I’ve been thinking about alternatives to privilege-based models of oppression.
For the unfamiliar: the privilege-based model essentially divides the world into the privileged and the oppressed. For instance, white people are privileged and people of color are marginalized; straight people are privileged and LGBA people are marginalized; thin people are privileged and fat people are marginalized. The privileged group has negative opinions about the oppressed group. In addition, various institutional things screw over the oppressed (for instance, redlining, the illegality of gay marriage, and too-small airline seats).
However, I think there are some serious problems with this sort of model.
First, there’s the problem I wrote about in this post. Privilege models fail when the intersection of a privileged identity and a marginalized identity ends up giving you worse outcomes than the intersection of two marginalized identities. For instance, men of color are far more likely than women of color to go to jail; gay men are more likely than any other sexual orientation subgroup to experience hate crimes.
Second, sometimes negative stereotypes about “privileged” groups are obviously powerful ideas in society. If someone makes a joke about how women are nice, ethical, and nonviolent, and men are stupid, ugly brutes, the joke is patriarchal. It is literally an example of a kind of sexism that has existed for two hundred years! It was used to argue against women having the right to vote! And while it’s possible to incorporate this into a privilege framework– indeed, feminists do every time we point out how pedestalization is one of the major ways white cis women were marginalized– a lot of feminists tend to think “well, that’s saying bad things about men, so it’s not sexist!” And a lot of nonfeminists or antifeminists tend to think “well, that’s saying bad things about men, so it is Feminism Gone Too Far.” It is neither of those things! It is Feminism Gone Not Far Enough And In Fact Using Anti-Suffragette Rhetoric What The Fuck Is Wrong With You People.
Third, there’s the point made in this Tumblr post:
i lose followers every time i say i Dont Hate Otherkin which is fuckin wild because like… i have a psychotic disorder! how do you expect me to muster hatred for people on the basis of them believing things other people think are delusional. people pull the “can’t they just stop being weird, everyone would treat them fine if they just stopped being weird” shit all the time and like, ok, clearly youve never been considered pathologically, involuntarily Weird
Are otherkin neurodivergent? Maybe some of them, and you might be able to make a case that believing you’re a wolf is a neurodivergence, but in general they’re not really people who would be diagnosed with anything if you sent them to a psychiatrist. A lot of them are just people who believe that they are, on a certain level, wolves. But it’s hard to read anti-otherkin stuff without thinking about how obviously they are being conceived of as mentally ill: “something wrong with them”, “delusional”, “sick”, “they should go to therapy”. The idea that someone is Weird and therefore you are justified mocking them is one that has hurt nearly every neurodivergent person. It seems weird to characterize otherkin as marginalized on the axis of neurodivergence, since they’re sometimes neurotypical, but it also seems weird to divide this into two problems when it is really obviously the same problem.
Similarly, fat people, neurodivergent people, and physically disabled people all experience people saying “you have Condition? Have you considered trying diet and exercise?” in tones that imply that diet and exercise is this exotic new recently developed technique that of course the person in question has never heard of. If they had heard of it certainly they wouldn’t be fat/neurodivergent/physically disabled anymore! In general, fat people experience the same thing that disabled people do: the idea that your body is public property for anyone to pass opinions on, that you must Fix It, and that it is totally and completely unacceptable to decide fixing it isn’t worth the effort and you instead want to live a decent life with the body you have. But, again, it doesn’t really make sense to understand fatphobia as a kind of ableism: most fat people are not disabled. It’s just… fat people and disabled people have the same sort of problem.
I’d like to consider replacing it with what you might call a “forces” model. This might be clearer with examples.
“Oppositional sexism”, a term invented by transfeminist Julia Serano, refers to ““the belief that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive categories” (13). A man should not have any of the “attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and desires” commonly associated with women, and vice-versa.”” This harms people in two different ways. First, deviation from the behavior expected of your gender may lead to punishment ranging from slight social disapproval to murder. Second, the gender roles themselves include harmful behavior. For instance, among many subcultures, maleness is often linked with violence, and femaleness with unassertiveness and not taking your own ideas seriously. In subcultures where kindness and empathy are associated with women, and strength and courage are associated with men, both genders may not develop the other gender’s virtues– and wind up becoming less good people than they could have been.
Similarly, Gayle Rubin in Thinking Sex [cw: apologia for sex with minors, brutal description of torture of children’s genitals] created the idea of the charmed circle of sexuality, as depicted in this helpful diagram:
Rubin failed to notice sex-negativity’s twin, compulsory sexuality, but it’s easy enough to generate examples the other way: virgins; people who don’t want to have sex until marriage; celibate people both voluntary and involuntary; asexuals, gray-asexuals, and demisexuals; low-libido people; people in sexless marriages; people who don’t want to have socially required sex acts like PIV or oral sex; premature ejaculators; people with small penises; preorgasmic people and people who have a hard time orgasming; people with genital pain; et cetera et cetera.
This is also a bit of an oversimplification because different subcultures have different charmed circles: the charmed circle at a munch is not the same as the charmed circle at a Pentecostal church. But you get the idea.
Finally, there’s one I don’t have a good theorist to cite, because neurodivergence is depressingly undertheorized. You could tentatively call it “weirdphobia.” A lot of people really don’t like those who are Strange, people whose actions they can’t imagine themselves doing, especially those who are unapologetically and unashamedly Strange, especially those who are Strange in public. They bully us; they harass us; they don’t want to hire us for jobs. And this cuts across a lot of different stigmas. It’s big for neurodivergent people, obviously, in part because we usually can’t choose not to be strange, and in part because a large amount of the mental health system is devoted to making us normal [cw: descriptions of psychiatric abuse of a child]. It’s big for trans and LGBT people. But it also affects a lot of stuff that we don’t, and shouldn’t, think of as oppression: furries; obsessive fans; otherkin; even people with tattoos.
The important thing about all three of those forces is that, to a first approximation, they affect everyone. Everyone deviates from their gender role in some way. Everyone was socialized to do suboptimal things because That’s What Your Gender Does. Everyone has a sex life that doesn’t fit in the charmed circle at least sometimes. Everyone has some aspects of their personality that are Just Strange.
I think this has great potential for solidarity. All too often, the privilege model goes “you are Evil because you are an Oppressor and you need to work endlessly until you aren’t Evil anymore.” I think the forces model has the potential to be “you know how you feel really bad about yourself because you don’t want sex very often? That’s because of a culture that thinks that there are important criteria for people’s sex lives other than ‘is it fulfilling for everyone involved?’ This hurts a lot of other people too, some of them much much worse than you. Support Planned Parenthood to help fix this.”
At the same time, I think it’s more accurate. Most of the marginalization I’ve faced as a neurodivergent person is not because people don’t like borderlines. Most people don’t know what a borderline is. For most of my life I didn’t know what a borderline was. But people noticed I was strange and different, and they mocked me because that’s what they do to strange and different people. It happens that I was strange and different because my identity falls into an Officially Approved Social Justice Category ™, but that doesn’t actually affect what people did– or how I felt about it.
I also think it’s more psychologically accurate for what people with sexist, sex-negative, and ableist beliefs actually believe. “Ableism” can refer to a hodgepodge of different beliefs– everything from “it is bad when autistic people are weird in public” to “if someone uses a wheelchair when they can stand, they are a Faker”. On the other hand, many people genuinely do believe that it is Wrong for others to be weird. The privilege model talks more about the effects on people harmed; the forces model, on what it feels like for those who believe it.
There is one serious problem with this model, which is that I am afraid assholes will take it as an excuse to have conversations like this:
Cis man: I feel really alienated because a lot of my friends like football and I don’t! We are both negatively affected by oppositional sexism. Therefore I know exactly what you’re going through and am an expert on your experiences.
Trans woman: Um.
Cis man: I don’t understand what’s the big deal. I mean, it’s annoying when people have football conversations I don’t understand but it’s not that big a deal.
Trans woman: UM
Cis man: You should be less angry all the time. Hate breeds hate!
Of course, the privilege model doesn’t exactly fix the situation. Think about how often trans people assigned female at birth talk about “transphobia” as if their experiences are as bad as those of trans people assigned male at birth (they aren’t). Or think about how often discussions of forced medication and distrust of the psychiatric system get interrupted by people with depression and anxiety who feel that the only problem with the psychiatric system is that sometimes people stigmatize depression and anxiety.
