some subjects before/after contact with Ozy?”
¹ private sphere meaning Tumblr in this context.
² I stand by this even more strongly now, especially on “erroneous facts”. You stand out among feminist bloggers on that front. Someone could argue that this is a rationalist in-group thing, and not something that everyone should aspire too. That someone can get lost as far as I’m concerned.
(one thing I would add: you do very little to none asymmetric enforcement of rigor, discourse norms or even politeness on your blog)
LikeLiked by 8 people
I think it’s useful to distinguish between “you are one of the good [category], unlike most of the rest of [category]” and “you are a good [supercategory], which I notice primarily in your [category].” Where the supercategory is, in this conext, [thinker] or [blogger] or whatever, and the category is [feminist], but this applies to anything for which a good supercategory can be defined. I also think that it’s perfectly reasonable to ask people to specify which one they mean, because it’s confusing if the two different points use the same phrasing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It wouldn’t cross my mind to say something like that. I don’t agree with feminist theory, but I believe almost all feminists are sincere about it, and are basically good people. I enjoy reading any intelligent, charitable, skilled writer; I even seek out those with whom I disagree. Hell, I read Mencius Moldbug, and he might as well be an alien.
It’s clear that you’re a good feminist. Whether or not you’re a “good feminist” is something I’m uninterested and unqualified to diagnose.
LikeLike
Can we say “I think I would enjoy spending time in your company rather more than I would with Amanda Marcotte?”
LikeLiked by 2 people
A sentiment rather ruined by the fact that some folks on here would enjoy scrubbing road tar off the bottom of a livestock transport rather more than spending time with Amanda Marcotte.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I might be the only person here who actually has spent time with both Amanda Marcotte and Ozy. I found both of them quite nice in person.
LikeLike
Is that because her internet persona is a character she performs? Or because she liked you? Or is it because you find her internet persona agreeable?
LikeLiked by 4 people
I had similar feelings when a Welsh Nationalist told me that I was “One of the OK English people*”. Nobody wants to feel that we are virtuous in spite of our identity, nobody wants to feel that our status as an OK person is contingent on somebody else making an exception. And certainly, nobody wants to be used as a stick to bludgeon their chosen ideology with. Being a feminist who’s popular with anti-feminists is not necessarily a satisfying situation to be in.
But having said that, I think writing off the specific problems of the ideology we identify with as just the inevitable consequence of the ideology being made up of flawed human beings seems like a bit of a cop out. We don’t have to accept that there is some kind of original sin buried in the philosophical foundations of our ideology (there might be, but the presence of objectionable tendencies isn’t evidence that there is), nor do we need to consider the ideology’s validity provisional until everybody who is part of it reaches a certain behavioural standard (let alone perfection)ˇ. But on the other hand, if we are willing to handwave away the tendencies towards destructive behaviour among adherents of our own ideology as just being the product of humans being flawed, we don’t really have any grounds when we try to connect the ideologies we oppose to similarly toxic behaviour.
Or to put it more succinctly, if we are willing to say that feminist indifference to male survivors is just due to feminists being human, it makes it harder to say conservative indifference to women who want jobs or don’t want kids is anything but the same thing.
*I’m only English by descent, but that was enough for him
LikeLiked by 4 people
“Nobody wants to feel that we are virtuous in spite of our identity, ”
I do actually. I can’t think of a value of X where “Other X are dumb and bad, but you’re okay.” Wouldnt make me feel good for the rest of thr day. I can totally understand the opposite position, but I always like to feel exceptionally tolerable.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I expect there’s some difference there depending on whether X is an identity one chooses or an innate/immutable one.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Sorry Ozy, but I still think of you as “a reasonable Internet Feminist”. That qualifier is important, because, in my experience, most feminists one is likely to meet on the Internet are pretty terrible.
As far as I can tell, the primary differences between you and someone e.g. from the staff at Jezebel are as follows:
1). You don’t claim any kind of a high moral authority. You have never (plus or minus epsilon) said something like, “You are a terrible person. Do better”, and expected people to bow down their heads in shame and do what you command. Whenever you say that some action is terrible, you always lay out an argument explaining why you think so, and what could be done about it. In other words, you treat your readers as rational and responsible adults, and not as children to be scolded.
2). You are committed to building a better world. Sure, sometimes (quite often, in fact), there are injustices that must be fought; but the fighting is not a goal in and of itself. By contrast, most Internet feminists have no plan beyound “crush the evil patriarchy and all of its soldiers”. They exist in a constant state of siege mentality; and they believe that, every minute of every day, they are waging a righteous war for their very existence against a superior opponent — and in such a war, any tactic is acceptable as long as it’s effective. They cannot build, but only destroy.
Now, that said, it is entirely possible that I have been reading the wrong kind of Internet Feminists; so, can anyone point me to some more counter-examples ?
LikeLiked by 8 people
I’d recommend the Pervocracy Blog, available at the elegant and finely-crafted link to the left sidebar. It’s more topic-specific than Thing of Things, and does not appear to be updating at present, but it’s another good example of Internet Feminism Done (Mostly) Right.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Most partisans have trouble identifying the strongest arguments in favor of whatever they support because it’s so obvious [1]. Very few partisans are able to identify their strongest arguments [2]. Ozy is one such person, so I will thank them for being one of the few reasonable partisans.
(Most of my feminist friends go to very liberal colleges and therefore don’t have the social analogue of peer review keeping them from espousing the most ridiculous ideas. For whatever reason, they really like saying stupid things about gender [3], and this blog acts as a sort of saline drip, constantly reminding me that feminists make good arguments. The fact that I have a bunch of friends at Harvard who have negligible pressure to make good arguments about gender doesn’t imply feminism is bad, but does mean that I’m super grateful to Ozy for maintaining this blog.)
[1] In HPMOR, for instance, Draco was initially completely incapable of coming up with a belief contrary to Blood Purity, much less modelling someone with such a belief. Blood Purity could have been entirely true, but Draco’s inability to model people with contrary beliefs would have made it utterly impossible for him to convince Harry. This is a general phenomenon; if the pain that sexism causes is so obvious to you that you cannot accurately model people who have never seen the pain sexism causes, you will be unable to make convincing feminist arguments to them, no matter how correct feminism is.
[2] I have trouble imagining what a strong argument in favor of creationism would look like, but it’s definitely not “evolutionists think monkeys gave birth to humans.”
[3] For instance, because it’s unacceptable for women to be shirtless in public, men should be subject to the same restriction. Disregarding the fact that men and women are made better off by having this freedom (as evidenced by principle of revealed preferences and how nice women are to me when I play ‘skins’ during ultimate frisbee, respectively), I’m pretty sure the good solution is to allow women to go about topless, which is something I support 100%.
LikeLiked by 7 people
Nit-pick: Your feminist friends are either pulling your leg, or atypical.
A quick Google search turns up loads of examples, in news, in scholarly articles, and in blogs (including a post by Ozy), of feminists arguing for equality under the law = women should be legally allowed to go topless. But I can’t find an example of a feminist publicly arguing that men’s toplessness should be made illegal. Probably it does happen – there are so very many people, after all, that odds are everything has been said by someone somewhere – but, as I said, atypical.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nit-picking your nit-pick: I think the people you’re describing would prefer the term “topfree” to “topless”, what with “topless” having sexualised connotations.
LikeLike
Nit-pick well taken. 🙂
LikeLike
*Digs*. This is the article I was referring to. Relevant quote: “Have you ever been in a crowded area on a hot summer day when a guy takes off his shirt? … he also exerts his privilege, as cis women and Trans* people do not often have that same privilege of going topless in public. A simple thing we can do to push back on sexist entitlement in public is to keep our damn clothes on (yes even if we’re hot).”
IIRC, this was posted to FB by a friend who is graduating from Harvard College this year. She regularly posts stuff from everydayfeminism, so either it was posted unironically or I’ve managed to fall victim to Poe’s law quite badly.
In an earlier draft of the parent comment, I suggested that in extremely liberal environments (women’s studies department), people signal ingroupishness by endorsing stupid liberal ideas: “I’m so feminist, I’m going to demand no one use gendered pronouns until they ask them what gender they identify as!”
…That is, my friends are agressively atypical. Typical people tend to be boring and I have better things to do than have boring friends.
LikeLiked by 6 people
“‘Privileged’ people should not do perfectly sensible things, simply because ‘oppressed’ people are unable to do them” is a recurring SJ failure mode. Probably the most common (though still fairly rare) example is calls (mostly a couple years back) for opposite-sex couples not to marry until their home states legalized same-sex marriage.
LikeLiked by 4 people
When you wrote “For instance, because it’s unacceptable for women to be shirtless in public, men should be subject to the same restriction,” I interpreted that as referring to the well-known legal restriction on women taking their shirts off in public. [*] I really think it would be extraordinary to find any feminist, even in a WS department (I was a WS major, so I have some idea of what WS departments are like), calling for laws against men taking off their shirts.
[*] Well-known but becoming less common. A lot of women have won court cases and in theory overturned the laws in many states. I say “in theory” because unfortunately, even after the law is overturned, many cops keep enforcing them. ]
Anyway, obviously you didn’t mean what I thought you meant. Thanks for the correction.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah, I think that, though I disagree with, “hey, leave your shirt on out of courtesy to those who can’t take theirs off,” it’s not a totally unreasonable thing to suggest the way that a proposed legal restriction would be.
The bar I feel like it needs to clear for me is whether my refraining from some action as a protest makes it more likely that other people will be able to do it. Nobody cares if I leave my shirt on, and it would have zero effect on the ability of women or trans folk to take their off.
LikeLike
I originally didn’t respond to this because I didn’t want to insult you and it’s often better to let things go.
But then I realized that it was bugging me that I didn’t respond, so….
1) I’ve heard this or similar sentiments hundreds of times. Ironically, it’s a common and (imo) rather boring sentiment.
2) It’s ugly, too.
3) I think you should consider that “typical” people, by definition, are pretty common, and very likely to be among those viewing what you write in a public or semi-public forum.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I started out thinking that for straights to refuse to marry was a meaningless gesture – just seeking a pointless personal purity, rather than taking an action that would contribute to social change – but in time I began to think otherwise.
In my experience – I was a guest-poster for years on a blog called “Family Scholars,” which was run by David Blankenhorn, a prominent anti-SSM intellectual, and his group – this sort of protest was noticed by some of the more intellectual opponents of SSM, and they realized it undermined their argument that it was necessary to keep same-sex couples out of marriage in order to maintain marriage as a “norm.” The more these sort of protests happened, the more it became clear that, for many young people, keeping same-sex couples out of marriage makes marriage less of a “norm” for what you should do when you form a family.
(Of course, arguably what the intellectuals say is not at all crucial for an issue like marriage equality.)
Incidentally, after years of public argument, Blankenhorn eventually changed his mind and is now pro-marriage equality.
LikeLiked by 2 people
“Yeah, I think that, though I disagree with, “hey, leave your shirt on out of courtesy to those who can’t take theirs off,” it’s not a totally unreasonable thing to suggest the way that a proposed legal restriction would be.”
I think this might be one of those issues on which people have genuinely divergent moral intuitions. It’s hard for me to imagine that it’s better to forego a small pleasure on the grounds that not everybody can enjoy it (in the literal sense that I can’t figure out what that feels like from the inside). But it seems very clear that there’s a ‘fairness’ sense that some people have where they’d genuinely rather see a world without [good thing] rather than see [good thing] distributed unevenly.
I don’t want to call it a failure mode exactly, but if not balanced out by other impulses, that sense of ‘fairness’ can go to some morally counter-intuitive places.
LikeLiked by 1 person
In this case, the reasons why they can’t enjoy it are purely social (i.e., laws and expected response from other people). So, your choice to enjoy the small pleasure is also, inevitably, a choice to remind them of their different social status.
LikeLike
In other words, it’s an attempt to redistribute positional goods by destroying private goods. That’s rather appalling.
LikeLike
Osberend on communication [paraphrased]: I don’t like hints, so everyone should change their default mode of communication.
Osberend on going topless [paraphrased]: How dare that guy suggest that I keep my shirt on?! What a jerk!
LikeLike
That’s not his position even a little. People were (and still are) defending creep-shaming on the grounds that creep-shaming is necessary when indirect communication has failed. osberend’s reply was to ask why, when indirect communication has clearly failed, you prefer insulting the guilty and the innocent alike to just using direct communication. Your response is that you’d rather shame the blameless along with the deserving than risk some personal harm.
This is crossing the street late at night when a black person is coming towards you. Sure, you take take a personal risk to be fair to black people. Or you could be unfair to black people, and avoid a personal risk. I don’t know what your stance on the racial version of the issue is, but I know the social justice community at large switches positions: I am morally obligated to take a personal risk to be fair to black people, but they aren’t morally obligated to take a personal risk to the fair to “creeps”. I find the hypocrisy grating. Either we’re all morally obligated to take personal risks to make the world a better place, or we’re all entitled to be selfish and protect ourselves rather than better the world.
No, his point is that reducing everyone to the state of the poorest among us leaves as all homeless and starving and that’s insane. Keeping his shirt on is a just a milder application of the core ethic. He disagrees with the core ethic because it has appalling consequences, and is thus not persuaded to agree with the milder application. Once the core ethic is discarded, there is no longer a good reason to keep his shirt on.
LikeLiked by 3 people
That’s one of the things he said, yes, but he’s also made much broader statements (at least according to my understanding). Examples include [paraphrased]:
– direct communication is objectively correct
– only a dishonorable person would voluntarily use indirect communication, unless explicitly requested by the other person
I’m in favour of everyone crossing the street whenever they feel like it, for whatever reason. Personally, I don’t use that particular strategy, but I do estimate the potential threat levels based on the number of people in the group, their behaviour, clothes and gender. If I saw more than one black person on a regular basis (he wears grey formal clothes — super-safe), I might take race into account as well.
So — no, I don’t believe anyone has a duty to take personal safety risks for the sake of fairness.
Sure. And if it’s so hot that you might die if you leave your shirt on, please feel free to take your shirt off, no matter how much you care about women’s plight.
Actually, feel free to take your shirt off in any case, as far as I’m concerned. But the guy who suggested this completely voluntary gesture of solidarity didn’t even call anyone “dishonorable”, so I find the level of outrage here baffling.
LikeLike
“I’m in favour of everyone crossing the street whenever they feel like it, for whatever reason.”
I am actually not. Crossing the street to avoid a Black person is not a particular effective way to defend yourself. And its likely to hurt the black person and contribute to a discriminatory culture. You should really not do it if you can.
Maybe you have bad experiences in your past and it would be very dificult for you to not cross the street. That’s fine and since I do not know people’s story I am not going to judge random people.
But my position is VERY different from “I am in favor of anyone crossing the street for any reason.” I am definitely not.
LikeLike
So osberend has probably written like 20,000 words on the topic so far, so I’m not going to read all of it again. However, at certain points in the conversation he did very much assert that everyone should change their way of communicating and that people who do not are “assholes” or “broken” or whatever. And I’m sure if I sift through what he wrote I can find him seeking nuance. Fine. But his position is pretty fucked up.
On “creep shaming,” as a woman it’s not my fault that some man is harassing me. I didn’t ask for this, and brushing off such men is a constant nuisance in my life that every so often backfires in really ugly ways.
And yes, creep-shaming can be a very effective way of getting certain men to leave me alone. Do I want to hurt the blameless? No, of course not. But I don’t see many people stepping up to help me when I’m in the thick, so I gotta deal the way I deal.
Regarding the shy guy in the corner reading comics, I leave him alone. If he starts bugging me, I’ll be nice at first, nothing wrong with liking me. I might even chat with him if he seems sweet, for a time, until I’m done. That goes fine most of the time with most guys. When it does not go fine —
Kitty’s got claws.
LikeLike
@veronica d
No. He asserted that people who find that indirect communication isn’t working (because people aren’t picking up the hints) should change their communication to direct forms because it will get their point across. He asserted that people who are literally incapable of making good-faith interpretations of his statements are broken. He asserted that people who are capable but unwilling to make good faith interpretations of his statements are assholes. He is correct about all three assertions.
You are projecting “everyone” onto his statements. Stop putting words into his mouth.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I think that suggesting that people are broken because they are incapable of certain kinds of communication is really ableist, even if you are proposing NTs are the broken ones. We’ve spent enough time considering ourselves broken; let’s not call others that.
LikeLiked by 2 people
What do you call people who do wrong but aren’t morally culpable for it (under the assumption that people shouldn’t do wrong)?
LikeLike
One could call them “wrong” or “incorrect.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh, and if their wrongness is hurting people, you could call them “hurtful.” If you think they are failing to consider your feelings, then “insensitive” can do the trick. If they are clinging to bad beliefs despite evidence, and if it starts to feel willful, then “stubborn” seems an effective word. There are many lovely words.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@veronica d
Except both “(objectively) wrong” and “incorrect” fail to communicate the absence of of moral culpability in the presence of morally wrong behavior. They are, in fact, entirely orthogonal to moral axes (unless being objectively correct is one of your moral axes).