But the forces problem almost certainly makes this problem worse, and I’m not sure how to fix it.
I have only tentatively outlined a handful of the forces that might exist. Sex, gender, and neurodivergence are three areas where I feel comfortable speculating about forces; I’m less comfortable talking about race, physical disability, and fatphobia. Tentatively, I would suggest Andrea Smith’s Heteropatriarchy and Three Pillars of White Supremacy as a starting point for theorizing from a racial perspective. I do think I’m onto something about fat and physically disabled people and “healthism” (and perhaps also “lookism”). I also think that Mel Baggs’s writing about how ableism is at the heart of every kind of oppression is important here. But, again, I’m not familiar enough with previous work to be confident that I’m not reinventing the wheel.
skye said:
I don’t think the forces model makes this problem worse. If anything, I think said problem might even be improved by a model that prioritizes human connection over accusatory rhetoric. While the privilege model is not inherently accusatory, it’s very loaded for a lot of people in a way that this isn’t. Less baggage = clearer discussions.
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skye said:
Also…
“Think about how often trans people assigned female at birth talk about ‘transphobia’ as if their experiences are as bad as those of trans people assigned male at birth (they aren’t).”
The juxtaposition of this example with the football one implies that FAAB trans people are as delusional in their complaints as the cis man above, which is both untrue and uncharitable. Gay men face more hate crimes than gay women, but that doesn’t make homophobia against lesbians any less severe. If anything, it points to its roots in benevolent sexism: female sexuality being inherently less threatening. I’ve often thought something similar is at play w.r.t. trans men.
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Somebody said:
While it’s true that female sexuality is often taken less seriously it seems like the most straight forward way of accounting for many of the problems with the privilege model which Ozy describes is just to acknowledge that men are viewed as legitimate targets for violence in a way which women are not. That said dropping the privilege model altogether and trying to understand things on their own terms seems to be better for almost everything except activism so what do I know?
I certainly wouldn’t deny there being some truth to what you said though based on traditional reactions to female homosexuality in the West and the Islamic world.
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InferentialDistance said:
How do you tell benevolent sexism against women apart from sexism against men? Isn’t every sexist act simultaneously sexist against one group and benevolently sexist against the other?
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skye said:
More or less, yeah. My point is that one group appearing to have it better is often deceptive. It might be the more insidious side of the coin instead.
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ozymandias said:
Benevolent sexism is not actually usually good for women. It’s the word for the thing I pointed out in the post: the pedestalization of (white, cis) women. As in the anti-suffragette example, it’s often used to “protect” women from having autonomy or participating in the public sphere. I understand that this is an INCREDIBLY CONFUSING way of naming it, I didn’t name it, and when I talk about it I usually don’t use that term for exactly this reason.
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Somebody said:
Seeing as our society basically only recognises two genders lots of things can be rephrased like that:
“Men earning more than women is benevolent sexism against men because men are expected to devote their entire lives to their career”
“Blacks/women being excluded from voting is benevolent racism/sexism against whites/men since it demands that they pay attention to politicians (a heavy burden) and make responsible decisions about their country’s future.”
It’s word game of political value (“this issue is really all about me!”) but with little descriptive value.
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Ginkgo said:
“I understand that this is an INCREDIBLY CONFUSING way of naming it, ”
Ozy, actually the term is accurate, at least as far as the sexism part goes. (It’s not a bit benevolent from the male point of view.)
What’s telling is that men who do not perform benevolent sexism are demonized as misogynist.
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Susebron said:
@Ginkgo: It’s not necessarily benevolent from a female perspective either. It was used as an argument against women voting (because they’re too pure to sully themselves with politics).
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megaemolga said:
@ Ozy
If it makes you feel better the original creators named it that for the “interesting” acronym it would create:
In the discussion about what to call the measure, we briefly entertained the “Ambivalent Sexism scale” but rejected this label due to the unfortunate acronym it yielded; the ASI seemed safer (and perhaps more impressive than a mere “scale”). The subjectively negative (more conventionally “prejudiced”) subscale became the Hostile Sexism (HS) scale. Having already depleted our acronymic self-control, we could not resist the irony of naming the subjectively positive (more novel) subscale benevolent sexism (BS)
http://tinyurl.com/pwr7dyd
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Matthew said:
Not defending the term given that you want to minimize confusion, but “benevolent” does not mean “benign” or “beneficial.”
If someone asks what the problem with benevolent x-ism is, you can tell them, “The road to hell is paved with benevolent intentions.”
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Nita said:
@ Ginkgo
Really? I thought most BS-enforcement comes from traditionalists, not from feminists. Did you have any particular examples in mind?
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osberend said:
@Nita: I can’t speak for Ginkgo, but one that I see a lot is double standards for retaliatory violence: I’ve had numerous self-identified feminists claim that I and/or my views are sexist, misogynist, or “part of the problem” when it comes to male-initated domestic violence (!) because of my gender-neutral, rights-respecting view that when a competent adult intentionally hits you without a damn good reason, you should hit them back, hard[1], period.
Because apparently, in their minds, the fact that some men hit women first means that it’s somehow unacceptable to endorse other men hitting women back.
[1] How hard may depend on context, of course. But it should, at a minimum, hurt.
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Nita said:
@ Osberend
Eh… Knowing you, I won’t say that your views are misogynist, but I see why your critics may have said that.
Firstly, the outcome of applying your rule in practice depends very much on the size and strength of the individuals involved.
Example: a guy hits me, I retaliate.
Expected outcome: he goes “ow” and decides whether to
a) hit me harder to “teach me a lesson”, or
b) leave it be and consider us even.
If he chooses option a, all I can do is hope that he’ll stop before my body gets irreparably damaged.
Bonus: now I’m a perpetrator of “reciprocal violence” and a “violence-prone woman”, in Erin Pizzey’s terms.
Secondly, the correct solution to domestic abuse is separation, not retaliation. Reciprocal violence does exist, and it seems likely that reasoning like yours is one of the factors that sustain it.
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thirqual said:
“@Nita: the source of this is probably this report Lay misperceptions of the relationship between men’s benevolent and hostile sexism which made the rounds a few years ago. Here was the conclusion:
“Two studies demonstrated that lay people misperceive the relationship between hostile sexism (HS) and benevolent sexism (BS) in men, but not in women. While men’s endorsement of BS is viewed as a sign of a univalently positive attitude towards women, their rejection of BS is perceived as a sign of univalent sexist antipathy. Low BS men were judged as more hostile towards women than high BS men, suggesting that perceivers inferred that low BS men were indeed misogynists. Negative evaluations were reduced when men’s rejection of BS was attributed to egalitarian values, supporting the hypothesis that ambiguity about the motivations for low BS in men was partially responsible for the attribution of hostile sexist attitudes to low BS men.”
As far as I know it’s the only report about this, but I’m not aware of studies finding the contrary.
(also, Gingko did not say it came from feminists)
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thirqual said:
@osberend and Nita :
I dislike both of your approaches to intimate violence. osberend’s focus seems to be on teaching the offender through physical pain (if deterrence fails, the aim of self-defense is IMO threat suppression, and pain only a mean), and Nita’s leads to the physically weaker partner being essentially free to use violence with little to no consequences. It’s probably linked to the fact that you are describing reactions to very different uses of violence, though.
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Nita said:
Wait, what?! I said whoever gets hit has to leave the situation (or get the other person to leave, if it’s an option). I also explained why using violence can be an extremely dangerous and ineffective strategy for the weaker partner.
Thanks for the link, though. I also liked the hilariously-titled “How sexy are sexist men?” by Bohner et al., which they mentioned in the literature review. Here’s a soup of quotes:
It seems that I’ll have to concede that BS-feminists (that’s “benevolently sexist feminists”) exist. And I can believe that people interpret low-BS as evidence of secret misogyny if they think purely hostile sexists are more common than non-sexists 😦
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Patrick said:
Alternate suggestion- one strong norm regarding violence is that it is only appropriate when necessary to stop more violence, and no non violent alternative exists. Another norm is that it is morally good to meet violence with violence, and that by committing violence the offender forsakes all protective social rules of non violence.