Similarly, “hurtful” doesn’t mean “morally wrong”; punishing criminals, or using violence to defend oneself, is “hurtful” but morally right. “Insensitive” has the same flaw. “Stubborn” connotes deliberate refusal to update on evidence.
I need a word that communicates that a person is disabled and that if a non-disabled person engaged in the same behavior as the disabled person, the non-disabled person would be evil. “Disabled” doesn’t work because many people are disabled without their disability resulting in behavior that would be morally unacceptable without the disability to excuse it. “Evil” doesn’t work, because the whole point is that the disability excuses the behavior.
LikeLike
I don’t think that the behavior osberend described is morally wrong at all? It’s a simple case of a competing access need: osberend needs to be interpreted literally, other people are incapable of turning off their subtext-finding parts of their brain. Competing access needs are sad, but no one has done anything morally wrong.
LikeLike
Deliberately misrepresenting a person’s argument is morally wrong. Being unable to properly represent a person’s argument because one is literally incapable of applying type-2 processing to an opponent’s stated views is a disability. Misrepresenting a person’s argument is excused if the person has a disability that causes them to misrepresent said person’s argument. “Competing access need” just means that both sides are disabled in ways that excuse their behavior; if fully capable people engaged in such behavior, at least one of them would be morally culpable.
LikeLike
I’m… confused? Since when are we talking about misrepresenting people’s arguments? I thought osberend was discussing his preferred conversational norms in general and flirting in specific.
I think “competing access need” is a useful concept when a person cannot meaningfully change their behavior upon request or when socially punished for not doing so, regardless of whether this inability to change behavior is caused by a Real Disability.
LikeLike
It’s a very long discussion, so I understand not having the context cached. veronic d brought up this post of osberend’s where he calls a specified group of people “broken”. That was a response to Bugmaster’s post that people are literally incapable of properly understanding osberend’s statements, and thus osberend should cut them some slack. That was a reply to obserend’s monster post in the On Creepiness thread, where he mentions his frustration with people misrepresenting his positions (“continue to make this assumption after I specifically tell them it’s false”, for example). Which is itself a response to an absurdly long discussion crossing several reply chains higher up in the comments.
I agree that the idea of “competing access need” is useful even in broader application.
LikeLike
I will try to answer more fully when I have more time this evening, but briefly, I think that InferentialDistance gives a much fairer summary of my statements and my stances than either Nita or veronica.
LikeLike
@veronica d:
> Kitty’s got claws.
You know, you keep saying stuff like that, all the time. I understand that it makes you feel empowered and stuff, but what I hear is, “I enjoy hurting people”. By now, I’m pretty much at the point where if I saw you coming, I’d cross the street. Better safe than injured.
LikeLike
What. Why? It literally means “I can defend myself”. I mean, in Osberend’s perfect world (as I understand it), everyone would either punch or shoot anyone who touched them without permission. Is he also some kind of sadist, according to you?
LikeLike
I don’t enjoy hurting people. Nor do I like people to be hurt.
That said, I got claws, cuz I will stick up for myself from folks who don’t respect my boundaries.
LikeLike
I don’t enjoy hurting people. Nor do I want people to be hurt.
But I got claws, cuz I defend myself from people who don’t respect my boundaries.
LikeLike
@Nita, veronica d:
> I mean, in Osberend’s perfect world (as I understand it), everyone would either punch or shoot anyone who touched them without permission.
I think this is a rather uncharitable interpretation of his perfect world. I don’t think that he literally wants to shoot people for trivial annoyances. Contrast:
> But I got claws, cuz I defend myself from people who don’t respect my boundaries.
The reason this kind of talk makes me cross the street is because veronica d seems to favor disproportionate response. I don’t know how far her boundaries extend, but I do know that if I violate them, I’m liable to get hurt (since she describes herself as something to the extent of “a 6-foot tranny with lots of martial arts training”, whereas I would describe myself as “round”). I also know that she especially relishes punishing people for being “creepy”, which is a pretty vague term that could, conceivably, include people like myself.
The obvious response to the above is, of course, “you are just looking for safe ways to harass me; die, creep !” This is not a statement that I (or anyone else) can refute (at least, not until telepathy is developed), so I won’t try. My point is that there’s a difference between using violence as the last resort, and using violence as soon as it becomes available.
LikeLike
@InferentialDistance: veronica d brought up this post of osberend’s where he calls a specified group of people “broken”. That was a response to Bugmaster’s post that people are literally incapable of properly understanding osberend’s statements, and thus osberend should cut them some slack. That was a reply to obserend’s monster post in the On Creepiness thread, where he mentions his frustration with people misrepresenting his positions (“continue to make this assumption after I specifically tell them it’s false”, for example). Which is itself a response to an absurdly long discussion crossing several reply chains higher up in the comments.
Yes. This. This. Thank you.
@veronica, Nita, ozymandias: That comment is one of exactly two places that I describe people as broken in the creepiness thread, and the other one is even more explicit about who, exactly, I am referring to:
I also, in my monster post, said “guess culture [emphasis added] is wrong and broken,” and then used the phrase “broken culture” twice in the same paragraph. That and the two comments noted above are the only places I used the word “broken” in that entire thread. I did a search to make sure.
LikeLike
And, of course, I managed to botch two of the links in my quotation of InferentialDistance (and one of them again later in the comment). The correct links are:
Bugmaster’s post and monster post
LikeLike
This is ridiculous. The chance I would use violence against someone who does not first use violence against me is somewhere between zero and epsilon. On the other hand, the chance I will someday have to use violence to defend myself — well that’s a bit higher. (A friend was attacked over the weekend, same neighborhood where my g/f and her roommate were attacked. This friend was a drag queen. She awoke in the hospital with head injuries and no recollection at all.)
I think you don’t understand my life or my world, what it’s like to ride the subway while trans. You think I’m gonna go violent on *you*? Don’t be silly.
The idea that I “relish” punishing people is likewise absurd. In fact, my experiences with creepy men have been uniformly horrible. These experiences are humiliating, gross, and frightening. I hate when it happens and I hate that I have to respond.
But I do have to respond, or just suck it up. I don’t suck it up.
I think you are confusing an unapologetic willingness to stand up for myself with aggression. They are not the same thing.
LikeLike
Will second Bugmaster. Veronica’s — frequent — references to the possibility of using violence do come off as super-aggressive and set off the fight-or-flight reflex.
LikeLike
All right, I’m gonna skip the things that InferentialDistance covered (thanks again, by the way), and deal with the rest:
@Nita: Examples include [paraphrased]:
– direct communication is objectively correct
Depending on what you mean by this, it might be a bit off. But it’s at least a reasonable approximation.
– only a dishonorable person would voluntarily use indirect communication, unless explicitly requested by the other person
This, on the other hand, is quite distant from what I said: I asked anyone but a dishonorable person could internalize the idea that directness is rude, and therefore refrain from being direct when they otherwise would, in order to avoid rudeness. Even if we take that question as purely (rather than mostly) rhetorical, the implied statement is still a lot weaker than your “paraphrase.”
he wears grey formal clothes — super-safe
Classism is plusunsocjustful. :p
But the guy who suggested this completely voluntary gesture of solidarity didn’t even call anyone “dishonorable”, so I find the level of outrage here baffling.
No, he just implied that failing to perform such “voluntary gestures,” as you put it, makes a man partially responsible for indiscriminate femicide:
@veronica: On “creep shaming,” as a woman it’s not my fault that some man is harassing me.
Sure. But the problem with creep shaming is not that actual harassers get shamed, it’s that guys who aren’t actual harassers get shamed as well, and that talking about “creepy fuckers” normalizes that, even if the particular “creepy fucker” you’re talking about is royally deserving.
And yes, creep-shaming can be a very effective way of getting certain men to leave me alone. Do I want to hurt the blameless? No, of course not. But I don’t see many people stepping up to help me when I’m in the thick, so I gotta deal the way I deal.
You have stated explicitly that if you feel that a man is a physical threat, you will placate him until you can extricate yourself from the situation, and then call him a creep later. So you’re claiming a right to contribute to ableist bullshit in order to express your displeasure in contexts where doing so does not make you safer.
[cw: harshly “sex negative” language and (arguably) rhetoric follows, in service of a point about hypocrisy]
So what do you think about the word “slut?” After all, if “creep” means a man (or, much more rarely, a woman) who violates legitimate boundaries and deserves to be shamed for it, then “slut” means a woman whose sexual behavior is immoral and who deserves to be shamed for it. And sure, a lot of the time, women who didn’t actually do anything immoral get shamed as sluts, because a lot of men have bullshit notions of what constitutes “immoral” sex for a woman and/or are just plain misogynist assholes, just as a lot of the time, men who didn’t actually do anything rights-violating or obligation-ignoring get shamed as creeps, because a lot of women have bullshit notions of what constitutes a legitimate boundary and/or are just plain ableist assholes.
But some women actually do have sex that’s immoral and deserving of public shaming. Like, say, a woman in a supposedly monogamous relationship who cheats on her partner multiple times with multiple people, and persistently lies to them about it. That’s immoral, right? And undoubtedly the fear of being known as a slut is a very effective way of getting certain women not to fuck around, right? So it should be fine to talk about how they’re filthy sluts, and to publicly defend men doing so, right? After all, it’s not their fault if other men call women sluts who aren’t any more than it’s your fault if other women call men creeps who aren’t.
This is the implication of your position. But I bet you won’t endorse it.
[end cw]
@ozymandias: [cw: defense of the term “broken”]
I think that suggesting that people are broken because they are incapable of certain kinds of communication is really ableist, even if you are proposing NTs are the broken ones.
I think it’s a reasonable description of the sort of person I was actually describing[1]; although it might be read as hostile, that wasn’t my intent. It never captures both the level of the damage, and that it is damage. Because I’m pretty sure—and maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt it—that no one, or almost no one, has that particular sort of specific paranoia (as distinct from, say, assuming that anything anyone says must be some sort of trap) just because they rolled snake eyes in the (epi)genetic lottery. If someone is like that, I’m pretty sure it’s because of something someone did to them, or that they did to themselves (probably as a result of some earlier damage). They were damaged until they broke, and now they’re broken. As I said, that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily unfixable, or useless until fixed, nor is it in general a moral failing; it’s just . . . brokenness.
[end cw]
It’s a simple case of a competing access need: osberend needs to be interpreted literally, other people are incapable of turning off their subtext-finding parts of their brain.
And if people respond to “I need to be taken literally” with “I don’t really think that’s a thing I can do, sorry,” then that’s unfortunate, insofar as it means the two of us are probably incapable of some or all forms of social interaction with each other (depending on just how broad their inability is), but that’s life. And if they respond with “Wait, what? I’m confused, can you explain?” that’s also fine. This is not about competing access needs themselves; to the extent it’s about them at all, it’s about responding to them in awful ways.
I’m… confused?
Is this resolved, or do you have any further questions that I can answer?
I mean, in Osberend’s perfect world (as I understand it), everyone would either punch or shoot anyone who touched them without permission.
That’s a bit strong, especially if you take “touched” literally. The position that I’ve actually been defending is that everyone should (ideally) punch anyone who (willfully) strikes, gropes, or grabs them, and should resort to a weapon if the initial aggressor fighting back makes that necessary.
[1] Which, as noted above, is a lot narrower than people who are “incapable of certain kinds of communication.”
LikeLike
Really?
You do realize that I have no idea who you are and this is the Internet?
Anyway, I did do some martial arts training a few years back, but like I’m not exactly some kinda badass monster. I trained in a pro-MMA gym, but honestly, compared to those guys I’m a silly-sadsack chump.
On the other hand, I’m large. I walk tall. Violence is something I think about. It’s on my mind.
Honestly, I sometimes think that my attitude toward violence is part of what keeps me safe, that the guys on the subway who might kinda like to kick my teeth in also kinda sense that kitty’s got claws, so they think twice.
Not sure. At least no one has gone for me yet, and they’ve gone for lots of other girls like me.
I mentioned that my g/f and her roomie got attacked last month, dude with a knife. This weekend a friend, this cool drag queen, got fucked up hard. I guess she woke up in an ambulance with some serious head trauma and like zero recollection, but the medics were pretty sure she took a beating. Or something. I don’t have the whole story yet, but there are already whispers that this was not isolated. Waiting to hear more. Waiting to send up the alarm.
Anyway, that’s my day to day.
And you guys are worried about me?
Heh.
LikeLike
Typo correction: “It never captures both the level of the damage, and that it is damage.”
“never” -> “neatly”
LikeLike
Bugmaster writes “I also know that she especially relishes punishing people for being ‘creepy’, which is a pretty vague term that could, conceivably, include people like myself. ” In context, Bugmaster was explicit about attributing a threat of physical violence to Veronica. This was a direct response to Veronica writing “I don’t enjoy hurting people.”
Bugmaster, can you back up what you said with a direct quote?
If you’re going to accuse another person here of relishing violence against people, I think you ought to back it up with a direct quote.
Where has Veronica explicitly said she relishes violence? Where has she explicitly written that she would relish, or even use, violence against anyone in a situation other than self-defense against a physical threat?
(Speaking of evidence, Oserbend, your link to what Veronica “explicitly said” doesn’t actually lead to any particular comment.)
LikeLike
Thanks for the informative comment, moebius.
I guess in my mind willingness to fight when cornered and desire to (non-consensually) hurt people for fun are extremely different things.
From reading veronica’s comments here, I have the impression that even if I triggered her self-defense response, she would stop the moment I said “ow, don’t do that, I meant no harm”.
On the other hand, someone who enjoys hurting people would be either unaffected or encouraged by that.
A porcupine will hurt you if cornered. Do you consider them terrifying?
LikeLike
@Ampersand: Thanks. Ugh. Like my previous linkfails, it’s a consequence of my tendency to wrap a statement that I want to be a link with <a href = “”></a> as I’m typing, and then go back and copy-and-paste the right link in. In the other cases, I copy-and-pasted the wrong things; here I forgot to copy-and-paste anything, and so it’s treated as a relative link that doesn’t specify any changes to the current URL, i.e. a link to the page one is on.
The correct link is this
LikeLike
@moebius —
Oh hon, I would never ever ever ever ever hurt you. I wouldn’t hurt a hair on your head. You are sweet and kind person, far better than the norm, with far more understanding, charity, and insight than a hundred other people. You have been abused and mistreated terribly and I’m sorry this happened to you.
You are a gentle soul who deserves to be nurtured and loved.
LikeLike
@osberend — Sometimes I encounter aggressive, creepy, scary men on the subway and I indeed placate them until I am safe. Then later I will talk about these men to my friends. I say bad things about them, such as they are gross creepy fucks who prey on women.
In fact, I am complaining about those men *right now*. This very post. That very paragraph right above this one, where I called them “gross creepy fucks.”
I’ll do it again: Those men suck. They’re toxic assholes who ruin my day again and again.
LikeLike
@veronica: I suspect that your comment is meant to be a disagreement with something I’ve said, but it doesn’t appear to contradict anything I’ve said. So I’m a bit confused.
At no point (at least that I can recall) have I suggested that you do not get harassed by assholes on the subway, or that venting about them later is bad. You get harassed, I lament that; you vent, fine.
What I have contended, and will continue to contend, is that framing that venting in terms of “creepiness” is vicious because it unnecessarily legitimizes ableism and various other badness.
LikeLike
Analogies and metaphors time!
@Veronica D
Cis people are more likely to hurt trans people than the reverse. And (in this specific context) men are more likely to hurt women than the reverse. Let’s take that as a given….
People are much more likely to abuse dogs than dogs are to attack people. And yet, if I see a dog bristling its hackles and baring its teeth at me, my response is not going to be “dogs don’t usually hurt people, so I’ll just play the odds.” Further, knowing the dog in question has been hurt by people before is going to make me more wary, not less.
(But for reference, I said your comments set off my fight-or-flight response. I didn’t say I was worried about you. I’m a 100kg black belt. I’m not worried, but I can understand why Bugmaster or moebius would be.)
@moebius
While I think you make excellent points, one has to be careful. In the case of a bully personality type, one wants to make oneself look dangerous, analogous to the dog’s hackles, so one doesn’t look like an easy victim. But there are other personality types — I’m not sure what to call them — who would see the appropriate metaphor as “new gorilla has shown up and is beating its chest and baring its teeth in my territory.” The effect on them of trying to look/sound dangerous is quite different.
@Nita
I guess in my mind willingness to fight when cornered and desire to (non-consensually) hurt people for fun are extremely different things.