Example from modern politics- some people view stand your ground laws as endorsing a morally good form of strength levied against criminality. Others view them as permitting to people to engage in illegitimate and unnecessary violence when other alternatives exist.
People in the “violence only when necessary” camp view people in the “violence when it is deserved” camp as evil, violent moral reprobates using masculine norms of honor and violent defense of the self as cover for a brutish self indulgence.
So when you endorse applying that to male on female violence, you come across as reveling in the opportunity to hurt women.
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stillnotking said:
I think benevolent sexism is one area in which feminist theory has actually contributed something good and useful, which is to link BS attitudes with HS attitudes. Of course BS attitudes are (superficially) appealing to women! People like flattery and special treatment, news at 11. But the flip side of that is a hostile and controlling expectation of conformity to feminine norms, which may not be apparent right away, and probably isn’t worth having doors held for you.
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osberend said:
@Nita: Eh… Knowing you, I won’t say that your views are misogynist, but I see why your critics may have said that.
I can certainly see what you’re saying, although I’d argue that there’s a fair bit of benevolent sexism in many (not necessarily all) people’s objections to a lot of my other positions as well (e.g. belief in the need to protect women from the Horrible Trauma! of being exposed to sexually explicit materials or comments). But this has also happened in contexts where no one has been aware of my other positions, and people have based their replie on my (explicitly stated to be gender-neutral) position on retaliation alone.
Firstly, the outcome of applying your rule in practice depends very much on the size and strength of the individuals involved.
Sure. This can be adjusted for somewhat by learning where to hit people for effect and/or having a weapon you can use as a fall-back option if the initial aggressor decides to continue the fight, but those both admittedly imperfect solutions. And if the criticism was limited to my active support for women hitting back in light of the risks thereof, that would be much more reasonable.
If he chooses option a, all I can do is hope that he’ll stop before my body gets irreparably damaged.
Or pull a gun. Upper-body strength doesn’t matter nearly as much at that point. But, again, admittedly imperfect solution. Or get help from an honorable bystander, if one exists. (Again, imperfect solution, thanks to that last bit.)
Bonus: now I’m a perpetrator of “reciprocal violence” and a “violence-prone woman”, in Erin Pizzey’s terms.
Well, (assuming that’s an accurate characterization of her views) to hell with her, then.
Secondly, the correct solution to domestic abuse is separation, not retaliation.
First, note that my position includes, but is not limited to, domestic violence cases. Second, this isn’t really about a solution, in the sense you’re probably thinking of. I can’t recall if you identify as a consequentialist or not, but I think it’s pretty plain that you’re significantly more consequentialist than I am.
Reciprocal violence does exist, and it seems likely that reasoning like yours is one of the factors that sustain it.
Possibly, depending on what one means by “reciprocal violence.” I’m not endorsing an attitude of “they hit me first that time that I failed to do the dishes, so I’m going to hit them first now for failing to have dinner ready.”[1] What I am endorsing is (a) “They hit me first just now, so I’m going to hit them back,” and (b) “They hit me first the other day, and I was too concussed to do anything about it, but now I’m back on my feet, and I’ll have my revenge.” The latter of which, at least, really ought to be accompanied by seeking separation—if you’re in a place where you’re seeking violent revenge after-the-fact, then you’re not in place where you should be continuing to live with and/or date this person.
@Nita, again: And I can believe that people interpret low-BS as evidence of secret misogyny if they think purely hostile sexists are more common than non-sexists 😦
I think this is where epistemic virtue comes in: Even if low-BS were evidence of secret misogyny, it would still be vicious to treat a low-BS man as a closet misogynist under most circumstances[2]
@Patrick: Another norm is that it is morally good to meet violence with violence, and that by committing violence the offender forsakes all protective social rules of non violence.
You have hit the nail on the head. I believe that inflicting retaliatory injury on an unjustified aggressor is instrinsically good, quite apart from any practical benefits that it may bring.
People in the “violence only when necessary” camp view people in the “violence when it is deserved” camp as evil, violent moral reprobates using masculine norms of honor and violent defense of the self as cover for a brutish self indulgence.
That seems like an accurate description of how people in that camp think. It’s contemptible, honorless, and epistemically uncharitable bullshit, but that doesn’t mean they don’t actually believe it.
So when you endorse applying that to male on female violence, you come across as reveling in the opportunity to hurt women.
But here’s where I get real pissed. I have been abundantly explicit, every time this subject has come up, that the norms of behavior I believe in are gender neutral. So, fine, people can conclude that I’m reveling in the opportunity to justify hurting other people[3]. I’ll get annoyed by that, but not furious. What makes me furious is when people take the fact that I don’t exempt women from this policy, and treat it as evidence that I have it out for women in particular.
Purely for the sake of argument, suppose that I do want to hurt people, men and women alike. So? How’s that make me sexist? How’s that make me misogynist. And how does my endorsing actually doing it, under the constraint that the person swung first, make me in any way, shape, or form responsible for men hurting women who didn’t swing first?
That’s the punishment for not endorsing BS, right there.
[1] Although, if both partners accept that as the norm of things, and are equally guilty, it’s not clear that it’s actually violating anyone’s rights. It’s still vicious, though.
[2] One might make an exception for questionss like “should I be alone with this person,” but certainly not for “how should I label this person in a conversation on the internet?”
[3] Insofar as I’m doing it without violating their rights, because they struck first, and by doing so disincentivizing initial aggression, it’s non-obvious why this is a bad thing even if true, but that’s another matter.
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osberend said:
The above should say “. . . endorsing actually doing it, under the constraint that the person you are hurting swung first . . .”
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Patrick said:
osberend: The rest of the world has zero obligation to take your self description at face value.
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osberend said:
@Patrick: I emphatically disagree.
This principle is not absolute. There are various edge cases where it may not apply. Certainly, if my testimony conflicts with another’s, then the mere fact that the testimony is about me does not universally oblige you to give me credence over them. Also, if you have caught me in a lie already, that gives you good cause to doubt my further statements. And if you will be put in danger if you trust me and are wrong, then that obviously complicates matters.
But broadly speaking, if all you know of me is what I have told you, and what is at stake is conversation and nothing more, then it is vicious for you to treat me as a liar. Moreover, even in cases where assuming that I am lying is reasonable, it is still vicious to do so without stating it openly.
Even if you are justified, in a particular circumstance, in saying “You claim that your standards are gender-neutral, but I do not believe you; I think you actually believe that a woman should be hit under those conditions, but are lying when you say you believe that a man should be hit. Hence, you are a misogynist,” you are still a contemptible fellow and quite without honor if you say “You support hitting women unnecessarily. That makes you a misogynist,” without addressing the fact that I have asserted that one should hit men under precisely the same circumstances.
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nancylebovitz said:
It’s been a while since I’ve read Pizzey, but she wrote about women who kept returning to violent men, and in Pizzey’s opinion, this was because of wanting to continue the physical fight.
I *think* Pizzey also wrote about women who were violent against other women in shelters, but I’m not as sure about that.
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Patrick said:
osberend- Welcome to real life. Sorry it doesn’t work the way you would like it to.
You probably shouldn’t talk about honor so much though. That’s a very… masculinist moral principle. And as applied to someone who thinks that its morally necessary to hit a woman to teach her a lesson if she hits him first, even when there are non violent alternatives that would protect him from harm… by our society’s norms of honor… lets just say you shouldn’t be invoking those if you want a charitable hearing.
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Nita said:
@ osberend
So, what kind of ethics do you adhere to? My worry is that pure moral intuition, without any grounding in consequences, can lead us astray just like other feelings.
I can’t assume that cake is nutritionally perfect just because it’s delicious, and I can’t assume that retaliation is morally right just because it’s emotionally satisfying.
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Matthew said:
@osberend
You have hit the nail on the head. I believe that inflicting retaliatory injury on an unjustified aggressor is instrinsically good, quite apart from any practical benefits that it may bring.