Let me shake things up by punching to my right instead of my left here. There is a certain personality type one finds among some gun enthusiasts that looks like this: (s)he lives in a very low crime suburban area, but enjoys nothing more than discussing the best type of ammunition and ideal firearm for his home defense needs and various scenarios for how he would deal — lethally — with intruders to his home. My reaction to this type of person is not “I’m glad I’m not a home invader;” it’s “Wow, this guy really likes fantasizing about situations where he can shoot someone without legal repercussions.”
The salient fact about gratuitous contributions about how one would deal violently with threats isn’t the contextual specifics of defensive v. offensive, it’s the gratuitousness. When someone never misses an opportunity to talk about how they would employ violence in the appropriate situation, the fact that they keep bringing it up is an important bit of information.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Seconding Bugmaster and Matthew; it really stands out. Like, I guess maybe that’s what you have to do if you live in a context where violence isn’t as rare, but…
LikeLike
@Matthew — Wait! Do you mean to compare me with the suburban paramilitary wannabe? Cuz, what the fuck? The analogy doesn’t fit at all. I live in an urban area. I ride public transit daily. I have been threatened by violence in a direct face-to-face way on multiple occasions, including once by a guy who brandished a knife.
Of course, knife guy didn’t *go for me* the way that other guy went for my g/f. But still.
That wasn’t even the most scary one. The guy who scared me most used his words.
Furthermore, I’ve been sexually assaulted multiple times, mostly by men but once by a woman. These were all groping incidents.
I don’t carry a weapon. I don’t want that kind of responsibility.
If that comparison was meant for me, it is facile in the extreme.
But if you recall, the real accusation against me was that I enjoy hurting guys and like calling them creeps and stuff. Which is total fucking rubbish.
LikeLike
I live in an urban area. I ride public transit daily. I have been threatened by violence in a direct face-to-face way on multiple occasions, including once by a guy who brandished a knife.
Ozy’s blog is the suburb. You’re welcome to loom large for your personal safety on the subway. It’s your apparent compulsion to say things here, of which “kitty’s got claws” has been probably the mildest version, that is… ill-considered.
But if you recall, the real accusation against me was that I enjoy hurting guys and like calling them creeps and stuff. Which is total fucking rubbish.
It’s something of a pet peeve of mine when people decide to conflate my arguments with other people’s arguments. I haven’t posted anything in the creepiness thread in some time. My argument is that your routine resort to menacing language on this blog comes off very badly, and that being a member of a marginalized group doesn’t make it less menacing.
LikeLike
@Matthew — You’re missing the thread of the conversation, which is *why* we’re discussing this topic at all. Likewise, you’re not the only person talking. “Kitty’s got claws” did not begin with you, so if you want to criticize you have to understand why I said it, what I was responding to.
This may be the suburbs, but we are not talking *about* Ozy’s blog. We are talking about my actual life outside this blog. This is the context for “kitty’s got claws.” Likewise it is the context for “creep.” I don’t call people creep here in the suburbs (save one time). But Bugmaster and osberend are not saying I should not use the word *here*. They are saying I should not use the word at all.
Thus I talk about the context where I indeed use it, which is here in the big-bad city.
If you go read my post that osberend linked to, which drives much of this controversy, you will see that I clearly delineate the issues I’ve had with men at work from the issues I’ve had with men outside of work. We might call my workplace another kind of suburb (although my employer has recently had some serious problems with sexual harassment, so there’s that).
Anyway, I do find it curious that so many of you seem *personally threatened* by a woman who defends herself against men *who are not you*.
Funny that. It’s almost as if you identify more with men who mistreat me than with me.
LikeLike
Anyway, I do find it curious that so many of you seem *personally threatened* by a woman who defends herself against men *who are not you*.
Doin’ that conflating-with-others thing again. My instinctive reaction is more like the gorilla metaphor above, but I don’t fault smaller people for reacting like the dog metaphor.
Funny that. It’s almost as if you identify more with men who mistreat me than with me.
If you want to sink to this level of intellectual dishonesty, that is your prerogative. I’m tapping out of this discussion.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This whole sub-conversation: people having visceral emotional responses to each other’s languages, getting mad, and then working really hard to rationalize having those visceral responses while calling each other names. Come on people, act like rationalists.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@ Matthew
I’ve seen the home defense enthusiasts you describe on the Internet, and I also have a negative reaction to them. But veronica’s comments have never given me that feeling. If anything, Osberend’s armed utopia advocacy came closer to triggering it than anything veronica has said so far.
Is it because I’m a woman? Or because “home defense” is a lot broader than what I consider self-defense? Or because pushing a “kill” button from a safe distance doesn’t feel “honorable” to my monkey brain? Or because a mistaken beating is easier to stop or survive than a mistaken shooting? Or because I’m a feral bitch under the thin veneer of civility?
I don’t know.
But it can’t be because I’m big and strong (I suspect Moebius or Bugmaster could easily subdue me if they tried), or because I hate guns and love unarmed violence (I don’t have much experience with either).
LikeLike
My own take on the whole “Kitty’s got claws” thing is that the context from this thread wasn’t someone threatening her with a knife. It was someone in a gaming store who chose to chat with her past the point that his natural level of sweetness allowed him. This did not increase my confidence that “Kitty’s got claws” was an expression of self-defense only. Furthermore, in the previous megathread on creepiness, Veronica conflated creepy in the sense of “This person makes me uncomfortable because it is plausible that they will respond with violence.” and the sense of “This person is violating my social expectations of who can talk about what.”. When someone who is distracted, checking their cell phone frequently, and talking incessantly about their brother is called creepy, that’s also a pretty strong indicator that there’s not a lot of discrimination going on in target choice here.
On the other hand, I’ve also seen absolutely no indication that Veronica’s inclined to swing first, and if she’s going to be rude or aggressive to someone who was rude or aggressive to her first, then that’s fine with me.
Another factor I do consider is that trans individuals are pretty much at a local maxima of suck in terms of both attracting violence and getting productive official response to it, thereby indicating a greater-than-usual need for threat displays. So, while I don’t like it when Veronica does it, I get the reason behind it, and I don’t personally feel threatened by it.
LikeLike
@Robert — Please forget the cell phone example. It didn’t work.
For the record, what I was trying to communicate with that example was this: it can be hard to explain exactly why someone comes across as creepy, and this is cuz of the lizard brain / gift of fear stuff. Sometimes the cues are subtle and hard to explain. Like, the way someone talks on the phone might set it off.
But yeah, that sounds weird. It was a bad example, as it didn’t put the reader in my shoes and express how these things really feel. However, it would take serious narrative skills and maybe a thousand words to express that — too much for a forum post.
On the other hand, I have tons of other examples that are more obvious, real life stuff, like the old panhandler who followed me around grunting like a pig.
Not anyone else. Just me. I was the one in the skirt.
Anyway, I failed to communicate my meaning. I wanted something not-so-on-the-nose as pig-grunting guy. I failed.
On the kitty’s got claws, osberend nicely posted a link to my position on this. If you read that, I make it clear that I will try to respect a person’s feeling. Go read it. Please, everyone.
Here, I’ll help. This is the relevant part:
See the “without hurting his feelings too much”? I’m not walking around claws out ready to destroy the first hapless man I encounter. I’m not a femme fatale. In fact, I find these encounters undesirable. I do not seek them. I do not enjoy them. What Bugmaster said about me was bullshit.
But still, the claws are there. Cuz women without claws get stomped on (not necessarily literally) — cuz most men are not kind-hearted, shy, awkward nerds. Even most nerds are not kind-hearted, shy, awkward nerds. For every truly decent man there is a callous one. For every righteous man there is a villian. And then of course most guys float around somewhere in between, depending on circumstances.
(And yeah it’s the same for women and non-binary people. Obvi.)
Plus look, in my social circles a fair number of guys seem to be stumbling around between “nice guy,” which does not work, or this kinda try-hard alpha wannabe, which also does not work. So I have to deal with that and it sucks and it ain’t my fault they haven’t figured shit out.
Oh, and “a fair number of guys” means like maybe ten percent. Honestly, I think the number is lower than it used to be. Maybe conversations like this help.
Anyway, “Kitty’s got claws” does not mean I attack them. It means *I call them on their shit*. It means I put my own needs and boundaries before their needs-for-women-to-be-something-I-ain’t. It means that *after they push far enough*, I shut them down and let them know where they stand.
Unless of course I am afraid of them, like men on the subway. That’s different.
#####
@Matthew — I may be wrong but I’m not dishonest. I really think you guys (that’s most of you in this conversation) seem to relate more to the men who hassle me than with me. Which maybe is not a surprise.
Read this famous nerd-gender imbroglio.
(I suggest you just read the Facebook exchange and ignore all else on that page. And no, I don’t like the broad discourse surrounding this, nor the rampant nerd-shaming. There is nothing wrong with wearing fedoras or liking toys.)
But anyway, where do your sympathies lie? Mine lie with the woman.
Which, I feel kinda bad for the guy. He got both barrels. Myself, I would have toned it down *a bit*. No really. I tend to be somewhat more kind than that. Furthermore, I think a lot of people enjoyed that story *because* a nerdy guy was getting put down. There were tons of “Trenchcoat, fedora, bought Geoffrey and Legolas” jokes. That’s not okay.
But still, regarding the broad message, I think he needed to hear it. I think she needed to say it. And I think she was 100% exactly correct.
He wanted to get to know her. He got his wish.
Oh, and yeah that’s where “kitty’s got claws” came from. That’s what boundaries look like. I admire her strength and insight.
#####
Honestly, if guys-like-you find girls-like-me to be a bit scary, maybe I’m okay with that. I wish it worked on subway-guys.
I think that’s all I got to say on the topic of my being violent and scary.
LikeLike
Mine lies with both of them. He failed to respect her as her own individual. She failed to give him a polite rejection before resorting to a humiliating diatribe. Two wrongs do not make a right. That you take sides in issues like this is entirely the problem.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I’m not talking about “taking sides.” And insofar as I’m not a referee, my “side” doesn’t matter.
This need not be a contest. I’m not here to win.
Instead, I’m talking about your immediate visceral reaction. In a story like that, what grabs you? Into which character do you project yourself?
This is what I mean by “sympathy.” Perhaps I should say “who do you identify with?”
I can sympathize with him *to a degree*. But I sympathize with her a lot.
I suspect some people here feel exactly the opposite. That’s gonna shape stuff a lot.
Anyway, after we figure out our sympathies, we can step back and analyze. What does this mean?
We can ask questions. Like, should she have posted to unfortunate episode on the Internet? (Probably not, but I link to it all the same.) Should folks have mocked him for being a fedora-guy? (Certainly not.) What should we learn from this?
Well, I don’t know what other people learned from this. For me it was an object lesson in a woman drawing a strong line. However, I also think she was frustrated and creeped out, so I think she dug a bit too deep, probably caused more pain than was really needed.
But then, we don’t actually know how the guy felt. We can guess.
But anyway, *her analysis* was spot on. Could she have stated her case in a nicer way? (Certainly.) Did he “need to hear it”? (Not sure, but probably. His view of relationships was whack.)
Did he keep his distance from her after that?
…
We can ask another question: who had power here?
Obviously you’ll say she did. But consider, she did not ask for power. I doubt she wanted any power. He thrust this power on her, by putting himself unwanted waaaay into her emotional space.
She had no power he didn’t give her, and she damn well didn’t want it, and she shut it down fast. Go her!
#####
I don’t want power over you.
LikeLike
Why the fuck would she owe him a polite rejection? He had a single five-minute conversation with her, tracked her down, ignored the fact that she ignored his messages, clearly stated that he was ignoring a really obvious boundary setting (if people don’t want to talk to you it’s because… they don’t want to talk to you), and then said that he would “worship” someone he had literally only talked to for five minutes.
Sometimes people get socially punished for making other people feel uncomfortable. This is how social rules are enforced, and I have no problem with it. He’ll probably learn better in the future.
(It’s nasty to put it online, though. Public humiliation is not cool.)
LikeLike
In order of importance: “Leave me alone, I’m not interested” is significantly easier to type than than her final message; because his behavior was ambiguous in regards ignorance vs. maliciousness and we owe it to people to give them the chance to demonstrate the former before assuming the latter; because the next step when indirect communication fails should be direct communication, not insults.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I don’t think his behavior was ambiguous at all? He had a crush on her and he had a mental image of what Romance ought to be like that happens to be one that disrespects people’s boundaries. Not his fault really; it’s what the culture portrays. I mean, people don’t go about being like “I am going to confess my love to strangers because I know it will make them uncomfortable!”
And I feel like he already made several major violations of social norms that would make a reasonable person uncomfortable. He needs to learn not to do that. “I’m not interested” doesn’t do that; “stop fucking stalking me, asshole” does.
LikeLike
This implies that you think his behavior was malicious. That he knew he was making her unacceptably uncomfortable but did it anyway.
Note that many normal, morally acceptable, non-malicious actions make reasonable people uncomfortable (crowding on public transit is a good example). Mere discomfort is not justification for that level of hostility; we reserve cruelty as a response to maliciousness. He has to be mean, not just stupid or thoughtless, to be deserving of that kind of put down.
This implies the opposite, however: that he was not malicious but mistaken.
If you find “Leave me alone” to be insufficiently instructive, you can also add specific proscriptions about the egregious behavior (i.e. “tracking me down on Facebook is unacceptably invasive”). Operant conditioning is notoriously finicky; he’s just as likely to conclude that she’s a “bitch” and wouldn’t have been worth dating anyways rather than associate his behavior as deserving such response (more likely, actually, due to the fundamental attribution error).
Most indirect communication is ambiguous. For example, on the one hand she berates him for not being able to “take the hint” that her lack of response was a deliberate sign of disinterest; on the other hand, in the very next sentence she explains that her lack of response was non-deliberate due to circumstances (which may very well have been what he assumed, which would have made him correct).
Even if he needs to be punished, the degree of punishment needs to be appropriate. I mean, if I shot everyone who invaded my personal space, people would learn very quickly to give me space. But that doesn’t seem right (except when the violation of my space is, say, a fist connecting with my face at significant velocity). In the same vein, actions that make people uncomfortable merit response, but unless you’re near certain that malicious intent was involved you should start with asking them to stop the behavior.
And finally, the mentally disabled are often collateral damage whenever cruelty or violence is an acceptable response to non-malicious behavior.
LikeLiked by 3 people
In general, I’d agree that beginning with polite rejection is the way to go, but tracking someone down on the internet after seeing them once at their job is such a boundary transgression that I’m impressed she wasn’t more directly insulting towards him.
I mean, this conversation shouldn’t have been taking place in this way in this medium at all, feeling more than a little creeped out by it is perfectly reasonable, and considering all that, it seems like her reaction was restrained if anything.
LikeLike
I mean: “Hey, I found out your name, though you did not give it to me, and I’ve demonstrated that I have both the ability and a willingness to find out things about you online. Now I’ve tracked you down and I’m engaging you in conversation. Whoops! I actually lied about how I found you. I’ve been asking mutual friends about you. You’re cute and adorable! Wanna have a conversation?”
ALL the bolded parts are parts that are not okay.
Also the work/home transgression – people who are at their jobs have to be nice to you, because they may get fired if they are not. Let them be at work when they’re at work and at home when they’re at home.
And look, I say this as a straight guy who quite often wants to flirt with cute girls I encounter in my day to day life. But this isn’t okay.
LikeLiked by 1 person
On the initial scan, my reaction to that link was to note the deliberate framing of a hero vs. villain narrative in traditional feminist terms- a stalker ‘gets served’, the importance given to his outfit of ‘a trenchcoat and fedora’, the use of red coloration on the words ‘nice guy’, and so on. The ‘dude’ in this story is very much being presented as a dehumanized trope, reduced to his transgressions.
To the extent that the events described there are accurate, I would agree that my sympathies tend to lie more with the Hot Topic employee. But if we take the article itself as an object, then it reminds me uncomfortably of certain other forms of propaganda.
If you are the sort of person with the same set of secondary traits as this caricatured ‘bad guy’, then it seems like a feeling of defensiveness is warranted in response to both the article and the assumptions that underpin it.
LikeLiked by 2 people
On the whole “polite rejection” thing, polite rejections don’t always work, and it can be hard to find the balance between *hurt feelings* and *still thinks he has a chance*. Furthermore, that awkward, lingering *he’s still after me* is damn uncomfortable. Society has told him that persistence will win her over, and if she presents as *person who cares much about his feelings*, he will believe that more. In fact, he might go into puzzlebox mode, and I don’t know her, but I bet she’s *done with that*.
She showed him a different face, and uncomfortable face indeed, but a true face.
#####
@Toggle — I am *very explicitly* not defending the discourse that surrounded the episode. You are correct that the article paints him as a legitimate target for *general public mockery and outrage*. And indeed that is what happened. If you Google around you can find extensive mockery of the guy. This is not okay.
LikeLike
Polite rejections don’t always fail either. Try one anyways; if it doesn’t work then escalate.
LikeLike
I’d agree, in the course of normal human interaction, but there have to be some limits on this. What this guy was doing was some serious boundary violation, and she was perfectly justified in responding with anger.
Where would you draw the line? What if it had been a phone call? What if it had been him showing up at her home? At what point would you be okay with her initial response being anger at the boundary violation rather than courtesy?
LikeLike
I think it’s more complicated, cuz here “not working” means “continuing to be stalked.” This was not a case of a mildly awkward guy asking her out in a fumbling way. This was *something else*.
Look, the problem is not that he likes her and she doesn’t feel the same. The problem is, he *is smitten by an idea of her that ain’t her*. Furthermore, he is willing to pursue that bogus fantasy past normal social boundaries. And the nice girl who lets him down gently can too easily be fit into his Ramona Flowers fantasy narrative, where a woman does emotional labor for a man, and where he just needs to keep trying to prove his boundless love.
Shutting him down hard and without ambiguity is a fine thing. Likewise dropping a truth bomb on him, about who she really is and how she sees the world and “work-me ain’t private-life-me” is important, for her own dignity.
Let me reiterate, having a man give you this kind of power over him is a damn imposition — when done without consent and discussion. He is putting himself on her. And that is *his power* being expressed. And (trust me on this) too much niceness just breeds more of this behavior, as it fits the narrative in his mind.
He was forcing her to play a game she didn’t want to play, and a “nice rejection” is not a way to step out of the game. Instead it gets read as a move on the board. That’s the puzzle box.
She made a move on a different playing board entirely, one of her choosing not his, with a move that is pretty much guaranteed to work.
And the board she was playing on is called the real world with real women who speak out. It’s time he got to see it.
#####
As an aside, from time to time I’ll hear a man complain about how, when women rejects him, she never tells him precisely why. When this topic comes up, I try to explain how women often soften their rejections with platitudes, as that can go easier and we often feel safer with that approach.
This is what telling you what you did wrong looks like.
LikeLike
@Veronica
I think what I was trying to get at is that I’m uncomfortable reasoning on an event that is elevated in a deliberate attempt to construct and reinforce an outgroup stereotype. There’s the lowish-probability-but-more-serious-than-baseline concern that the whole thing was fabricated to better match existing narratives, of course. But reality is large, and it’s not hard to find real examples of the story you’re trying to tell. And so the real threat to sanity here is that it takes an assuredly nontypical interaction and puts a big hat on it that says ‘representative case’.
If we hold up the employee’s behavior as laudable in the general sense, even though her circumstances were carefully selected, then we’re going to end up optimizing our behavior for a fictional or distorted world and not a real one. And since this particular event was designed, among other things, to be easily mistaken for reality, I don’t trust myself to draw a line and say which parts are good to learn from and which parts are not.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The limit is high probability of malicious intent.
Say no, hang up. If they call again, then yell (or call the cops).
Say no, close the door. If they knock again, then yell (or call the cops).
When they have made it explicit that they don’t want the boundary violated, but the other party still violates it (i.e. demonstrates with high probability that they’re malicious).
Telemarketers and door-to-door salespeople routinely violate these boundaries, for example.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I am confused by what you mean by “malicious intent.”
I usually interpret “malicious intent” to mean “wants to hurt her.” I don’t think anyone in this conversation thinks that guy wanted to hurt her. He just had incorrect beliefs that caused her pain.
I don’t think it’s always wrong to socially punish people for having incorrect beliefs that hurt you. (Obvious example: if someone says “you’re a woman” I’m going to say “fuck you.”)
LikeLike
This is point of disconnect. I, and a large portion of society, do not feel that it is just or fair to punish people for behavior that they did not a priori know was unacceptable. This is explicitly coded into some laws as mens rea, and is a moral intuition many people carry into social contexts. I believe it informs a core aspect of anti-ableism; that many mentally disabled people cannot have mens rea for their beliefs or actions, because of their disabilities, and thus should not be punished (restrained, perhaps, but not punished).
Is this before or after you explain that you’d prefer gender-neutral? Because I’d frown at before, but after the explanation/request the statement is either hostile or within-epsilon of hostile.
LikeLiked by 2 people
If someone genuinely believes that acceptance of transness will cause a breakdown in gender roles that will eventually lead to the destruction of civilization, I will respond to them calling me a woman with “fuck you,” even though this is a perfectly reasonable behavior given their belief set.
LikeLike
Yes, but they’re still being deliberately harmful (i.e. malicious). That they think their maliciousness is justified means little. They can, a priori, tell that saying that utterance will upset you. They cannot plead ignorance.
LikeLike
Hm. But on the other hand if someone thinks nonbinaries are special snowflakes who are making it up for attention (and thus that I will not be harmed by being misgendered), and says “you’re a woman”, I don’t think that would be malicious by your definition, but I’m still going to say “fuck you.”
LikeLike
Asserting that you’re making it up for attention is calling you a liar, which is a malicious action.
LikeLike
I think that having someone yell at you and call you a fucking creep for stalking them is part of how you learn that stalking isn’t okay.
Absent that, a polite ‘no’ may well indicate, “I’m not interested in a relationship with you, but there’s nothing wrong with how you’ve acted here,” which is a horrible and dangerous, message for someone to either give or receive.
You do understand that the relevant boundary crossing here isn’t just the “coming to your door,” which door-to-door salespeople do, but the “seeing you in one place, and secretly gathering information about you including where you live, then showing up at you home” which door-to-door salespeople do not do.
It’s not just the “being at your house.” It’s the “I can find out where you live, and I’m the kind of guy who thinks that’s an okay thing to do.”
LikeLike
I have sympathy for / can identify with both individuals in that exchange, and I still think the final message was both pragmatically and ethically superior to a flat “Leave me alone”.
Veronica already explained the pragmatic part, so I’ll just cover the ethical part.
You see, infatuation is an altered state of mind — it’s a little like being delusional or drunk. And when I start acting unethically due to being drunk/infatuated/whatever, the nicest thing anyone can do for me is to stop me, ideally in a way that sticks. If I’m in the process of doing something terribly stupid and wrong, please stop me.
Now, you can’t snap people out of some states just by yelling at them. Fortunately, it can work in case of infatuation, especially if you’re the object. Like Veronica said, flipping the whole table and sending the chess pieces flying is the one move that can stop the game.
And Kitty even went beyond the call of duty and explained exactly what he did wrong and what effect his actions had on her (and as we all know, showing is better than telling). I don’t know whether she did it for the guy’s sake, or for future recipients of his attention, but evidently she’s a better person than me. She typed all that up because she cared. She wanted to make him understand, to make his behavior change for the better.
So, here’s my ethical calculus for the message:
– helping an infatuated person stop violating boundaries: +1
– pointing out mistakes in his romantic model: +1
– making him sad: -1
Total: +1
She should have erased the names completely, though. Anonymization fail.
LikeLike
hmm, i sort of identify with both, in that i would be very uncomfortable in her position, and i can still see myself unintentionally making others uncomfortable by mistake like that, and unlike other people who somewhat identify with the dude, i still think she was right to reply like that.
If i unknowingly crossed boundaries to that level while being oblivious, while i may be upset in the short term, i would actually be grateful to her for giving me a wake up call, which i hope i would be able to internalise. (if she did that and didn’t put it on the internet and stuff anyway).
LikeLike
Maybe the question comes down to “who pays?”
It would cost her emotional energy to respond with courtesy to someone who either cluelessly or deliberately transgressed important (and broadly socially accepted) personal boundaries.
It would cost him emotional energy to have a girl he likes speak to him harshly.
One of them is going to have to expend emotional energy on this (well, really, both of them will no matter what she does, since it likely cost him emotional energy to contact her, and it certainly cost her emotional energy to have to deal with him).
Since he created the situation ENTIRELY, I would argue that he ought to bear the cost. Is this optimal? No. Optimally, neither of them would be in this situation.
But he fucked it all up and that’s not an option any more. So at the point she has any choices to make, it’s either she spends emotional energy on making him feel better or he spends emotional energy on feeling bad.
I haven’t seen an argument yet that convinces me that she has an obligation to spend her emotional energy on this dude who’s been stalking her.
LikeLike
“Stalking” is not remotely an appropriate term for contacting someone who has not requested not to be contacted, using their publicly searchable profile on a single website, in a text-only medium.
There are more options than active courtesy and active cruelty. “I do not wish to continue speaking to you; please do not contact me again.” There. Not courteous, not cruel. Just blunt. If she wanted, this could be augmented by further clarifications, or not.
I reject the idea that the breadth of acceptance of social norms has anything whatsoever to do with the reasonableness of enforcing those norms.
The “I’m not much, but I would worship you” part is pretty pathetic, though. The Ramona Flowers part may well be more fucked, or not; I’ve never read or watched Scott Pilgrim, and actually had to google the name to discover that’s where it was from.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I agree that “stalking,” as a legal term, isn’t what happened here.
But he wrote her, she asked how she knew him, he said he found her through the Facebook page, Then were five separate times – FIVE – that enough time had passed to make it clear that the conversation wasn’t going to be picked up by her, but he nontheless messaged her in response to one of his own messages.
In our culture, “ignoring your messages” is understood to be a way of turning down people without having to hurt their feelings by explicitly saying “no.” And sure, maybe you could justify doing a repeat reaching out a second time just to be sure that your first message wasn’t just unseen, but five times? That’s ridiculous.
And, before he gets chewed out, he makes it clear that he DOES understand that First when he wrote “you ever gonna message me back?” That’s not something you write unless you’ve noticed that she is, indeed, pointedly not returning your messages.
He then waits two days without getting a response. At that point, it’s VERY clear to him that she’s decided not to reply to his messages, which is why he decides it’s time for a big change in his strategy – and so he writes the big “I would worship you” putting-all-his-cards-on-the-table message.
She does respond to this, by curtly asking who gave him her name, but in a way that doesn’t invite further conversation. He clearly understands this, because only a few minutes later he writes “You won’t have a conversation with me?” – indicating that he was consciously aware that she was refusing to talk to him.
It is only at this point that she chews him out.
He knew perfectly well his advances were unwelcome. He had understood for days that she didn’t want to continue this exchange. And he pressed on.
I do feel sorry for him, in that I can relate VERY well to his position. But he acted badly, not out of confusion, not because he failed to understand what was going on, but because he understood she didn’t want to talk to him and persisted in bugging her anyway.
She was right to chew him out. She had every reason to believe that he understood that she didn’t want to talk to him and that he was going to persist. And it was him, not her, who made the choice to escalate the conversation to a “let’s put all our cards on the table and say what we’re really thinking” level.
With luck, next time he hits on a pretty geek girl he meets (which is *fine*, as long as it’s not in an enclosed space at 2am or something), and he notices she’s signalling she doesn’t want to continue the conversation, he’ll allow the conversation to end rather than continuing to push. If so, then he’ll have learned something, and the chewing out will have been a net benefit to him.
LikeLike
I’d just like to jump in here and say, yay for the notion for the notion of mens rea! This is a notion that I think needs to be brought up more often, largely because it is not the same thing as malicious intent. (At least, if I understand it correctly. I am not a lawyer, and my understanding of these matters comes basically just from The Illustrated Guide to Law. Somebody please correct me if I am way off base.) Specifically, it’s a superset of malicious intent. But it is still an intent requirement and I think it is a good one! (“Malicious intent” is generally too strict a requirement I think.)
(I mean actually mens rea comes in levels, e.g. under the model penal code you have “negligently”, “recklessly”, “knowingly”, “purposely”; but we’re basically discussing “purposely” here. Though I think all this can be made to apply mutatis mutandis to “knowingly” and “recklessly” as well.)
The thing about mens rea is that ignorance of the law is no excuse. So you don’t need to intend to break the law; you just need to intend to do the thing that is in fact illegal. Here we’re not dealing with laws, but you can see how it works — we’re not asking, “Did this person intend to hurt someone?”, but rather, “Did this person intend to do the thing that we have all agreed counts as hurting someone, even if they were unaware that it would result in harm?”
Personally, I think this is often a pretty good standard — even if I’ve totally misunderstood mens rea and that’s not how it actually works. 😛
LikeLiked by 2 people
That sounds like my bat signal!
Short answer- mens rea works however we need it to work in context. We customize it when we draft the law.
Longer answer- A statute typically has mens rea defined within it. If it doesn’t, the state often has a “default mens rea” statute elsewhere which tells you what mens rea is required when none is specified. Common mens rea are, in laymans terms, things like “meant to do the thing,” or “behaved recklessly with respect to whether the thing would occur,” or “behaved negligently and the thing occurred.” Even the strictest of strict liability teeeeechnically can be said to have a mens rea, in the sense that it typically requires “engaged in a volitional act and the thing occurred.” This is why you generally can’t go to jail for statutory rape if you were unconscious- your acts weren’t volitional. Which mens reas are relevant is often a factor is creating a graduated system of offenses- “meant to do it” might be murder, “recklessly acted resulting in it” might be a lesser but still serious offense, etc.
In short again- caring about mens rea is incredibly important when considering moral issues, because it is the factor in our reasoning that relates to how much the offender knew the offense might have resulted from their behavior. But you usually can’t start with mens rea, and then figure out your moral position. You usually need to determine your moral position, and then determine what mens rea is relevant.
LikeLiked by 1 person
This doesn’t really go against what I was saying — my point is that in all of the above, you have “do the thing”, not “break the law” or “do something bad” or “cause harm”. That was my point; not the level of mens rea (intentional vs. knowing vs. reckless); it applies to all of them. Do I have that right? Because if so I think it’s an important point to make.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Something I noticed that no one seems to have mentioned yet: That Facebook message exchange contains this exchange:
“Oh right! Sorry, I see a lot of people through there. I don’t remember giving you my last name, were you a little sleuth through the Hot Topic facebook page?”
“Yes…was that okay.”
[followed by several days of one-sided messages]
So, the guy outright asked if what he did was okay, and she never responded to that. So while I think this guy has some seriously poor social skills and maybe boundary issues as well, I have a hard time excusing her behavior either. Because if she wanted to make it clear that his behavior was not acceptable, all she had to do was answer the question when he asked about exactly that.
Or alternatively, she could have just clicked the block button and instantly gotten rid of this guy without having to type even one more word in response. Expecting someone to delete their facebook account to get away from you is ridiculous, of course, but he kind of has a point about blocking. Communicating on social media where you can press a button to make people magically disappear from your life forever is about as far from “2am in an enclosed space” as you can get.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Sure, ‘stalking’ in the legal sense doesn’t apply, but that’s not really the point of my argument, either.
Why should she have to assume any of the emotional cost here? Remember, she’s already assumed some of it from having to deal with his nonsense … why is it her job to assume more? Why on earth wouldn’t it all be on him?
LikeLike
It does have to do with whether or not he could reasonably be expected to be familiar with these norms.
As Ampersand pointed out, it’s vanishingly unlikely that he didn’t know what he was doing, and didn’t know that she wasn’t interested.
—Myca
LikeLike
There’s a little more context from the Hot Topic employee at this link, if you scroll down to the “update”:
It doesn’t really change anything, but I thought I’d post the link for folks who are interested in hearing a bit more of this story.
She says when he was in the store he handed her his phone number, said that she could call him if she ever wanted to talk comics, and walked away. “It’s not the first time somebody’s done that to me at work, and personally I’ve always thought it’s the respectful way to give someone your number, because it takes the pressure off of them.” So she’s not against being hit on at work, if it’s done in a way that doesn’t put her on the spot..
“Had he left it at that, I wouldn’t have any problem with him at all, and I would have been happy to see him in my store again.
“But he didn’t leave it at that. He tracked me down, he dug up information about me I had not made available to him, he made judgement calls about my character and assumptions about me, he pushed and pushed and pushed and was really really creepy towards me. I’m not comfortable with that, and I told him so.”
LikeLike
I have a question for Osberend and other people who have trouble with indirect communication. How did you interpret her very first reply, “Do I know you?”
If she had contacted him, it would mean, “You seem familiar — do I know you from somewhere?”
If his initial message contained zero information, her reply could have meant, “Sorry, but I’ve no idea whether I know you or not — could you give me a hint?”
But his first message already contained that hint. So, to me her reply clearly says, “I’m not immediately telling you to leave me alone in case I’m mistaken, but I’m pretty sure I don’t know you. In that case, you’d better have a good reason for messaging me, because I prefer to have Facebook contact only with people I actually know.”
Note that he dooesn’t answer her question directly (“No, not really, but…”). Instead, he explains how they “met”. So, either this guy thinks he “knows” every person he’s ever interacted with, or, like Ampersand said, he’s deliberately ignoring her attempts to stop the interaction.
LikeLike
On what @ampersand posted — wow I had no idea. The fact this guy had already tried the *give her my number* ploy and struck out —
That pretty much eliminates any shred of sympathy I had for the guy. What a jackass.