I would disagree with this on simple personal grounds as a consequentialist, but on top of the ordinary interpersonal grounds why this is a bad thing, people have a tendency to think that moral behavior on the aggregate level should parallel moral behavior on the individual level. If most people actually thought like this, think about what interstate relations — where who “struck” first is almost always in dispute — would look like…
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osberend said:
@Nita: I broadly identify as a virtue ethicist, although my attitude toward individual rights is arguably fairly deontological (in a distinctly non-Kantian way). My ethics aren’t entirely non-consequential, in part because it’s actually incredibly difficult to formulate an ethical system that doesn’t depend on consequences at all[1], but most or all of the dependence on consequences is filtered through either virtue[2] or rights-based deontology[3].
My worry is that pure moral intuition, without any grounding in consequences, can lead us astray just like other feelings.
But what consequences are good is itself a matter of moral intuition.
So limiting oneself to moral intuitions that involve consequences doesn’t mean escaping from the possibility of having one’s moral intuitions go wrong. It just means that one has reduced the number of intuitions whose rightness or wrongness is relevant. That seems (looking at the matter consequentially) ill-advised: If one’s intuitions are not broadly sound, then the whole moral project is doomed from the start. If they are broadly sound, but are not perfect, then a priori reducing the number of them that are in play increases the risk of happening to have the bulk of the relevant ones be bad.
Also, it is (I contend) just plain not human. A healthy human being has non-consequential moral intuitions, and cares about them.
That being said, sometimes one does need to discard or modify certain intuitions that prove to be self-defeating by their own standards, or are consistently opposed to other, more fundamental intuitions. If trying harder to be virtuous in a particular way results in being more vicious (by the same standard), then clearly something has gone wrong.
And indeed, my standard of justice and righteous retaliation, although no doubt harsh in your eyes, is actually less so than it used to be. And the reason for that is that I came to realize that, due to certain features of my own psychology (particularly my inability to sustain a strong but cold hatred), clinging to a maximally rigorous view of justice was actually making me, by that same standard, less just.
But all of this must be done judiciously, in light of the whole of one’s moral understanding, and not by simply discarding every moral injunction that does not concern itself solely with achieving desirable consequences[4].
I can’t assume that cake is nutritionally perfect just because it’s delicious, and I can’t assume that retaliation is morally right just because it’s emotionally satisfying.
I agree, but would contend that emotional satisfaction and moral satisfaction are not the same, although you could probably treat the latter as a subset of the former if you felt the need.
[1] It’s also not apparent why one would want to, except perhaps as a philosophical exercise.
[2] For example, generosity is virtuous, as is sound judgment; consequently, having settled upon a charitable end, one ought to (in general, and perhaps subject to other constraints) seek to give alms and/or do service in such a way as to effectively achieve it.
[3] For example, it is a violation of my neighbor’s rights to needlessly keep them awake at all hours of the night, thereby injuring their health; consequently, it is not okay (outside of some edge cases) for me to blast music late at night, even if the reasons I would have for doing so are perfectly unobjectionable.
[4] For a reasonable definition thereof. You can arguably approximate most forms of virtue ethics as weird varieties of consequentialism just by caring about exactly the right consequences, but that’s sort of missing the point.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
The forces model seems to encompass a phrasing I like to use, which is “People are privileged in so far as they are both willing and able to uphold their culturally assigned roles.” People who can’t uphold their roles lose out; people who can but don’t want to are in a better position, because at least they have some measure of control, but that comes at the cost of their own happiness.
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stillnotking said:
I cannot imagine a culture in which this wouldn’t be true. Even if everyone were assigned the same role, and even if the role were something completely positive and wonderful like “Be kind to everyone at all times,” some of us would be better equipped to do that than others.
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Myca said:
This was one of my ah-HA moments re: sexism, actually. Realizing that:
1) Men who step outside their gender roles get punished
2) Women who step outside their gender roles get punished
3) Men who fulfill their gender roles get rewarded (with lots of caveats, living inside a proscribed role is punishment all on its own, etc.)
4) But Women who fulfill their gender roles get punished, just differently.
Fucking lightbulb moment.
I keep thinking that this is part of what George R. R. Martin was aiming for with Arya and Sansa – an illustration of how women are fucked whether they conform or not.
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Maxim Kovalev said:
@Myca
You may do some utility calculations to prover that 4 is worse that 3 (although that’d re
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Maxim Kovalev said:
@Myca
You may do some utility calculations to prover that 4 is worse that 3 (although that’d require to prove that gender-conforming women live much worse that gender-conforming men to compensate QALY-wise for the gender gap in lifespan), but on conceptual level, there are both punishments and rewards for conforming to the either of gender roles.
Conforming to the masculine gender role generally exposes one to high-risk, high-violence, high-stress, high-expectation environments. In societies with compulsory military service (like Russia, or since you mentioned it, Westeros, where a man has to be paraplegic to not become a warrior) a man either goes to army, which is a huge risk to his life and health, both physical and mental, or is a pussy (further punishments may apply too, like avoiding the draft with no good reason being a felony, and exploiting loopholes having negative externalities). Of course, American selective service, which works in theory, isn’t remotely as much of a problem, but if we’re not limiting ourselves to America-centric perspective, it’s worth noting that in some highly patriarchal societies conforming to the masculine gender role exposes a man to dedovshchina, which is one hell of a punishment. I have some more points on why I thing Russia is a huge counterexample to the predictions of privilege/oppression model, but let’s go back to the America-centric perspective, since it’s the American society that most people here care about. Highly sexist and masculinity-conforming environments like fraternities, sports, military, police, blue-collar jobs especially in generally conservative areas, etc. expose men to the idea that every psychological problem is solved by “manning up” and suppressing it, which probably could partially account for vastly higher suicide rates among men than women (also aligns with the idea that in th even more patriarchal Russian society suicide rate gender gap is even larger). Apparently it also exposes men to the idea that it’s unmanly to consult a doctor about physical problems – otherwise we probably wouldn’t have seen PSAs specifically against this belief. Poor masculine men are more likely to end up in gangs than poor not-so-masculine men, and while failure to be masculine is likely to result in bullying, being in a gang is likely to result in being involved in inter-gang, intra-gang, and gang-police violent conflicts. Middle class men are expected to be pursuing career success, usually defined as being in a managerial position, which is a huge source of stress (and as I mentioned, the expected strategy of dealing with stress is manning up).
At the same time, of course, it results in lots of benefits like making more money, having easier time achieving professional respect, being subjected to a lower risk of rape than women, being subjected a lower risk of hate-driven assault or bullying than gender non-conforming men, having better treatment in markets where it’s hard to enforce non-discriminatory practices, like automotive and housing.
Likewise, women conforming to femininity are punished for that in lots of difference ways. They are probably gonna have less financial security (whether it’s a result of direct discrimination in salaries or the result of having maternity leave, doesn’t matter for the end result – having harder time supporting themselves and their families), higher risk of rape, absorbing a lot of unrealistic body image expectations, and having body image problems as the result, having no choice but to assume submissive position in a family, being expected to undergo potentially unpleasant beauty procedures (like hair removal) and make potentially uncomfortable attire choices (like high heels; and then having some radfems yell at them for these choices)…
But then it results in rewards too, for example: being able to vent about negative emotions and otherwise signal weakness without running into gender policing, being able to self-actualize entirely through family, not be considered a failure because of that, and having a large pool of potential partners who are willing to support such decision, having better dating prospects than gender non-conforming women, and arguably until mid-20s better dating prospects than masculinity-conforming men.
So both genders, gender-conformity has both positive and negative effects. This is a qualitative statement, not quantitative, and a case could be made, using some metric (QALY seems like a good start, but it may not encompass all aspects), that one is objectively worse, but it definitely doesn’t seem to be the case that men are only rewarded, and women are only punished for conforming to prescribed gender roles.
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Distribution said:
Maxim’s reply is spot on. Some people think that gender advantages/disadvantages mostly favor men over women, but this view is based on confirmation bias, ignorance of what men actually face, and exclusionary standards about what kinds of suffering count.