#####
A big +1 on @Myca’s “who pays” thing.
But more, there is a thing in society where women are expected to play the role of patient nurturer, which this also plays into how the same behavior from a man versus a woman will seem, from him, bold and strong, while from her, callous and bitchy. There are tons of studies that show this stuff. And this affects what we think, how we act, what is expected from us, and even *how we perceive behavior*.
I would suggest to people who are critical of this woman’s behavior keep that in mind. It’s hard to imagine an all-things-equal gender reversal of this scenario, but sexism against bold, outspoken women surely plays a role in how she is seen. Don’t imagine that we on this forum are above that shit.
Anyway, Kitty is an example of a woman who has decided to set aside the social expectations that she be a patient nurturer. Good for her. Too bad for the men who cannot handle that.
#####
@Toggle — What you describe seems to be a general pattern of Internet outrage culture. I agree we should be aware of this stuff. On the other hand, I’m not willing to give up looking at anecdotes, particularly *starkly drawn* anecdotes such as this. They have much to teach.
But you are correct that we should recognize that the anecdotes that go viral have been selected for *extremity*, and are thus imperfect guides. Duly noted.
#####
@moebius — Do what you need to do to keep yourself safe.
LikeLike
I don’t see expecting her to say “No, go away” as expecting here to be a “patient nurturer”. If anything, my criticism is that she wasn’t masculine enough and should have been more direct and confrontational rather than trying to drop hints.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Tee hee. This is telling.
She is not *a masculine person*. Nor is masculinity (as imagined under patriarchy) an appropriate norm. Nor was she (likely) socialized in an environment where women acting masculine are respected or effective. Thus there was no good reason for her to try to thread the needle of “how to act masculine as a woman,” maybe cuz she has no desire to be thus, nor any hope it would work.
We’re not going to be what you want us to be.
LikeLike
If what you want to be is a poor communicator, than you’re partially culpable for the consequences of poor communication.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It appears she communicated quite clearly.
But seriously, the notion that men like this guy will get an ordinary clear message flies in the face of experience. For one thing, the puzzlebox guy will keep trying until you smack him down hard. Likewise Ami Angelwings famous post on why we need the term “creep” gives more examples of basic communication failing, not cuz we women don’t say it clearly, but that dudes don’t want to hear it. (Link in next post, cuz spam filter.)
LikeLike
From Ami’s post:
LikeLike
You mean the part where she doesn’t say anything, which may be because she was too busy to respond, or didn’t have access to the internet? And even mentions that some of that was because she was, in fact, without internet for several days? A case which was not only ambiguous, but in which the outcome you think he shouldn’t have considered actually occurred?
Doesn’t matter. You owe it to the people who will back off when asked to ask before resorting to cruelty. Such people exist, and you don’t know if this person is one of them because she didn’t even try asking.
This wasn’t a face-to-face exchange, she didn’t need to placate him for fear of physical harm. She had the option to easily end the conversation, since Facebook lets you block users. A simple “leave me alone” is such a trivial effort that there isn’t a good reason not to have said it.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Wrong. She did have to fear physical violence. He knows where she works. He knows her name. He can find where she lives.
Which, your comment is so-utterly-wrong it shows you have literally no clue.
So let me help you guys: when a woman doesn’t respond to your phone-number-giving, nor to your persistent message — she *is* communicating with you. She is saying you ain’t even worth her time to answer.
Look, you seem to think women should change on behalf of clueless men, but I say *clueless men* should step up and figure out women.
And that’s it. This guy was *completely fucking delusional* regarding women, and honestly some of you guys on this forum have no idea — like thinking a guy who knows your name and workplace ain’t a threat — that I say it’s *you all* who need to figure shit out, not us.
Kitty seems to have it pretty together. Most guys will get the *not answering* message. For the occasional creep who does not, well, kitty’s got claws.
LikeLike
Hmm. I think guys don’t like ‘creepy’ because it’s a rhetorical superweapon, used to sneak in connotations of risk of physical harm in scenarios where there clearly are none.
Allow me to propose an alternate hypothesis; women have very few universal and judgement-free socially-acceptable scripts for a “I have no interest in speaking with you or interacting with you.” Calling out a creep engaged in blatantly unacceptable behavior is one of them. Most woman aren’t really comfortable saying “While I concede that your behavior is unimpeachable by an objective standard, I personally don’t like it, or you, and don’t want to talk to you or interact with you ever again.” Ergo, most rejections that can’t fall into the creep script tend to get softened.
So, you’ve got motivated reasoning happening on both sides; the pursuers are hearing that softening and are motivated to interpret it as a sign that they’ve got a chance if they just keep pursuing, and the pursued are motivated to interpret that as creepiness so that they can use the social script, and speak their minds without fear of internal or social sanction.
Then you mix in genuine bad actors, in the form of pursuers who will try to maneuver around or ignore a flat, polite rejection, and pursued who will deliberately miscast or misinterpret behavior in order to drop the creeper label on people they don’t like, and you get the observed behaviors.
LikeLiked by 3 people
“Leave me alone” is more likely to provoke violent retaliation than humiliation and shame? Seriously?
I think women should step up and put in even a tenth as much effort into communication as the people you’re condemning. She can summon up the effort to type several paragraphs of insults, but can’t be bothered to write three words?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’d like to offer an illustration of how direct rejection can fail, even if the pursuer is not an evil manipulator:
https://richardbrittain.wordpress.com/2014/09/23/the-benevolent-stalker/
https://richardbrittain.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/a-re-evaluation-of-romance/
(This is the pursuer’s own account, not mind-reading by the target or a third party. The first post provides an inside view of the mindset, the second one is a more of a critical analysis.)
Now, you might say that this case is exceptional, because he’s been diagnosed with schizophrenia. But he wasn’t diagnosed at the time — he thought he was a perfectly healthy guy engaged in perfectly healthy romantic courtship. And, as I said earlier, infatuation makes everyone a little delusional. So, when a stranger fails to take a hint, it can be a very bad sign.
Luckily for the girl in this story, this guy was only planning to pretend-kidnap her. But what if he was a little less nice, or if a real kidnapping seemed even more romantic to him?
Here are some red flags he’s identified in his thinking at the time:
And here’s what he says about the response to his “Benevolent Stalker” post:
He puts it pretty mildly, but I suspect these comments weren’t any nicer than Kitty’s message.
LikeLike
The fear of harm is why at first she follows the “mostly ignore him and hope he goes away” strategy. This is a conflict avoidance strategy. It is low key. It does not force the issue, which does not raise the stakes, which does not give the man *purchase* onto her emotional life. This works most of the time. For this guy, when it did not work, she immediately jumped to the “get the fuck away creep,” with an added dose of truth.
Truth is a fine thing. Men seem to hate it from women, however.
Too bad.
And yes this raises the stakes, but the guy has proven to have low emotional calibration, and as the Ami Angelwings post describes, “get the fuck away creep” is an ideal tool. It gives him nothing to work with, zero emotional purchase. It’s game over.
The truth-bomb just kinda feels good to drop from time to time. “Listen you ignorant screwhead, here’s the score…”
The dude seriously *does* need the truth.
And yes there is always the danger that the man is gonna go Eliot Rogers on you — but at this point it doesn’t really matter what you do. The low-key did not work. The man is delusional and persistent. If he’s an Eliot Rogers type-guy, he’s already *picked you*. You already have a bullet in your future regardless of what you say. May as well say it all at once.
LikeLike
“Ramona Flowers” gets mentioned a lot in these discussions, and I’ve no idea who that is, so I looked it up:
Wow. So, is that what Kitty’s admirer meant when he compared her to this character? “My obsession with you is all your fault, and now you owe me a relationship”?
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Inferential:
“You mean the part where she doesn’t say anything, which may be because she was too busy to respond, or didn’t have access to the internet? And even mentions that some of that was because she was, in fact, without internet for several days? A case which was not only ambiguous, but in which the outcome you think he shouldn’t have considered actually occurred?”
What difference does that make?
If I email you, and you happen to be offline for the next two days, you won’t get to read my message sooner because I email you another four times in that two days.
Furthermore, he indicated – twice – that he understood that her non-response as a form of rejection. “You ever gonna message me back?” and “you won’t have a conversation with me?” both show he understood she didn’t want to talk to him. (Remember, he also knew she had his phone number and has chosen not to call him.)
It’s striking how much you and others here – and I can’t help but suspect that most or all of those doing this are men – see it as your place to micromanage women’s reactions to a guy acting inappropriately (and both the pestering and the “I worship you” message was completely inappropriate). She didn’t act saintly enough for your standards. She (gasp) expressed anger. How dare she!
He initiated, he refused to take the hint after a bunch of non-response rejections, he escalated with an enormously unfair and inconsiderate “I worship you” message. As Myca has said, and no one has answered, why should it be up to her to bear any more of the emotional costs of this encounter than she chooses?
Also, a word about “fearing physical violence.” These conversations always end up there, partly because it has some relevance, but also partly because the guys who want to micromanage women’s reactions don’t accept any concerns from women apart from fear of violence.
Kitty may or may not have thought this guy was likely to become violent – I’m guessing, from the tone of what she wrote, that she thought it was unlikely. But at the back of her mind, she’s aware that violence or other things, like stalking or approaching her in public with a big romantic gesture, or eventually getting mad and sending her “fuck you you cunt” messages – are possibilities. That alone is reason enough not to block him – if you’re Kitty, and some dude you don’t know is obsessively sending you dozens or hundreds of messages, wouldn’t you want to know that?
If he can be persuaded to voluntarily leave her alone, that signals he’s not someone to worry about. (And conversely….) But Kitty can’t receive that signal if she blocks him.
Or maybe she doesn’t like blocking people. Or maybe she’s unaware of the option or how to use it (plenty of people are). Or maybe she felt harmed by his behavior and wanted to chew him out. All of these reasons would be legitimate.
Saying “she shouldn’t express anger as long as blocking is an option” is ridiculous. You don’t get to decide that for her.
“Leave me alone” is more likely to provoke violent retaliation than humiliation and shame? Seriously?
I know a few people who, if they fear someone following them (virtually or physically) might turn violent, would still prefer to turn around and confront them. Contrary to what you seem to believe, this doesn’t prove that they didn’t think violence wasn’t a possible outcome; it’s just that they prefer confronting head-on when they can, even if that creates risk of violence.
That said, again, violence isn’t the only thing Kitty had to fear. Stalking, inappropriate public romantic gestures, him writing her boss, him getting mad in nonviolent but horrid ways – all of these are legitimate things for her to worry about.
I think women should step up and put in even a tenth as much effort into communication as the people you’re condemning. She can summon up the effort to type several paragraphs of insults, but can’t be bothered to write three words?
Again, it’s not your place to micromanage her response to his inappropriate acts. She had rejected him a bunch of times through non-response; he indicated that he understood that she was choosing not to converse with him.
He pushed this encounter onto her, and pushed, and pushed. He refused to take hints. He told her “I would worship you,” which is an INCREDIBLY CREEPY thing to tell someone.
If she decides her best strategy is to nonviolently express her anger to him, then that’s completely in the range of appropriate responses that she is allowed to have. And it’s completely unfair of you to demand that she act in a more saintly fashion, or to sneer at her because she failed to put his feelings before her own, or because she failed to act in whatever completely arbitrary fashion that you have decided is the only acceptable way for women to act.
LikeLike
@Nita:
So, is that what Kitty’s admirer meant when he compared her to this character? “My obsession with you is all your fault, and now you owe me a relationship”?
I suspect that isn’t really what he meant – it would be an unusual reader of Scott Pilgrim who’d take that from reading the comic. (Although he might be an unusual reader.) I think it was more like, he was thinking of her as his Magic Pixie Dream Girl.
Which is how Kitty seems to have taken it: “I’m not your Felicia Day, I’m not your Ramona Flowers, I’m not your magic pixie dream girl.”
LikeLike
Maybe I read your message but was pulled away before I could write a response, and then forgot it was there. Which is a thing that happens sufficiently often enough that standard advice for job applicants is to send a followup email upon experiencing extended silence; acknowledgement requests are common across many communication methods, including social ones, for just this reason. Deliberately refusing to acknowledge having seen a message is poor communication.
Those are pretty straight-forward acknowledgement requests, which is why they were framed as questions.
Being a woman has zero relation to whether or not communicating poorly is acceptable behavior. Being a woman has zero relation to person’s actions coming under scrutiny because of being cited as supporting evidence in a discussion. Being a woman has zero relation whether or not a person reached too quickly for anger.
Because he’s still a human being and his fuckups aren’t a carte-blanche on responses. More specifically, her failure was not sending an explicit rejection before the “I worship you” nonesense, when she both had the means (i.e. still functioning internet), and clear evidence that her “non-response rejections” weren’t working.
None of this is justification of the guy’s actions. He fucked up. He fucked up worse. But she fucked up too. And two wrongs don’t make a right.
If a person is safe enough to write several paragraphs of insults, they’re safe enough to say “leave me alone”. If they aren’t safe enough to say “leave me alone”, they have no business writing several paragraphs of insults.
I never said that, don’t put words into my mouth. I said that she has an easy escape from the conversation, by which I meant she had less need to placate him because he had less power over her.
Saying “leave me alone” is confrontation, it just isn’t cruel. If the person refuses to comply, you have discharged your responsibility and are fully entitled to be cruel in future responses.
Additionally, you haven’t answered the question. Or perhaps you implicitly conceded the point?
LikeLiked by 1 person
@ InferentialDistance
She did not write several paragraphs of insults. She wrote several paragraphs of explanation, in an angry tone with a few insults thrown in.
And many clueless guys do want explanations — some of them even want to change whatever they’re doing wrong. If he’s one those sincerely well-meaning guys, she did him a favour.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Right. This.
In fact, “micromanage” seems the perfect word here. I think it is this: there is not one right answer. There is not a single script that we all get to follow. There are many scripts, and most of them are garbage, and thus we kinda have to stumble through and invent the scripts as we go.
Yes, she could have been nicer. Myself, I probably would have been. At least, I think I would.
But that’s the point. I do not know. I am not Kitty. I can guess some of the pressures she faces — since as a woman I face many of them myself. Plus I can read what women write about their experiences and empathize. This gives me a foundation from which to approach this. So I can try to guess how I would act. But I also know how tricky this can be, so I make allowances for Kitty.
Plus, I’ve noticed that no one here has suggested what she said was *false* — I think cuz it was clearly true.
In the end I see a woman being pushed past reasonable boundaries. In fact, this guy plowed through her boundaries. He showed a stunning lack of empathy and insight. So she spoke out hard. Good for her.
There is context here, where women feel that our boundaries are routinely pushed aside. For example, this, which came across my Twitter feed this weekend.
As I said before, we women (many of us) did not ask for this power that men thrust upon us, but we got it all the same. And that power comes with unwanted baggage. It is the power to say no, but only if we accept a fuckton of accompanying male insecurity and resentment.
We’re sick of it (many of us) and we’re setting boundaries and we’re firmly defending them. Which is why Kitty got cheers from us.
Likewise we’re done accepting even a smidgen of blame from men who cannot figure it out.
Figure it the fuck out.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@veronica,
I fully agree what the dude did to Kitty was completely unacceptable and it’s unreasonable to try and complain about what she did.
But the phrase “figure it the fuck out” auto-completes, to many of us as “there are social norms, why are you not doing the social norms perfectly”. I don’t think you mean this, but what I think of when I hear the phrase is “why won’t autistic people just stop being obsessive and stimming in public, they should figure it the fuck out”. Why will people with nerdy habits not just avoid regular people*. Man Scott Aaronson is an asshole for having mis-calibrated why the ethical rate at which you can ask people out and it be okay why didn’t he just figure it the fuck out.
I don’t think you’re trying to argue this at all and I don’t get the impression you personally use creep in this way, but when the term creep is misused it’s regularly used towards people who are disabled or fat or nerdy because they are disabled or fat or nerdy and either are conversing in a non-sexually inappropriate way (droning on about sub-interest despite a lack of interest by the other party) or expressing sexual interest in a benign if non-standard way (obviously harassment/refusing to take no for an answer/continual pestering is not benign). I’ve also seen the term “creep” appropriated to people with politically wrong/misogynistic opinions (so that in left/liberal circles you’ll have anti-abortion politicians referred to as creeps)
You’ve implied, and I believe that you aren’t using the phrases in these ways but the phrase, possibly not in your social circle, is regularly used these ways and people object to being lumped together with sexual harassers when they don’t tolerate or are not okay with sexual harassment. I’m pretty some of the backlash you’re getting is that the style of your arguments are simultaneously used by people who are reasonably saying that Women shouldn’t have to put up with creepy bullshit and it’s okay for them to say mean things to get them to go away, and that women shouldn’t have to put up with (male) nerds, autistic people, and fat people, especially those that have the temerity to show sexual interest or refuse to be mute and conforming deserve to be stigmatized and shunned.
(To emphasize again, I really, really, don’t think you believe this, but many Women (and men) certainly do and one of the discourses they tend to use to justify this dickishness is that they’re just against “creeps”)
* http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/08/31/elitism-now-it-basically-just-means-not-having-sex-with-everybody/
LikeLiked by 2 people
@J — There is zero evidence the guy in the story was autistic. Nor do we have even the slightest reason to believe he was a shy Scott Aaronson type. In fact, we can be rather certain he was not, insofar as he gave her his phone number in the store.
I’ll say this flatly: not all nerds are autistic. In fact, I suspect that for every autistic nerd speaking on this issue there are several non-autistic nerds who *appropriate autistic experience* to justify their own creepy-ass behavior.
Yep. I mean that. In fact, let me make this really clear: the hardships of autistic people are not a shield for creepy shit from non-autistic people. Full stop.
WHICH MIGHT NOT APPLY TO YOU I’M NOT SAYING THAT.
Most nerds are not autistic.
You might say that most nerds are kinda autism-adjacent. We are (many of us) a little bit autistic. We have a touch of the bad brains.
Sure. No doubt. But look, that also applies to me. I have a very weird brain. In fact, I was that girl who the teachers could not control, but around 2nd grade they discovered they could sit me in the hall with long math worksheets, and that would keep me still.
Which, yay math. Math math math math math math math.
Plus I like to fiddle with objects constantly and I play with my hair cuz it relieves stress, and plus I like to rock sometimes, and I had the hardest time learning to look folks in the eyes — on and on. Oh and I’m faceblind, never can figure out which movie actor is which. I get way below average scores on the “identify the emotion from the picture” tests.
But I doubt I could get a diagnosis. I’ve learned too many compensating skills. In fact, I think my social skills nowadays function at a base-normal level.
I had a shit time dating for most of high school. Trust me, I failed the same ways you all failed. (And folks thought I was a boy then, so I got that too.) I was called gross and creepy and all of it, plus with a healthy dose of “faggot” from the jocks. Sucks. On top of it all, I had no idea how to deal with women, just like Kitty’s desperate hopeful. Everything he believed, I believed.
No for real. I remember when I fell in love with this pretty girl in tenth grade. I never spoke to her once — literally! — but I did send her flowers. I was really sad.
I was truly not ready to have a meaningful relationship with a girl, even by stumbling messy adolescent relationship standards. I had so much to learn.
(I had one huge advantage: I was pretty good looking, by conventional standards, at least those years I could keep my weight down.)
Anyway, yeah, romance hard. Until I figured it the fuck out.
My bad brains made it hard, not impossible.
I repeat: I figured it the fuck out! Most nerds can. In fact, most nerds do.
If you’re a nerd and shit ain’t working, you should at least try. And then try again.
Well, unless you’re really totes autistic, not kinda maybe a bit autistic, like I was, but totally unambiguously off the charts. If you got it that bad, then I’m not sure what to say.
#####
There is a point I made a while ago in one of the gender threads on SCC. It went like this: social skills are not like other things. They are how we relate to each other, the very software on which our relationships run. But more, they are not arbitrary barriers invented merely to stand between you and romance. They are in fact *the content* of romance. The are *what happens when you relate to a girl*. (Or boy or non-binary person, if that’s how you roll.)
An analogy: imagine someone who lacked the cognitive skills to play chess. I’m not just saying they suck at chess. I’m not saying they lose a lot. Instead I’m saying this: they literally cannot understand the rules, at least not well enough to function in a game. They keep screwing up and making the wrong moves, from which they then get frustrated and ruin the game. Such a person could not effectively participate in chess club. Nor would it be fair to expect chess player to play with this person.
But social justice matters. This person wants to play chess. They cannot play chess. What to do?
I don’t have a one-size-fits-all answer. It’s gonna matter who they are and where they are and what resources are around. But we can imagine this: someone comes up with a different version of chess with rules this person could understand, but with chess pieces, as this person wants chess not checkers, and then teaches that game to some folks willing to play.
That might work. It’s worth trying.
I don’t know what to do for autistic people. In the other thread, Moebius mentioned that he is dating an autistic girl. That seems common enough. Among my trans friends there are a fair number of autistic women, and they do seem to cluster. Which, yay them. Yay cool autistic trans women who hook up with other cool autistic trans women.
And yay Moebius.
Is that the answer? Autistic people can stay in their little autistic ghetto and only date each other?
That seems kinda shitty. I mean, it might be the safest choice for some. I dunno. I’ll say this: my “relationship software” is at least close to neuro-typical, and I’m gonna want to play the game with that software.
I don’t really have a better answer.
But I insist: this has fuck-all to do with that creepy-ass goofball who was pursuing Kitty. Odds are he wasn’t autistic. There are tons of guys like him.
#####
And if he was…
LikeLike
Hmm. Actually, I disagree. Or at least the skills I use for interaction with “a typical stranger” feel very different from the skills I use in relationships. The difficult part is finding someone with a matching taste in romance 🙂
LikeLiked by 3 people
@Nita — I don’t think that contradicts what I am saying, which is *not* that the way you relate romantically should be *identical* to your casual social interactions. In fact, that seems absurd. I surely treat my boss differently from my g/f.
Instead what I mean is this: The way I interact with my g/f involves a full range of social interaction, including body language, tone of voice, facial expressions (where I do poorly), along with complex rhetorical interactions, much playful flirting, much subtext, cooperative approaches to status play, on and on. These are social things and our social calibration, hers and mine, influences our pleasure.
This is the playful, fun, reassuring, anxiety-reducing part of our interaction. Good stuff.
I think most relationships include this stuff to some degree, although the precise content is as varied as the people who get into relationships. Sure. Perhaps for you it is way different. But do you claim it is absent entirely?
Anyway, this all seems pretty obvious to me. However, I think we should discuss it explicitly, as there is indeed an *attitude* I encounter in nerd gender debates, where I think people do see the need for body language and flirting (and so on) as a needless imposition. Perhaps for them it is, but then, what is their post-asking-out-phase relationship supposed to look like? What happens when person-one engages in playful banter, and the person-two *just does not get subtext*? Is this going to be fun, or does person-two inform person-one that playful banter is out of bounds and that is not how this date will go.
Which, sounds pretty unpleasant for person-one.
Furthermore, is person-one wrong to look for social skills from the first moment of the first encounter? Are they wrong to avoid romantic interactions with people who, socially speaking, just cannot. Myself, I look for people who are playful and fun. Of course, I also look for people who seem to relate well to *me*.
This perhaps sounds more hardline than I really mean. Which, I’m neuro-diverse and I date. I’m not trying to build a wall. But I am saying social skills matter and not only to get past the first yes.
LikeLike
@veronica
FWIW, I’m unsure about your definition of Autistic, but I was diagnosed with Autism at age 4, identify as autistic, and have several stereotypically autistic traits, on the otherhand I can read, write, and communicate verbally, and generally pass as non-autistic in most arenas, I definitely count myself as a real autistic but you might disagree? I’m also gay, my concerns about coming across as creepy have not been of the form “I’m not allowed to ask the pretty girl out”.
I’m pretty sure you misunderstood my point. My point was emphatically not that kitty dude was autistic, or what he did was okay, or that what he did was uncommon. I don’t think any of those three things are true. I’m not sure whether I have any object level differences over what behaviors you think are okay in this context.
My point is that the language you are using has been, it turns out, coopted in order to be assholes to people.
Nobody needs to date somebody they don’t like, if you don’t like somebody because they’re bisexual, because they’re autistic, because they’re a nerd, because they have blue eyes, or because they’re not a virgin you aren’t obligated to date those people.
Refusing to date these people on these grounds, may, or may not (depending on the class) make your more or less of an asshole, but you still aren’t obligated to do it and the person who wants to pursue you should stop when you’ve made that clear.
Now that that’s out of the way
It turns out that people who don’t want to date various groups of people are sometimes uncomfortable saying it outright because it makes you seems like an asshole. It makes you sound shallow to say you won’t date a guy because he’s short so you say he has a “napoleon complex”, it sounds shallow to say you don’t like women who’ve had sex with many other men so you imply they’re far more likely to cheat on you and it sounds horrendous to say “I don’t want to have sex with socially awkward, borderline autistic, overweight men” so you imply they’re “creeps” more likely to violate boundaries.
This isn’t the only use of creeps. It’s not the way you are using creep. Creep is a very reasonable term to describe people who refuse to take no for an answer and I think they wholly deserve it, I’ve personally described sexually pressurey people as creeps before.
But it is also used in this alternate sense, the language about how you have a right to not date anybody and women have a right not to be harassed(which is true!) is also used to justify posting long mocking post about people with anxiety disorders. You aren’t the one doing it. To repeat, I don’t think you are the one doing it, but something about the way your right has the affect on my id that “oh god, you probably wouldn’t want to talk to me at a social gathering because I’m autistic”. I don’t think you believe it. But because your language has been coopted by other less charitable assholes (wonkette, marcotte, etc), I have to consciously remind myself that you’re not actually calling me a horrible person. (I don’t think you are).
I don’t think this is remotely intentional on your part and I sure as hell don’t think guys who refuse to take no for an answer are generally the victims. But it is an effect your language is having on at least my subconscious.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@J — Well first, I hope never to be in the position to try to decide if some individual person is “autistic enough.” No good could come of my making that decision.
But it is this: just as “go away creep” has been badly abused by nerd-averse feminists, any argument on the behalf of socially awkward men has been co-opted by the Redpill goons and the general assortment of rape and harassment apologists.
For example: “Workplace rules that protect women from harassment are bad because they will be used against autistic men.” I’ve seen that argument made. In fact, it was made last week on my employer’s private email forum.
So we are both awash in a sea of bad faith argument. However, this does not mean I shouldn’t take the time to sift through what men such as Scott Alexander or Scott Aaronson say, cuz while I have quibbles with them, I think they are speaking up for a group of actually-vulnerable people.
Sure. And that includes autistic men.
But still, most nerds are not autistic, at least not the way (for example) Moebius is. I expect that most are not really autistic at all, and then a fair number are autistic-like-me. Just a touch, but a touch one can work past.
I will say this: the existence of autistic men *must not* be used to excuse bad behavior by non autistic men, cuz sexism is abundant and creepy men are all over the place, and most of them know exactly what they are doing. Most of them are in fact socially adept. They push boundaries they know they can push. They exploit the nooks and crannies of what is acceptable. And they creep women out, and it’s hard to deal with them cuz they know the rules better than us.
Cuz these men prey on certain women, the young and the weird and the vulnerable.
And then some creeps are more like Kitty’s suitor, just clueless dolts with poor boundaries and a very unrealistic view of women. A guy like that comes across more as clumsy than malicious. But still, his views are fucked up and a cluebat might be just what he needs. Surely I support every woman having a cluebat available to let loose on jerks like him.
(Note, a “cluebat” is not a literal bat and I do not advocate violence against people who have not used violence first.)
LikeLike
Evolution versus creation is an atypical example–about the only reasonable creationist you can have is someone who was fooled by less reasonable creationists. If anything, the example of creationism is useful to remind us that not every idea *has* a strong argument in favor of it. And no, I don’t believe I claim this just because I can’t model creationists, even if it’s easy for you to pattern-match it that way.
LikeLike
Sorkin had a great scene about “bias towards fairness” in the media that seems relevant here. Some stories only have one side, some have five, but ” if the entire Congressional Republican Caucus were to walk into the House and propose a resolution stating that the earth was flat, the ‘Times’ would lead with “Democrats and Republicans Can’t Agree on Shape of Earth.'”
Anyways, point well taken, so… I know exactly what a strong argument that [0, 1] isn’t open looks like, but it’s not that [0, 1] is closed (“Closed doesn’t imply not open!“)
LikeLiked by 2 people
Opinions on feminism aside, I’ve got a lot of sympathy for how you feel about unwanted compliments. It’s not an exact analog, but when I was in my first relationship I would often get compliments on how cute my girlfriend and I were together and how stable we seemed; naturally, the reality was very different behind closed doors, and as time went on I began to feel sick whenever friends would congratulate us.
I’m not the sort to call anyone “one of the few reasonable [x]s” anyway, but I do appreciate you sharing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Geez, already I have a backlog of comments here I mean to write, and now this! Well, let’s tackle this first. (Also, I’m a bit late and other people have already stated most of of my points, but I’ll restate them anyway. 🙂 )
So, on the one hand…
If people are calling feminists “unreasonable” due to extreme object-level positions, they should stop. This is not a good thing to do. As I’ve said earlier, extreme positions are often correct! And when they are not, they are at least interesting and worth considering or at least discussing.
And, OK, people do do this a lot, but, like, I hope people here don’t do that.
A lot of the time this all just gets conflated under the label “extremism”. I don’t like this. Because “extremism” can mean either extreme object-level positions — which we should not be discouraging — or it can mean all sorts of awful things. And I don’t think it’s fair to associate one with the other. And, OK, I guess a correlation does actually exist, but it’s still not fair, and, like, we can do better than that here, I hope.
(Although I’m kind of disappointed that “burning gender to the ground” is considered an extreme position at all. I’d consider it an obvious position? I still don’t really understand how feminism that isn’t in favor of burning gender to the ground is supposed to make sense.)
Now, on the other hand…
1. I do think that feminism and SJ and such are mostly uniquely terrible when it comes to entrenchment. That is to say, not merely having an echo chamber like everyone else, but actually warping the norms of discourse so that it becomes impossible to argue against the doctrine position. SJ isn’t awful because of its object-level positions; it’s awful because of its norms of discourse. Who else has that same sort of entrenchment? Some religious movements, I guess. And maybe also the MRAs? But, well, who do you think they learned it from?
2. Most feminists are probably reasonable. They’re also mostly silent about it. If we implicitly restrict to vocal feminists, well, does that change anything?
3. Finally, I think this look different depending on how much you’ve bought into Blue Tribe mythology. This is very similar to LTP’s point above. If you haven’t at all, then, yes, you expect that feminism will have these “people failure modes”. If you have… well then, y’know, we’re supposed to be better than them. We’re not supposed to have those ordinary people failure modes. They’re the ones with the unquestionable holy books and xenophobic biases and etc.; we’re the good logical thinkers, who have accounted for such things, with numbers to back up our position and etc. If you’re coming from that point of view, then finally recognizing that, in fact, the feminist movement is not substantially better than other people in that respect is not only quite a shock, but dismantles one of the major reasons for supporting it in the first place.
That is to say, part of why I (depending on context) don’t anymore call myself a feminist is that feminism is a movement in the first place. I still am entirely in favor of (what I would consider) basic feminist principles, if not the more detailed positions that they claim follow from them (and I claim do not)! But to hell with movements; I just want to get the right answer.
LikeLiked by 9 people
Drifting off topic, but I can answer this. I’ll be brief.
I don’t think we understand *all* of gender or its psychological necessity, but the experiences of trans people (including me) convinces me that *something really important* is there.
If by “burning gender to the ground” you mean “only the bad parts” (such as the compulsory gender roles or the fucked up power stuff), then fine. But on the other hand, someone might say, “I want a free market but no market failures.” Another may say, “I want socialism with centralized control, but that at all times find the real global optimum.”
Those are lovely goals, but they may not be achievable. Human society is boundlessly complex.
We can see the failure modes of gender, but I don’t think we know how to separate them from the “good parts,” such as how I felt the first time someone called me “she.”
We may find things thing do not separate out so nicely, and attempts to *force them apart* will work as well as collective farming did in the Soviet Union. Works on paper. Theory seems sound. When you try it on people…
I’m a woman.
LikeLiked by 4 people
A few weeks ago I posted a disagreement (in an anti-feminist-in-a-libertarian-fashion-but-not-MRA space) with the blogger about which rape prevalence studies provide more accurate statistics. The blogger and his commenters responded by making jokes about how small they imagined my penis to be. I gave up and left the argument, and I’m sure that the folks there were convinced that they had won an intellectual debate.
Although there are some spaces where you can argue with reasonable gun rights advocates, there are also many, many spaces where the gun rights advocates will gang up on you, yell at you that you’re an idiot, ask you why you hate freedom, refuse to talk to you and instead talk about you to the other people there (“Barry and his ilk…”), etc..
So no, I don’t think entrenchment is a “uniquely” present feature of feminism and SJ. I agree that it’s pretty common for feminist and SJ spaces to have an entrenchment problem, but I’m puzzled how you can’t see that the same problem occurs commonly in other spaces as well.
LikeLiked by 3 people
That’s an example of ignoring data that pointed away from their consensus beliefs- a regrettable but fairly common activity. But note that you actually had a strong point on their terms; they just ignored it because monkeys.