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osberend said:
[cw: discussion of suicide methods]
@Maxim: I broadly agree with most of what you are saying. However, it is worth noting that, at least in the U.S., far more women than men attempt suicide; it’s just that men are better at it. Specifically, men tend to shoot or hang themselves; women tend to take an overdose of whatever pills are on hand (including acetaminophan/paracetmol/Tylenol, which, seriously, people, please stop doing this, it’s not very effective (and it’s extremely slow when it is), but it’s horribly painful, and can cause permanent liver damage up to and including a need for an emergency liver transplant) or to cut their wrists. The former are much more likely to actually be fatal than the latter.
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Ginkgo said:
‘“People are privileged in so far as they are both willing and able to uphold their culturally assigned roles.””
Jacob, the counter-examples to that just come swarming in. White supremacy does not privilege subservient, compliant black people even if it does oppress non-complaint black people even more.
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InferentialDistance said:
It sounds like the problem is poor calibration of magnitudes. The cis man in the example is underestimating the degree of alienation, and the degree of emotional pain resulting from it. You’ll always have this kind of problem on the margins, but I think a forces model with an eye on calibrating magnitudes well is a significant improvement over the privilege model. Mostly because the privelege model seems preoccupied with dividing people into groups (marginalized vs. oppressed), and that doesn’t end well; the forces model talks more about abstract concepts (aggregate behavior of society as a force) acting on individuals, which seems much less likely to activate counterproductive tribal instincts.
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davidmikesimon said:
I always thought that the privilege model was (at least originally) about describing hidden social structures, rather than people. For example, middle-class people have an easier time finding a job than poor people; this is an example of privilege not just because it’s an instance of oppression, but because many middle-class people benefit from it without even knowing about it.
But now that I think about it, this definition doesn’t quite resolve: people who learn about a privilege are still generally considered to have that privilege, if only because third party gatekeepers (e.g. employers) are still blind to it.
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megaemolga said:
From what I understand the original model was that certain people receive unearned/undeserved special treatment and benefits due to their group membership. Now this concept is already flawed since it both validates and invalidates a meritocracy at the same time. For example why should people be limited to having only what they “earned”. Christmas gifts aren’t “earned” but no one accuses people of Christmas gift privilege.
But online social justice came along and took an already flawed concept and decided to make it even worse. The way online social justice activists use it. It’s become a way to dismiss or shut people up if you don’t have strong argument against them. Or to dismiss someones suffering if they have less privilege than you.
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osberend said:
Also, it’s been flawed from the start in that a large part of what is commonly described as privilege (as in, well over half of the items listed in Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack) is not underserved privileges; it’s deserved rights, that wrongfully not accorded to everyone.
Incidentally, I am currently in trouble in an SJW-infested group that I volunteer with (because its theoretical goal is commendable, and some of the work it does actually serves that goal), possibly in the process of being kicked out, for arguing that point. Apparently some people get really touchy (I’m pretty sure the word “triggered” is going to be used in the upcoming meeting, but I’m also pretty sure it’ll be bullshit) when you point out that, yes, in some areas, the white (or male) experience is the natural human default.
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nancylebovitz said:
I’ve wondered why the privilege model doesn’t distinguish between good things that everyone should have and good things that no one should have.
From one angle it makes sense if you’re trying to explain to privileged people how much worse life is when you don’t have privilege, and that this is common.
On the other hand, conflating what everyone should have and what no one should have to endure seems to lead to a considerable amount of ineffectiveness in the real world.
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osberend said:
@nancylebovitz: I wonder if this is actually a manifestation of anti-weirdism: It seems to be (to a large extent) a reaction against the idea that the white/male/straight/whatever experience is (in any way) the natural or default experience, which others have unfortunately been denied. This might in turn be explained by a compulsion not to feel like one has had an abnormal experience, since that’s dangerously close to being abnormal.
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Nita said:
@ osberend
Really? I mean, they might think you’re wrong or even evil, but you seem to think they’re subhuman. Uh, and the usual solution to infestation is extermination
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osberend said:
[cw: dehumanization, bitter ranting]
@Nita: I mean, they might think you’re wrong or even evil, but you seem to think they’re subhuman.
*shrug* Sometimes I feel like they are, by their own choice. Not all the SJ supporters, mind you, just the worst of them. They’ve turned their backs on reasoned analysis in favor of dogma and censorship (hardly unique to SJ, of course; I’m just considering the particular variety in front of me). So if the defining characteristic of a human being is the ability to reason, and they’ve rejected that, doesn’t that make them at least a little subhuman?
But mostly, it’s just bitterness and rhetoric, the same as calling sexist men “pigs.” I don’t think you have a grasp of how immensely frustrating it is to be anti-SJ while caring deeply about—and wanting to do something about—various concrete problems that SJ has come to dominate the movements against. There are no options, at least as far as I can tell, for opposing sexual assault in my community that don’t require, at least to some extent, shutting up and pretending to believe that “not being followed in stores” is “white privilege.” (Not to mention having a volunteer training session on empathy skills that included the godsdamned RSA Shorts video. The profession staff that I talked to were at least reasonably understanding about that, so maybe that’s going to change.) I’ve been told before to keep my mouth shut when people say blatantly ridiculous things like that under state law, any quantity of alcohol whatesoever is sufficient to invalidate consent, because my arguing against idiocies like that was “triggering” people.
Can you imagine what that’s like? And now I’m going to, at a minimum, be told to shut my mouth some more. Quite likely, I’ll get asked to leave the group entirely, because all the accomodations I’ve made, and all of my biting of my tongue, because I believe in a sufficient part of the work we’re doing, isn’t enough. I think my bitterness is pretty understandable.
Uh, and the usual solution to infestation is extermination
Or to give up the house as a lost cause and move somewhere else.
(Also, pigs are overwhelming slaughtered for meat.)
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Nita said:
@ osberend
That sounds extremely human, and very unlike any vermin I’ve ever heard of.
Pigs are delicious, and also pretty smart! Some people like pigs. No one likes vermin — even the people who like mice or rats don’t think of them as “vermin”.
I’ll be back with more substantial stuff later.
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nancylebovitz said:
So far as “infested” is concerned, Social Justice has caused me to take metaphors very seriously– I don’t feel like I’m a native speaker of English any more. I remember what it was like for me before Social Justice, when I could say “I could just kill them” and not only know I didn’t intend murder, but I could trust other people to know I didn’t intend murder.
A light-weight use of “infested” would normally indicate anger, but that’s not the same thing as being close to mass murder.
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Matthew said:
I think this argument could have been pre-empted if Osberend had chosen to say “SJW meme-infested” instead of “SJW infested”. Presumably he actually would like to see the memes rooted out, not the people exterminated.
Also, what Nancy said.
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Nita said:
@ osberend
Eh, actually, that doesn’t sound shockingly implausible? Like, other things being equal, a Roma person is more likely to be treated with suspicion than a white person around here, so I don’t see why the same couldn’t be true of being black or Hispanic in the US.
That does sound terrible. I don’t think that video can improve anyone’s empathy skills.
Not entirely, I’m afraid. I’ve never found “bleeding heart” radicals particularly infuriating, and the social justice worldview is at least somewhat responsive to evidence, so I like SJWs better than Catholics or redpillers.
Also, whenever a feminist says something stupid or cruel, I have no problem rolling my eyes and judging them without considering myself any less of a feminist. It’s probably related to being a woman, but also to this:
I definitely use “feminist” and “pro-SJ” as descriptions of my own beliefs, unrelated to anything anyone else does (philosophers have a lot of terms of this sort: “utilitarianism”, “free will compatibilism”, “phenomenal conservatism” etc.). But your describing yourself as “anti-SJ” makes me think that you use them as army-membership terms. Is that right?
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Nita said:
WordPress ate my attribution link for the last quote! It was this: http://funereal-disease.tumblr.com/post/114150246020/on-isms-as-tools-rather-than-identities
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osberend said:
@Matthew: I think this argument could have been pre-empted if Osberend had chosen to say “SJW meme-infested” instead of “SJW infested”. Presumably he actually would like to see the memes rooted out, not the people exterminated.
That seems like a reasonable description, yeah.
Alternatively: I would be quite happy to see the people themselves[1] “rooted out,” not in the sense of being exterminated, but in the sense of being removed from the organization before they can do more damage.
I recognize that they probably feel the same way about me.
[1] In the sense of the worst examples, not of everyone who’s SJ-aligned at all, as the latter would probably mean the reduction of the organization to being too small to function effectively.
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osberend said:
@Nita: Eh, actually, that doesn’t sound shockingly implausible? Like, other things being equal, a Roma person is more likely to be treated with suspicion than a white person around here, so I don’t see why the same couldn’t be true of being black or Hispanic in the US.
Sure, but that’s not the issue under debate. I agree that white people are less likely to be followed in stores because of their race. But I contend that understanding that as “privilege” rather than “lack of oppression[1]” is a bad conceptualization for three reasons:
1. It is, at a fundamental level (and given both the etymology and the modern vernacular meaning of the word “privilege”), wrong.
2. It leads to really stupid conclusions about what actions are morally obligatory, permissible, or forbidden.
3. It alienates a hell of a lot of white people unnecessarily, which is counterproductive.[2]
That does sound terrible.
Thanks for the sympathy. I appreciate it.
I don’t think that video can improve anyone’s empathy skills.
Agreed.
Not entirely, I’m afraid. I’ve never found “bleeding heart” radicals particularly infuriating, and the social justice worldview is at least somewhat responsive to evidence, so I like SJWs better than Catholics or redpillers.
I’m not sure that bleeding heart-ism is exactly the problem, although that might depend on what you mean by that. I like SJWs better than redpillers, but that’s hardly saying much. I’m not sure that I have a blanket preference between SJWs and Catholics. I think the best of the Catholics might be better than the best of the SJWs (in the sense of “more worth talking to), but I’m not sure, and that’s a small subgroup in any event.
Also, whenever a feminist says something stupid or cruel, I have no problem rolling my eyes and judging them without considering myself any less of a feminist.
I used to do that with “feminist,” because I fully accepted the motte definition as “what the word means.” These days I’m ambivalent, and have basically given up identifying as “feminist” or “non-feminist.” With SJ, on the other hand, I have no such ambivalence.
I definitely use “feminist” and “pro-SJ” as descriptions of my own beliefs, unrelated to anything anyone else does (philosophers have a lot of terms of this sort: “utilitarianism”, “free will compatibilism”, “phenomenal conservatism” etc.). But your describing yourself as “anti-SJ” makes me think that you use them as army-membership terms. Is that right?
Partly, I think? I read that link, but it’s extremely late at night here, and so I may be missing some subtleties. I’m planning to be on the computer little if at all Sunday, and not recreationally on the computer on Monday prior to the evening, so I’m trying to not leave major thoughts dangling.
The way I see SJ, it’s both a concrete movement and a set of beliefs. I have no love at all for the movement, although there are some people in it who I think are all right, including a good friend of mine. As for the beliefs, they’re not so much a motte-and-bailey as a deep matryoshka doll. At some point, I’m meaning to post my thoughts on the various definitions of SJ on my blog[3], and will try to remember to let you know when I do.
But for now, let’s just say that the absolute minimum that someone could conceivably mean by “I support social justice” is “I care about (individual) justice and want to see injustices rectified, including injustices that that result from an individual’s broad demographic characteristics.” In that truly minimal sense, which as far as I can tell is narrower than what absolutely anyone who actually declares themselves in support of “social justice” (at least on the internet) actually means by it, I support social justice.
But in every broader sense of the term that I can envision, I oppose it as a principle. That doesn’t mean, of course, that I disagree with every concrete position that that principle implies, or even that I can’t be co-belligerent with (some) SJ folk about some issues. But—and I want to stress that this is not a Godwin about how bad SJ is, but merely the invocation of the paradigmatic modern example of co-belligerence without alliance—that doesn’t stop me from considering myself anti-SJ, in the same way that a Finnish soldier fighting alongside German troops in the Continuation War could still be anti-Nazi.
Also, if you have a specific definition of SJ that you’re interested in my attitude regarding, I’ll be happy to oblige.
[1] I have some ambivalence about the term “oppression” in a lot of cases, but let’s leave it alone for now.
[2] Given my moral views, I wouldn’t necessarily see this as reason enough not to use it if I thought it were right. But it’s a damn good additional reason not to use it given that it’s wrong anyway.
[3] Which currently contains only poorly-adhered-to New Year’s resolutions and an abandoned attempt to track adherence to them. I should work on that, in both senses.
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Lizardbreath said:
@osberend and nancylebovitz:
On the “Problem with ‘Creep'” thread I wrote: “When you’ve been given to understand that the “only reason you even mind” is that “there’s something wrong with you” or “you’re weak”…then seeing a more favored child complain hugely over something far milder…teaches you like nothing else can that your hurt is real. That it’s *not* your fault for minding. That what’s happening to you really *is* bad.”
And ISTM this is one thing that underlies the “privileges vs. rights” issue. That is: If you’re used to being denied something, you usually don’t perceive it as your right. If all of your life experiences have taught you never to expect it, it often doesn’t feel like–it often doesn’t even occur to you that it is–a right you’re being denied. Then when you see others receiving it, it can feel instead like a privilege they and only they are granted.
You may notice the injustice long, long before you notice (or decide) that it’s a right that should be available to everyone, rather than a privilege that should be granted to no one.
So. The “privilege” rhetoric is I think both the result of this confusion (people objecting to “unfair privileges” they are not used to thinking of as rights) and also an attempt at communicating it (“it may really be a right, but *relatively speaking* it’s a privilege” is IMO an attempt to communicate the feeling of that confusion, of being used to thinking you don’t have a right to something while at the same time having begun focusing on the injustice that you *still don’t* have access to that right while others do).
I think these days that second meaning is often lost.
OTOH, we still have the practical communication problem.
What should someone say, when they know there’s an injustice but they aren’t yet sure if it’s a right they’re being denied or a privilege others shouldn’t have?
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osberend said:
@Lizardbreath: I’m sure the dynamic you describe is real, although it’s somewhat foreign to me—my experience of people treating me like crap is of pain and sadness, but also of rage and hate at not being treated the way I had a right to be treated. I’m not sure how much of that is neural wiring and how much is parenting. In any event, thanks for bringing it up.
But while that might explain why some people cling to the “privilege” formulation, it doesn’t explain how it arose to begin with, or even why people who’ve read its foundational documents don’t realize that it’s crap. Because the core document here (although it makes reference to earlier discussions of male privilege) is, as far as I can tell, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, which is about race, and was written by a white woman.[1] And that text specifically acknowledges the viewpoint that this about oppression, not privilege, and rejects it (without, of course, any logical defense of that rejection):
Weirdly, she fumbles at the flaws in this formulation later in the same essay, but then brushes past them and continues to use it.
What should someone say, when they know there’s an injustice but they aren’t yet sure if it’s a right they’re being denied or a privilege others shouldn’t have?
I apologize if this comes off as hostile or dismissive (which is not my intent), because I appreciate your engagement with me (on this and in general) and I think you’ve said a lot of valuable and insightful things. But I can’t think of another way to express my views on this:
“Knowing” there’s an injustice, without perceiving a denial of rights, is literally childish[2]. The paradigmatic example is “Mommy, they got a cookie! Why do they get a cookie!?”
If everyone is receiving at least what they deserve, if no one’s rights are being violated, then there isn’t an injustice, by definition, unless the person receiving more is actively wicked, and their receiving more (or even equal) is therefore a failure of just punishment. The meaning of justice is that everyone is receiving what they deserve, for good and for ill. If some people are receiving more good than they deserve, and this isn’t prevented them from receiving a deserved ill, then that’s just a bonus.
But a lot of SJ people don’t see it that way, because they’re obsessed with positional goods. For them, it’s “worsening oppression” if things get significantly better for those who are already well-off, but stay the same or improve only slightly for others. This is not an exaggeration—I’ve been to talks where speakers expressed concern about the ethics of research into new, expensive medical technologies. Their stated concern was that these technologies are likely to “worsen health disparities,” because only the wealthy will be able to afford them, even though this leaves the poor and middle class no worse off than they would be otherwise. And, to be perfectly clear, they were not stating that this is bad because the research dollars that would be used to develop those technologies could better be used to develop technologies that would benefit everyone; they were stating that “worsening health disparities” is bad as such.