I think the point is that SJ spaces are attempting to create a vocabulary and a set of rhetorical norms such that dissent is more difficult- not just accumulating a bunch of people who agree about something, but structuring definitions to incorporate specific assumptions and lead to a predetermined conclusion. Note that social justice swings hard towards linguistic prescriptivism (“what racism actually means is….”). This, it seems to me, is because a lot of its strength comes from the predictable consequences of rigidly defined terms.
LikeLiked by 5 people
@Toggle: Crimethink will soon be doubleplusunpossible.
LikeLike
Toggle, thanks – that’s an interesting point.
But I’m still not convinced that linguistic prescriptivism is limited to SJ spaces. I can’t count how many times a conservative has told me “What racism actually means is….,” with “racism” defined in a way to exclude all but the most extreme examples. Another example: I’ve learned from experience not to argue with a pro-gun-rights person without being careful to use what they believe to be the acceptable definition of “assault weapon,” because some of them consider the use of any other definition reason to dismiss all your arguments (and your intelligence).
That said, I do agree that some SJ spaces lean too hard on a linguistic prescriptivist approach – I’ve seen a lot of that on Tumblr and on some blogs. Whether or not it’s unique to SJ, it’s something I’d like to see SJ do much less.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Osberend: Crimethink has always been doubleplusungood.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Ampersand: You probably already know this, but a major reason that pro-gun people get so heated about “assault weapon” is that it’s a legal term-of-art coined by a specific and awful law.
LikeLiked by 5 people
@Ampersand: Crimethink has always been doubleplusungood. Socjust makes crimethink doubleplusunpossible.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Assault rifle is a standard term referring to a specific class of firearm. Assault weapon was a ludicrous legal open-ended definition, meant to sound the same as the previous, but used to demonize a number of cosmetic and safety features on a wide array of very different firearms. It’s the center of the “when they say they don’t want to ban all guns, they’re lying” meme that’s prevalent in gun-rights spaces.
On topic: Ampersand, I won’t even try and deny that gun rights supporters can be a rough bunch, but your commentary was allowed to stand. Whereas on anti-gun blogs, forums, etc., the standard approach to pro-gun folks challenging the narrative or posting corrections to the blatant misinformation that pops up is to delete, ban, moderate and otherwise ensure that there is only one view represented. This is so common that we even have a standard term for it, after the Brady campaign’s smears – “reasoned discourse”.
Non-blues will let you have your say, even if they may make fun of it or you. Blues will engage in the same type of mocking behaviour – which supports your point to some degree – but I’d say that their reliance on denying any dissent or correction, often while hypocritically claiming that there needs to be a “conversation”, makes it a whole special failure mode of its own.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Leit: You gotta love the inclusion of barrel shrouds. It tips their hand so beautifully. “How dare you want features that make your gun look more visually imposing, simply to reduce the likelihood of accidentally burning yourself!?”
Of course, Carolyn McCarthy’s interview response revealed a few other things as well: “A shoulder thing that goes up,” indeed!
LikeLiked by 1 person
@osberend – as much fun as it is, if we get sidetracked into the chronicles of uninformed quotes by ignorant louts who don’t know enough to keep their fingers off triggers, we’re going to be here all week and it’s going to look terribly like partisan sniping.
LikeLike
@ osberend
Do guns get hot enough to require a barrel shroud when used for self-defense? (Honest question — I’ve never needed or wanted a gun, so I don’t know much about them.)
Also, how broad is the class of guns that the definition from McCarthy’s proposal — “a semiautomatic rifle that has an ability to accept a detachable magazine, and that has a barrel shroud” — describes? Like, what’s the most innocuous thing in this category?
LikeLike
@Nita – guns will actually get hot enough during sporting use or when just running mags for fun. The wooden furniture on, for instance, Kalashnikovs and most hunting rifles serves a similar purpose – while being a good chunk heavier. A lot of the banned items have ergonomic impacts like this.
Remember, you’re setting off explosions and propelling chunks of metal via rifling – contact friction – ahead of the burning gases. Depending on caliber I wouldn’t suggest touching the barrel after one shot, much less however many you need in a defensive situation. If you’re a bloody idiot, you can even give yourself a neat round burn by pressing a pistol’s barrel against your skin after a mag. (DO NOT DO THIS)
The AWB was Feinstein’s baby, as far as I recall, and it banned a lot more than your definition. It had prescriptions for combinations of features, and like the shroud example, most banned ergonomic improvements for the sake of not letting weapons look scary. Stuff like carrying handles, which – unbelievably enough – make weapons easier to carry. Or adjustable stocks, which make customising the fit easier. Or flash suppressors, which direct gases out to preserve the shooter’s vision – there’s still a visible flash, it’s just not necessarily in your eyes. Or pistol grips, which make rifles easier to handle for a lot of people, because heaven knows you don’t want people having better control over where their shots are going!
There was even a point for bayonet lugs, which, sure, if you put one on a modern rifle you’re playing into a stereotype. But some folks do stuff like that for fun, and honestly, I can’t think of a case of someone being knifed to death by a mounted bayonet ever.
If you want the most innocuous thing in the category you specified, it’s probably that cute little .22 folding rifle that Kel-Tec came up with a couple of years back. Looks evil with the wrong furniture, but it’s a dinky little plinker and looks like a bendy straw without the shroud.
LikeLiked by 1 person
(and by pistol’s barrel I meant the muzzle, herp derp)
LikeLike
I’m resisting the impulse to get drawn into any gun-related debates.
@Leit:
Non-blues will let you have your say, even if they may make fun of it or you. Blues will engage in the same type of mocking behaviour – which supports your point to some degree – but I’d say that their reliance on denying any dissent or correction, often while hypocritically claiming that there needs to be a “conversation”, makes it a whole special failure mode of its own.
I don’t think your claims of “non-blue” superiority really makes sense.
First of all, factually, I think you’re probably just plain wrong – there are many non-blue forums that will delete dissenting posts and ban dissenters. But even if you weren’t mistaken about that, I’d still think you’re wrong on the ethics.
It’s true that, in the non-blue forums I described earlier, I was allowed to post comments. Why does that matter? I don’t think letting me “have my say” on a forum where no one is willing to listen and engage in any meaningful fashion is superior to banning me. Whether you make fun of dissent or just ban it, the end result is the same – you’re refusing to listen or engage in any meaningful way, on that forum.
Actually, I’d argue that it’s better to just ban people, as compared to hostile mocking. On my blog, I don’t allow “race realism” arguments, for reasons. I’m perfectly open about that. Bring it up once or twice and you get warned; after that, banned.
I think the way I handle topics I don’t want to discuss on my blog is actually a great deal kinder, more respectful, and more ethical than if I pretended to be open to “race realism” debate but actually just mocked them and sneered at them. I don’t waste people’s time; I don’t make fun of them; I just let them know that there are discussions I’m not willing to host.
On an internet with an effectively infinite number of forums, there’s nothing at all unethical about setting rules for a privately-owned space – including rules like “this is not a space for gun debate, go somewhere else for that.” There is no moral requirement that I make my space available for everything and anything, and unmoderated spaces are not superior to moderated spaces.
On the other hand, deliberately being mean is – well – mean. I find that much more objectionable, on the left or the right, than I do a simple “not on my forum” policy.
LikeLike
>Why does that matter? I don’t think letting me “have my say” on a forum where no one is willing to listen and engage in any meaningful fashion is superior to banning me.
I’d say it matters because you can’t really know that no one is willing to acknowledge your points. There are people who don’t post but still read, and there’s also people who might engage in the mocking due to peer pressure but still acknowledge what you have to say.
>On an internet with an effectively infinite number of forums, there’s nothing at all unethical about setting rules for a privately-owned space – including rules like “this is not a space for gun debate, go somewhere else for that.” There is no moral requirement that I make my space available for everything and anything, and unmoderated spaces are not superior to moderated space
This is most certainly true, but I guess the issue would be with places that, for the lack of a better word, “pretend” to be spaces for this-or-that debate, while actively censoring opinions that are not within the consensus.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The thing about forums that allow discussion in the first place is that you can often have decent arguments if you know how to speak to the populace. It isn’t that many ideas are offlimits, but rather than certain words send up massive warning signs of “crazy person” and thus the mocking begins. Avoid sending up signal flairs that you’re outgroup and many people are surprisingly willing to change their minds, given that you rephrase the issue in a way they can grok. It’s not actually that hard to explain ideas such as privilege or cultural appropriation to those who recoil in horror and toss “SJW” at anything approaching social critique in a way they agree with, just so long as you place it within their worldview.
On red vs blue; I don’t think there’s really too big a difference when it comes to who bans discussion on the internet. Rather it’s just more obvious on the red side and thus you don’t go there in the first place because their version of the SJ sphere is the Religion bubble. You aren’t going into a Christ Saves forum and try to convert the heathens. But you might think people in the SJ sphere would be up for a discussion about some principles because that’s what liberalism is all about.So it’s really a betrayal of expectations which leads to this view.
That said, in my experience if you’re kind and respectful to conservatives while speaking their language on the internet they’re less likely to outgroup you than liberals who will look for a reason to decry you as an evil outsider (and this is coming from someone who is deeply blue), but I suspect that’s a good cop/bad cop effect rather than anything inherent in the ideology. There are a lot of asshole liberals who spread out from their home forums, while the equivalent conservatives tend to be happy without going evangelical (ironically enough). Thus you have conservatives exposed to a lot of shitbirds, so the occasional nice person stands out as someone they really want to engage with.
As for why blue spreads and red tends to stay put I don’t think I can put together a coherent theory. The big Facebook study that came out a bit ago did put forth that blues are more likely to cut people out for going against their opinions, but reds are more likely to have more friends of their own tribe than blues are of other blues. Maybe it’s the instigator vs the establishment; the former needs to grow or die (but doesn’t want to lose its identity thus a higher turnover) while the latter is comfortable with the status quo? You just preach to those who you think you can convert and shut out the non-believers.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Ampersand – I respectfully disagree. Being mocked is hurtful, sure, but being dismissed altogether as being without merit strikes me as more damaging. I’d rather at least have the satisfaction of being able to represent my view, slim as it may be. And I’d rather the chance that there are others out there who might join their voices and make it more difficult not to engage. That opportunity never exists when the message can never be seen.
You do indeed have no obligation to provide a place for debate outside of your interests. But you’re talking about your own interests and I’m talking about gun control spaces as an example of blue spaces that concentrate on an issue. When a space is set up around an issue, and refuses to engage other viewpoints on their ostensible interest or even to allow dissent to be seen, that suggests hypocrisy and insecurity.
Sure, there are non-blue spaces that don’t tolerate dissent. It’s the internet, the butthurt flows freely. I’d still say that those are outliers where the blue side makes the behaviour common enough to be a recognisable issue – there’s a theme of pointing out this sort of censorious behaviour elsewhere in these comments.
And for some good-natured resolve-picking – please don’t tell me you defend the Evil Black Rifle act? That abomination was useful only as a ratchet and to generate static for manufacturers. It was a bit of a dog even for the antis, given that it handed so much delicious ammunition to the pro side.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Ampersand
I don’t think we’re necessarily constrained to the binary choice between ‘ban’ and ‘hostile mocking’, even in communities where hostile mocking of outgroup ideas is the social norm. It’s actually the choice between ‘ban’ and ‘hostile mocking plus exposure to outgroup ideas’.
People do sometimes change their minds as a product of debate. It’s rare. And of course it’s always on a delay, or a slow drift- you never get the sentence “I lose, I now believe [x]”. But then, it doesn’t have to be common to be a significant event. Especially in the aggregate.
Isolated communities without this kind of check can develop serious problems, and its members are vulnerable to developing real crazypants beliefs. In theory, an online forum is not ‘isolated’ since any given member can go places where outgroup arguments are made. But in practice, self-segregation is a common and self-reinforcing thing, and so the consequences are often similar.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@Ann Onora Mynuz
This is most certainly true, but I guess the issue would be with places that, for the lack of a better word, “pretend” to be spaces for this-or-that debate, while actively censoring opinions that are not within the consensus.
I agree, a place like that sucks – not because there’s anything wrong with moderation, but because there’s something wrong with claiming to be something you are not.
However…
At my blog, although I and the other posters are all lefty feminists, there are commenters who are fairly hard-line Republicans, who are anti-feminists, who are Tea Party Members, who have posted literally thousands of comments on my blog over the years, without being banned.
Nonetheless, it’s common for people I’ve moderated to claim that I don’t allow dissent. It’s common for anti-feminist blogs, if they discuss my blog, to dismiss my blog as a place which doesn’t allow dissenting opinions.
My hypothesis is that when a “blue” blog moderates in any way, and for any reason, many “non-blue” folks will earnestly conclude that the blogger doesn’t allow dissent.
LikeLike
I’ve actually gotten this in both directions! People accusing me of unreasonably censoring conservatives and MRAs and people accusing me of unreasonably censoring people to my left.
LikeLike
@Ampersand
Of course there’s always going to be those who kvetch. But I as you put forth before, plenty of places do claim to be areas of honest discourse… and then the mob jumps on anyone who goes against the grain. There’s not moderation per se, but it’s the creation of an environment hostile to honest discourse which I find most aggravating. A spirit of the law issue if you will. If a place is predisposed to treat anyone arguing against them as being in bad faith, well, you don’t exactly have an open discussion. I’m not a regular on your site so I can’t comment there, but there’s a reason people dislike sites where they get badmouthed and dogpiled for being different.
It isn’t like this doesn’t occur on red forums either, it’s just that they haven’t decried “civility” as a badwrong tool of the oppressor, so you can get away with a hell of a lot more without the pitchforks and torches coming out so long as you’re not a dick.
Even then, some superblue places are good on certain topics. One forum I frequent is absolutely godawful for SJ related issues… but can be remarkably open about guns, law, or economics. I do find the movement of SJ away from economic structures to be both worrying (as I find it to be the root of many of our problems) and positive (because they’re really, really bad at econ).
LikeLike
@Leit–
Being mocked is hurtful, sure, but being dismissed altogether as being without merit strikes me as more damaging.
It’s not an either/or choice; most commonly, hostile mockery is combined with being dismissed altogether, not a substitute for it.
That said, if you find being banned more hurtful than being mocked, then you do. I very much find it the other way around.
When a space is set up around an issue, and refuses to engage other viewpoints on their ostensible interest or even to allow dissent to be seen, that suggests hypocrisy and insecurity.
No, it doesn’t – you’re just not giving a reasonable benefit of the doubt.
First of all, a “space” is not a person. It’s entirely possible – and even likely, in the case of gun control forums – that most people who are dedicated enough to go to such a specialized forum, do engage with opposing views regularly, just not in that forum.
Secondly, there are a bunch of legitimate reasons to have specialized forums.
Example: Gun rights advocates are very eager to express their views, and will turn 100% of a pro-gun-control forum into a debate forum if they can. So the only way to have non-debate discussions freely is to have specialized spaces for that.
Second example: A loud and aggressive subset of gun rights advocates are just mean, and it’s not like those folks will obey a “mean people please don’t come here” notice. It’s perfectly legit to want to have discussions without people who come in to tell you that you’re worthless ignorant stupid sheeple scum, and pretty much the only way for pro-gun-control folks to avoid that subset of GRAs is to have a no GRAs rule.
LikeLike
What you note here is quite right. Whenever someone says “you’re one of the good ones”, a very weird power dynamic is going on here. Even if they mean it complimentarily, they are asserting their right to pick out the good from a set of bad people.
I’ve heard this phrase used for “you’re one of the good [racial minority]’, to “you’re one of the good men we can trust”, to “you’re one of the good feminists”, and in all cases it’s a sign of the in group othering the out group.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Being a racial minority isn’t an ideology, so it’s much less reasonable for “you’re a good X” to mean “you’re a good X, out of the X who actively promote the ideas of X”.
LikeLike
Whenever someone says “you’re one of the good ones”, a very weird power dynamic is going on here. Even if they mean it complimentarily, they are asserting their right to pick out the good from a set of bad people.
I don’t think that’s necessarily indicative of weird power dynamic; as I see things, I have the right to pick out the good from a set of bad people . . . because I’m me. Because I’m the one doing it, and making the assertion. And you have the right to do the same. And either of us might be wrong in our conclusions, but that doesn’t mean that we are wrong to pass judgement in the first place.
In general, I feel like there’s a weird social dynamic (that has come up in order discussions I have on this blog, as well as in interactions in meatspace), where if there’s a social taboo against doing X unless you’re above the other people in the interaction, people refuse to believe (often even when told) that you’re doing X because you reject that taboo, and not because you’re asserting that you’re above them (cf. “mainsplaining,” which numerous people have accused me of based on the way that I often talk to women and men).
in all cases it’s a sign of the in group othering the out group.
But the out-group is other, by definition. If they weren’t other from me, they wouldn’t be my outgroup. Why is it bad to be open about this?