And this is why I get so bothered by this. Because I think that a lot of the people who most vigorously defend the idea that it’s “white privilege” not to be followed around in a store while talking about the need to “end white privilege,” really would prefer a world in which everyone is needlessly harassed by store clerks, if forced to choose between that world and this one. And I find that completely appalling.
[1] Similarly, the usually cited equivalent, regarding male privilege, is by Ampersand, who is a man.
[2] And maybe childish is the best that some people can manage, as a result of having had experiences that have stunted their growth in this regard. But even an actual child should be able to understand “What’s unfair is not that they have it; what’s unfair is that you don’t,” once it’s explained to them. (Not to mention that most SJ activists are actually from sufficiently “privileged” backgrounds that this seems like an unlikely explanation for most of them.)
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megaemolga said:
“And this is why I get so bothered by this. Because I think that a lot of the people who most vigorously defend the idea that it’s “white privilege” not to be followed around in a store while talking about the need to “end white privilege,” really would prefer a world in which everyone is needlessly harassed by store clerks, if forced to choose between that world and this one.”
This is why I don’t like people who flippantly use the word privilege. Their world view is usually based on a crab bucket mentality. They would rather live in a world were everyones lives suck than be in a world were someone had it better than they did.
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ninecarpals said:
Sure is a shame when rich trans people talk about transphobia as though it’s the same as what poor trans people go through, huh?
If you keep slicing up who can talk about transphobia in what way (and I know plenty of AFAB trans folks who have it real bad – comes from making friends with San Francisco street kids), you’re going to end up with a hyperpolarized movement like-
Oh.
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multiheaded said:
100% my thoughts exactly.
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multiheaded said:
(p.s. there *are* at least some other commenters here who are queer and not Western, right?)
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ninecarpals said:
multiheaded, do you mean ‘Western’ as in ‘Western cultures’, or ‘Western’ as in ‘from the West Coast’? I’m originally from the Midwest (a ‘shy WIsconsin boy’, to paraphrase one of my former professors), so if you’re going with the second version then I might count, even though I now live in the Bay.
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multiheaded said:
As in “Western cultures”… but your comment, through no fault of your own, is a helpful illustration of Americentrism in SJ-ish spaces!
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ninecarpals said:
I asked about the West Coast specifically because I had mentioned San Francisco in a prior comment, so I thought it was a possibility that your Western question was referring to that. 🙂
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Ann Onora Mynuz said:
Where is the line drawn for “Western Cultures”?
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Toggle said:
One of the things that the privilege hierarchy does is to force localization of the SJ memespace, I think. There are plenty of places where ‘white’ is affirmatively not the culturally or politically dominant race, for example, and the existing social justice culture has extremely well-developed mechanisms for eliminating speech that suggests white people are not in a position of privilege. Including Indonesia in the dialogue would require adding a step to the algorithm in which the reader stopped to consider whether white people actually are privileged in the author’s experience, blunting the edge of the whole movement.
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Ginkgo said:
“is a helpful illustration of Americentrism in SJ-ish spaces!”
Ah, but an Americentric view would call Europe “Eastern”! 🙂
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stargirlprincess said:
I am queer but pretty damn western 😦
(from NYC)
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Maxim Kovalev said:
I’m not sure if I’m queer enough (I’ve identified as one, and at best would pass as gender non-conforming, but almost exclusively wearing dresses for two years is probably GNC enough for a man to have some kind of expertise and experience), and not sure if I’m non-Western enough (Russia is neither a part of Anglosphere, nor EU, and is kinda Eastern, but I’m still white (unless you apply 4chan /pol/ standards, which exclude Slavs from whites), and the culture is still mostly Christian, and I’ve only been in Asia twice, and I’ve been living in SF Bay Area for two years), but I guess it’s better than nothing.
I do find it rather funny how American leftists, who take immense pride in America-bashing (so much that in such debates I’m almost always on the side “it’s actually rather fine, and a lot of socialist institutions you dream of have their own modes of failure”), actually often end up being incredibly America-centric and exceptionalist in they ways they don’t even understand they are. Among them, the fact that it’s by no means specific to the US that most of the political and societal discussions in a given country are focused on this country.
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stillnotking said:
Perhaps I’m not reading this correctly, but it seems to me the “forces” model is essentially the oppression model without oppressors. Who is applying these forces to atypical people, and why? Is there room for human nature in the forces model? (For example, the link between maleness and violence, which is surely attributable at least in part to sexual dimorphism.)
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InferentialDistance said:
You can. But one of the strengths of the forces model is that it abstracts away the “oppressor class”, which means that fighting oppression becomes about reducing the frequency of oppressive acts rather than kicking the designated outgroup repeatedly. It’s also more effective introspectively, since it encourages marginalized groups to stop contributing to the force too.
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stillnotking said:
“Hate the forces, love the forcers,” eh? Sounds familiar. 🙂
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osberend said:
It also potentially has the benefit of forcing people to think (haha, as if one could! </bitter cynicism>) about who is actually applying these forces, as opposed to taking a Marxist-derived view in which belonging to the less oppressed group makes you an oppressor by definition, and then saying idiotic things like “true consent is impossible between an oppressed person and her oppressor.” (And yes, I’ve actually seen that said. And no, it wasn’t a troll, unless it was a truly amazingly persistent one.)
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Myca said:
Yeah, I think I’m with InferentialDistance on this – though there can sometimes be a benefit to naming oppressors for what they are, there are so few people who are open, self-proclaimed racists/sexists/whichever that by naming specific oppressors, you end up in an unwinnable “uh-huh/nuh-uh” argument.
I think that generally talking about actions (or forces) instead gets us closer to where we want to be.
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stillnotking said:
Oh, I’m definitely with Inferential, too. There are some practical problems, though. For one thing, people — especially people with activist personalities — need enemies. You can’t be the Rebel Alliance without the Empire. Observe the way conservative Christians somehow keep turning the Sermon on the Mount, possibly the least oppositional speech ever given, into an eschatology of violence. For another, and this is kind of my personal hobbyhorse, it eschews the descriptive in favor of the normative. I don’t think the program can work without an understanding of why these forces keep arising, and taking the oppressor out of the equation eliminates even that as an explanation. (A good thing, of course, if it’s the wrong explanation! But we’re still left with an unsatisfactory void in its place.)
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Myca said:
I think that a lot of the ongoing oppression is due to essentially the post roast problem rather than people consciously and deliberately considering things and choosing oppression.
And the problem with that is that though people are attached to cutting the ends off their pot roast, they take great offense at the suggestion that they intend to or need to take responsibility for cutting the ends off their pot roast.
That is, I think a lot of oppression is inertial. And the people who perpetuate it are often just swept up in the inertia, rather than thinking actors.
And calling those people oppressors while factually correct, may not be as effective as describing their behavior as oppressive.
The same person who can clearly see that that they ought to stop wasting good meat by cutting off the ends of the roast might well have trouble if the implication was “and therefore you’re a jerk, you jerk.”
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InferentialDistance said:
@Myca
Off the top of my head: when there’s mutual trust and respect, so you’ll take care in sending the message and they’ll actually listen to it; when they’re the enemy and torches and pitchforks are exactly what’s called for (though you should be extremely careful when naming people such, and be prepared for them to fight back viciously).
@stillnotking
Fight Azathoth and Moloch! Please! I need the help!
Privilege as an explanatory model (they do X because they have privilege) is fine (and useful, even). Sadly, it’s far more often used as a prescriptive heuristic (we should do X to them because they have privilege), where it is frequently terrible. As long as we can have the former without the latter, I’m happy. Happier, in fact, since explanatory power is useful.
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Myca said:
Also as a way to create solidarity or express sympathy within the in-group. When someone’s being a racist ass to you, it can help for your friends to say, “that dude was fucking racist.”
Also as a simply factual ‘words mean stuff’ thing:
“This guy thinks that women are less intelligent and competent than men.”
“Ahh. That man is sexist.”
One of the things that has bothered me about the whole, “don’t call anyone racist or sexist because it’s a mean insult you big meanie” thing is that it’s a word with a definition. It’s like making up a rule that nobody is allowed to call other people blonde or something.
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Daniel Speyer said:
I suspect if you dig into a lot of these forces, you’ll find cyclic incentive systems with no one at the helm.