LikeLiked by 2 people
I did call you one of the few reasonable feminists i’ve met at one point, although i did apologise once i saw you post about it on your tumblr. I probably should have been more specific and said vocal internet feminist, since feminists you meet IRL you just tend to not notice when they’re being reasonable, since it never really comes up. and in general you only notice people being vocal in the first place.
At one point you mentioned that you got upset because you have friends who are feminists and you feel bad because it’s like you’re being told your feminist friends aren’t reasonable, which i certainly hadn’t considered, although i have no idea why you brought up a feminist friend who hated men for this as i can’t see how it helps your point.
LikeLike
Ozy, tribalism is bad. Gender abolition is an egalitarian idea. Human equality is an egalitarian idea.
Feminism is a tribalist idea propping up women über alles. Like religions prop their members über alles and nationalism props the nation über alles.
THAT is the failure mode. Othering, categorizing into ingroups and outgroups, favorizing the ingroup and penalizing the outgroups by discrimination. Feminism is sexist by its very name. Feminism will inevitably lobby for the legalization of rape by women because it represents the interests of women blindly, over the interests of not-women.
I KNOW feminism has done more for gender equality than against so far, but nobody needs it to fight for disutility against not-women.
If you’re a gender abolitionist, then you’re against FEMinism. If gender abolitionism WINS, then the word ‘feminism’ itself will lose all meaning! And that’s a way better endgame for everyone.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Feminism has done good things in the past and can do good things in the present. What is the alternative movement that “good” feminists should join?
Also, I personally owe an enormous debt to feminism (you know, the usual stuff — education, voting, respect, bodily autonomy), so agreeing with the people who want to make “feminism” a bad word feels like a betrayal.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I highly doubt that most of the feminists who got you the vote would have approved of the things that the currently active feminists are saying and doing (especially on the Internet). So this is distriubted motte-and-bailey again–they count as feminists when used to earn your loyalty to feminism, but they don’t count as feminists insofar as anyone who actually had opinions like them and posted on feminist blogs would get banned in an instant.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Could you give an example of the opinions you have in mind?
LikeLike
“I don’t believe in (insert modern SJ-feminist idea here).”
LikeLike
Yeah, I got that much. How about something more specific?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I really don’t feel like getting into arguments of the order of “well, I think that Susan B. Anthony *would* have supported Schrodinger’s rapist, so there”.
LikeLike
@ Jiro
Well, as you wish.
Speaking of Schroedinger’s Rapist, did you like my interpretation of it?
LikeLike
Jiro: “I highly doubt that most of the feminists who got you the vote would have approved of the things that the currently active feminists are saying and doing”
It is also true that some civil war era abolitionists would have been shocked and disturbed by a black president.
Movements move on. Historical feminists and historical abolitionists were limited by the Overton Window, not just in what they could achieve, but also in what they could conceive. If you give historical movementarians a privileged position to define movementarianism then it will only move so far.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@Ozy – my experiences with discussions with feminists are mostly limited to my home country. But – in my limited experience – vast majority of feminists I encountered were bullies, nasty trolls, and so on. On forum where I interacted with about 10 women, I would count only 2 as ones which would be “reasonable”, meaning: would not start ad hominem attacks, would actually read scientifc studies I provided and would provide their own studies, would understand when I would talk about things like statistics and methodological flaws. All others would just shut all the discussion down as soon as I would not agree with everything they will say.
You may be offended, but the reality is that if you are not a feminist, then most of feminists you will bump into in internet will be really, really nasty b**ches (sorry, but there is no other strong enough word to describe this kind of behaviour)
LikeLiked by 1 person
This is one of those things that is hard to explain but easy to analogize.
Compare “You’re one of the good Muslims.” Technically it’s better than the alternative, but…
LikeLiked by 2 people
“You’re one of the good X” is fact-dependent–it depends on how many of them are bad. If the typical religiously active Muslim was as bad as the typical vocal feminist, then “you’re one of the good Muslims” could be a legiutimate thing to say. Of course, they’re not, so it isn’t.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I think unimportantutterance and Matthew have kind of already responded to this point above. Or, to use analogies, for some people it would be more like
“You’re one of the good atheists” → “Really? What problem do you have with atheists?”
“You’re one of the good Jews” → Get away from there, now.
(Note this has less to do with actual immutability than, like, what things we consider to be more-or-less immutable. Not sure exactly how to specify this, but that category that includes race and sex but also religion But probably doesn’t cover atheism. It’s a weird category.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
I actively (and aggressively) reject the social inclusion of religion in that category. Religious beliefs have moral significance, and individuals can choose to change their religion; that most of them don’t is entirely immaterial.
LikeLike
I can no more choose to change my religious beliefs than to choose to believe I can step in front of a moving train and not be hurt.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@blacktrance: Hmmm, yes and no, I think. It’s true that you can’t just up and decide “as of today I will believe that Roman Catholicism is true” or not. But you can decide that you are going to behave in ways that are likely to cultivate such a belief, or not. Given that you want to believe X, you can engage in rituals that are known to reinforce belief in X, look harder for counterarguments when you encounter arguments against X than when you encounter arguments for X, be more willing to treat hard-to-understand implications of X as mysteries of faith, seek out and associate with X believers that you like personally in order to cultivate a sense of group identification, and so forth. Given that you want not to believe X, you can do the reverse of all of those things.
LikeLike
@ osberend
But if you currently believe in, say, the Christian God, how could you want to get rid of that belief? According to your current beliefs, that would result in an unthinkable amount or torture!
LikeLike
@blacktrance
You’re not a typical person. People who have (or don’t have) religious beliefs purely because of a conviction that those beliefs are true are fairly uncommon.
There are tons of people who convert because the people at the other church are friendly, because the people at the other church look happier than normal, because the leader at their current church is a jerk, because some family member or significant other wants them to, and so on.
Religious belief, in cases like that, is a choice similar to wearing certain clothes (see the classic Less Wrong article “belief as attire”). I think osberend is right to categorize these sorts of “beliefs” as choices.
LikeLike
@Nita: The direct answer to that question is that you would want that if there is something you value more than avoiding an unthinkable amount of torture, and that something is opposed to believing in the Christian God. If you can say, in the words of Huckleberry Finn[1], “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”
But in practice, one usually does not have to surmount quite such a high bar. Because in practice, these decisions are generally made in a moment of utter certainty, but of doubt. Someone still believes in the Christian God . . . mostly. And they have to decide whether to try to self-modify to believing in him fully, or not at all. So it’s not necessary that their reasons for not believing should be powerful to overcome their desire not to surely suffer eternal torment; it suffices that they should powerful enough to overcome their desire not to risk eternal torment.
And, then too, in a modern society, many self-professed Christians are annihilationist or vaguely universalist.
[1] Over a question of action, not of belief per se, but still.
LikeLike
@Ghatanathoah:
Those sound more like changes in associations than changes in beliefs. Belonging to a particular church is a choice (when important doctrines aren’t at stake), but they’re not changes in one’s anticipations about the world.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That depends on how highly you think of your fellow Muslims. I think that on average, people have too high of an opinion of those who agree with them, and are willing to overlook flaws that they’d care about if they were their opponents. People should be more willing to throw their allies under the bus.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I’d qualify that a little: It is bad to throw your allies under the bus for personal gain, despite actually being no better than them yourself. It is good to throw your allies under the bus if that’s where they deserve to be any, and is not where you deserve to be.
LikeLike
“. . . where they deserve to be anyway,” even. I swear, there is something weird going on with my brain that makes me approximately 500% more likely to see typos after hitting “post comment.”
LikeLike
I try to be good at this. I usually find rationalists whose human values have been destroyed by Hollywood Rationality (or by willingness to bite bullets that don’t need to be bitten) to be just as unpleasant as I find theists whose values have been destroyed by religion. And I’m pretty leftist, but I really hate SJWs.
LikeLike
I would have no problem telling someone “you’re one of the good muslims”. Nor would I feel insulted if they said to me “you’re one of the good atheists”.
Saying “you’re one of the good X” is to say “I don’t respect your ideas, but I do respect you as a person”. It might not be the ideal expression of moral communion, but it does have the virtue of being true. I would rather we acknowledge our differences and still express respect for each other than pretend those differences don’t exist or aren’t important.
LikeLiked by 4 people
So, rethinking things a little, trying to remember things, because I think my previous reply was perhaps unduly by the “Grr, those damn feminists!” tone that seems to occur here a lot.
For much of my life, I’ve been in contexts where pretty much everyone I knew — in real life, that is — were reasonable people, and also feminists. (Myself included.) It occurs to me that I largely don’t really know to what extent these people were “reasonable feminists”. There are, I think, at least three reasons for this.
For much of that time, I was also reading websites mainly frequented by the sort of people I’d now consider “unreasonable feminists”. So that’s one reason right there — contamination of memory. I think it’s very possible that (at least some of) the people I knew in real life were much more reasonable than the people I was reading on the internet; but the latter had a bigger influence on me in this area, so that’s most of what I remember.
(I mean, I guess there’s Facebook. But that doesn’t distinguish between “A number of the people I used to know now repeat awful things” and “A number of the people I used to know were always prone to repeating awful things, and I didn’t realize.”)
The second reason is that, on the other hand, some of this was before I ever encountered scary-internet-feminism, and found that I had any reason to disagree with what appeared to be the consensus feminist position; so why would it come up? In a “we’re all feminists” context, where you have no reason to disagree, you’re not going to find out who might actually not be so reasonable as they appear.
The third reason is that once you’ve been around the scary-internet-feminists and learned better than to try disagreeing, you again are not going to find yourself disagreeing in real life and finding out who’ll discuss things reasonably and who won’t.
Because this is the thing — a reasonable person who is a feminist is not necessarily a “reasonable feminist”, because of compartmentalization. The people I was reading were reasonable people, otherwise I would have ignored them. (Or so I thought, anyway. In retrospect I think they might actually have been generally less reasonable than I gave them credit for.) And yet on this one topic they were not. It’s not some stereotype of a screaming SJW that scares me — I mean, yeah, eventually those people become scary; but first you have to become vulnerable to them. And what leads you to that is people who are generally reasonable but on this one topic stack the deck.
And yeah, everyone stacks the deck, but — I guess the reason that stories of other movements being unreasonable don’t strike me as comparable is, they’re unreasonable in their own little space; the rest of us just watch and laugh. They may have screwed up norms of discourse, but it’s not like they’re successful in exporting them. If they are, it’s only to other places with awful norms of discourse. But unreasonable-feminism (and unreasonable-SJ in general) to me seem to threaten to export awful norms of discourse to places that were previously reasonable. What I’ve talked about as “garden subversion” earlier. It’s an amazing thing they do, to openly alter the norms of discourse while making it sound entirely reasonable.
I mean, maybe there’s some Red Tribe mirror of this that I don’t know about. Not like I would know. But it’s us the Blue Tribe that has control of the academy, which is the place that’s supposed to be the most protected against this sort of thing. We have more responsibility here, y’know?
Anyway, I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I’m tired and less than certain that this comment was helpful or a good use of my time. But possibly helpful bits of anecdote here, maybe. Better comments tomorrow maybe.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The Red Tribe mirror of crackpot SJWism is evangelical Protestantism. It’s not a perfect symmetry — for one thing, evangelicals believe in the possibility of redemption — but the parallels are unmistakable to anyone who’s spent time in both spaces. Both rely heavily on specialized jargon to control discourse. Both have a siege mentality. Both have an obsessive interest in controlling and/or limiting exposure to popular culture. Both are politically activist, albeit with a lot of dissenters who see politics as a waste of time. Both are focused on the future, not the past, and see themselves as working toward a cataclysmic overturn of social order to usher in a new utopian age (“the rapture”/”smashing the patriarchy”). Most importantly, both are convinced that there is no such thing as sincere disagreement with their views, merely people who have been duped or misled.
LikeLiked by 2 people
>Most importantly, both are convinced that there is no such thing as sincere disagreement with their views, merely people who have been duped or misled.
I think both account for the possibility of people just being Evil.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Of course, but the inevitable problem is that most people are not evil. Strongly moralistic, minority ideologies need some way to account for that.
It kinda ties back into Ozy’s original point — one with which I’m very familiar, having been called a “good atheist” by my evangelical former in-laws, who viewed my belief in evolution as a tragic consequence of exposure to the public school system.
LikeLiked by 1 person
>Of course, but the inevitable problem is that most people are not evil. Strongly moralistic, minority ideologies need some way to account for that.
I’d say one of the reasons for the backlash against the SJ movement is the incresingly broad definition of Evil People by some (perhaps disproportionately) loud groups that belong to it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
stillnotkind: Again, it’s fact-dependent. Did your in-laws compare you to the majority of bad atheists based on meeting lots of bad atheists? Or were they just stereotyping? Probably the latter. But most people here who want to talk about reasonable feminists really have run across lots of unreasonable feminists.
LikeLike
What scares me the most about Evangelicals is that I don’t understand them. In a world where the most radical of the feminists have won—where you don’t get to use gendered pronouns until someone tells you their gender; where every TV show, book, and film has a ‘minority quota’; and where any time a man has sex, he’s a rapist if he failed to get his partner to sign a contract of consent beforehand—I will be able to fit in fairly painlessly, and even understand the reasons behind these rules, even if I disagree with the tradeoffs they require. In a world where conservative Christians hold sway… I’m ostracized at best. I have trouble understanding their customs, I have trouble understanding the reasoning behind their customs, and adopting them would therefore be very painful.
LikeLiked by 1 person
@ZZ:
http://the-toast.net/2015/03/11/2050-feminism-finally-won/
LikeLike
@&
The best part of that article is definitely the second sentence: “It’s 2050 and feminism has finally won. Women make up more than 80% of serial killers and serial killer-related entertainment shows..”
Yes, in 2050, feminism will not only have eliminated male privilege, but also serial-killer-related entertainment show
I think that it is wrong that serial killer-related entertainment shows can make large sums of money for their creators/owners by depicting some of the worst parts of humanity in an unrealistic fashion to millions of people while women can’t. I think that that is wrong. It is inappropriate. It is inappropriate that women be denied this right. And you know what else? It’s wrong.
(The first step towards allowing women to make large sums of money for their creators/owners is, of course, to reinstate slavery. I’m sure, now that this has been brought to their attention, Ozy will soon have a blog post eloquently detailing how, to end the oppression of women, we must allow them to be slaves.)
LikeLike
zz: I don’t know how you could claim that you could fit in in a hypothetical radical feminist world where innocent people get branded as rapists, unless you think that being branded as a rapist counts as fitting in.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@Jiro: I only get branded as a rapist if I fail to obtain a contract-o’-consent before having sex. Since contracts-which-aren’t-legally-binding are already common enough in and around BDSM, getting my partners to sign the standard-contract-of-consent(-which-in-my-hypothetical-serves-as-unimpeachable-evidence-of-not-rape) isn’t so huge a step.
LikeLike
>I only get branded as a rapist if I fail to obtain a contract-o’-consent before having sex
Or if your consent form isn’t disregarded as invalid.
LikeLike
Everyone in this subthread needs to go read Yes Means Yes before they can have more opinions about what pro-affirmative-consent feminists want.
Consent contracts don’t work because you always have to be able to revoke consent. I mean… this is how sex works in your own lives, yes? If your partner says “honey, I’m not feeling it tonight” you don’t go “YOU AGREED TO SEX WE HAVE TO FINISH”
LikeLike
The analogy to BDSM contracts make me think, if consent contracts weren’t horrible, they would say things like:
“We both agree, mild escalation if both partners are giving positive signs of enjoyment are ok without verbal consent. Major escalation, eg. to penetrating a new orifice, should include verbal consent. If one partner goes silent or freezes up, you should check if they’re ok, and not continue unless they positively indicate they want you to. If either partner says no or asks you to stop, you should stop immediately.”
With optional extras like, “in this situation I freeze up in pleasure, that’s a good thing, if I want you to stop, I’ll say so” and “in this situation I go nonverbal, be extra careful at checking I’m still into it because I may not be able to say so”.
I mean, everyone should know all that already, but if people wanted contracts that actually made both partners safer, rather than just trying to avoid the issue of thinking about consent, they could propose something like that…
LikeLike
” The flaws that feminism has are no different or worse from the flaws any other large group of people has, from Catholicism to football fandom”
Respectfully, I disagree. Feminism has a real problem with civility, and it is a problem with Feminism, not with individual feminists.
Feminism even has jargon whose sole purpose is to mock the very idea of civility: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Tone_argument
Yes, political movements in general are not exactly known for being civil, but Feminism is exceptionally uncivil even compared to most political movements.
LikeLiked by 2 people
So you’re against reasonable feminism? In that case, you’ll make enemies because of that.
For your information, true feminists are reasonable. False ones are unreasonable.
LikeLike