Remember Bostrom’s Dictatorless Dystopia? I can’t find the original formulation, so I’ll just quote Scott:
Doesn’t that sound like a pretty good description of gender roles?
We know that lots of men deliberately study how to be more demanding and less considerate — even though it goes against who they want to be — because that’s what women in the dating scene insist on. It seems very likely that many of those women would rather be dating someone kinder and gentler, but then their peers would mock them as losers or as closet lesbians. And maybe some of those peers would rather say “she can date whomever she wants; that’s her business” but then they’d get labelled uptight prudes… I’m guessing on these latter two, but it sounds plausible, doesn’t it?
Similarly, I once read a serious rant about how unwise it was for a minor celebrity to say nice things about a sex worker (things that weren’t even sex-work related!) because there existed a stigma against sex workers and he could get tarred with the same brush. Consider how much damage this idea can do to sex workers without anyone actually objecting to sex work! And it’s self-reinforcing. If anyone begins to suspect there isn’t a stigma, all they have to do is look at how scared celebrities are to say nice things about sex workers.
For a subtler case, imagine a heterosexual couple in the grips of sex-as-exchange haggling over how much emotional bonding to trade for how much sex. As it happens, they both want both things and about the same amounts. But he knows that if he reveals that he doesn’t really hate emotional closeness he’ll be leaving sex on the table, and vice versa. So they continue to act out the stereotype, and learn from each-other’s behaviour that they really do need the sex-as-exchange concept to get one of the things they really want.
So that’s what forces look like. They’re not people. They’re unthinkingly cruel beyond human capability.
Moloch delenda est!
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Nomophilos said:
For what it’s worth I don’t think it’s a good description of gender roles, I tend to like gender roles provided a) they aren’t *too* narrow Saudi-Arabia style, b) both genders are on average about as well off, and c) the system allows enough leeway for people who don’t fit in a role to find their place. So basically, I like “traditionalish gender roles by default, but with no punishment for not following them”.
Of all three, the “tolerance for weirdness” part probably needs the most work.
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stargirlprincess said:
“We know that lots of men deliberately study how to be more demanding and less considerate — even though it goes against who they want to be — because that’s what women in the dating scene insist on. It seems very likely that many of those women would rather be dating someone kinder and gentler, but then their peers would mock them as losers or as closet lesbians.”
Is this even true? Having read through alot of the man-o-sphere stuff I am totally unconvinced that women actually reward this behavior in the dating scene. In fact there seems to be clear counter evidence such as women responding much better to men who are “self effacing” on online surveys.
I am not trying to say women do not help enforce gender roles. They certainly often do as mothers (fathers enforce gender roles in children too). And women in the dating scene do seem to respond better to men who show “benevolent but not opposition-ally sexist attitudes.” And “benevolent sexism” hurts both women and men imo.
But I see no evidence women actually prefer “demanding and inconsiderate” men in dating.
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Landru said:
sgp: “But I see no evidence…”
Hmm; and what would count as “evidence”, for you? When you say “see”, are you talking just about what you yourself have observed first-hand, or second-hand among people you’ve known? or are you making a claim about the wider world at large?
If the latter, then this is particularly confusing:
“Having read through a lot of the man-o-sphere stuff I am totally unconvinced that women actually reward this behavior in the dating scene.”
Well, what would it take to convince you? Super-anecdotally, for example, you can read reams of men’s casual testimony, not ideological or commercial but just remarked in passing, expressing variations on the theme of “Once I started behaving like a selfish jerk I did much better with women.” People of a certain age may recognize the aphorism, “Treat ’em mean to keep ’em keen.” The question is, as always, not what people say they prefer, but what actual behavior tends to result in what actual other behavior.
If you want to work from a basis of observations about the world, then the PUA’s have been very empirical over many people and many years, and their verdict is clear: the best short summary of the (younger, cis-het, middle class plus or minus) dating scene is that “chicks dig jerks”. To use more words more pedantically, the important PUA observation is that (cis-het, etc.) women are extremely prone to mistake kindness for weakness in men, and selfishness for strength. And since weakness is the ultimate sexual turn-off, the man seeking sex, if he doesn’t have any manifest advantages of being rich or handsome and has to get by on his personality, is well advised to err on the side being selfish and inconsiderate.
Now, this description of the world may not seem accurate, or even recognizable, to you. And it’s certainly not the world I would prefer, or believed in when I was young. But ultimately it is an objective and empirical question, and if you want to make big statements about what goes on in the world then you have to reference a correspondingly wide base of experience.
Along those lines, when evaluating things like this
“women responding much better to men who are “self effacing” on online surveys”
one has to be circumspect. For instance, if “responding” here means something like “responded to an inquiry on a dating site”, then that’s not evidence of very much at all in real terms. Generally, I never put much stock in people’s conscious, verbal or written descriptions of who they are or what they like, for men or women, and that includes what boxes they check in response to which words; self-reported surveys are useless, or worse. The only meaningful evidence for what is rewarded, or what works, to achieve a given goal, is to see what action actually led all the way to achieving said goal, whatever that happens to be.
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stargirlprincess said:
@Landau
Actual studies would be good. If you are going to claim “chicks dig jerks” you need actual evidence. All I have seen are the studies showing both men and women with “dark triad” traits have more sexual partners. But the effect holds for both sexes and hardly proves the PUA model.
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InferentialDistance said:
@stargirlprincess
I don’t understand your objection. Are you asserting that:
– people with more “dark triad” traits are not more demanding/less considerate than people with less “dark triad” traits?
– people with more “dark triad” traits are not more successful romantically than people with less “dark triad” traits?
– that “chicks dig jerks” is somehow contradictory with “chicks and dudes dig jerks”?
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ozymandias said:
High-dark-triad people have more sexual partners, but that doesn’t mean high-dark-triad people are more sexually attractive. In particular, the fact that high-dark-triad people are more likely to be interested in casual sex and sex with strangers seems relevant.
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stargirlprincess said:
The obvious explanation would be that people with Dark Triad traits mostly date each other and admittedly have a ton of partners. There is a POV where this means “PUA works.” The normal claim among redpillers is that the redpill i general advice. The evidence for this is quite weak. In order for the redpill to be sold as advice for most (or some say almost all) relationships one needs better than correlation studies on personality.
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Landru said:
sgp: “Actual studies would be good. If you are going to claim “chicks dig jerks” you need actual evidence. “
Perhaps I should make clear — though the beliefs of one vaporous, pseudononymous commenter don’t count for very much — that I’m not claiming that the PUA description of the world is correct. Certainly it doesn’t cover everyone, everywhere, at all times. But I do think they have the best set of evidence collected so far, even if it’s not organized and published scientifically, while I don’t at all share your faith in “studies”. Whenever I’ve gone through the work to track one of those down I’ve nearly always found them so flawed as to be effectively meaningless: based on very small statistics, not controlled for confounding factors, or based in indirect evidence such as self-reporting that is very likely mistaken.
The question of whether partner count is a good or meaningful proxy for attractiveness is well taken; but ultimately I think it’s either trivial or beside the point. On the one hand, if it is your goal to have a lot of partners, or at least the option of having a lot of partners, then whatever behavior works to get you that is, by definition, attractive. The subtler point, though, is that the important PUA question is not Who gets the most partners/propositions/opportunities?, but rather What should/can a typical (cis-hetcetera) man do, from where he is right now, to increase his opportunities with desirable partners?
The answers to the former may inform the latter, or they may not. If it were the case, as doesn’t seem unlikely, the people with the most opportunities are the rich and the handsome, then those qualities are very hard to acquire on short notice. So the PUA’s naturally focus instead on behaviors, which might or might not be do-able but are not constrained by money and bone structure. And within that sphere we should appreciate the subtle but important difference between asking the somewhat philosophical “Which behaviors are most attractive?” versus asking the more operational “Which behaviors will _best_ increase my chances, right now, of having (consensual, enthusiastic) sex with an attractive partner in the very near future?”
And, to that narrower, well-defined question, the PUA’s empirical answer includes many local derivatives, measured at the point where the typical man is typically standing: it is better to err toward being selfish than toward being considerate; better toward egotistical than toward humble; better to give orders than to comply with requests; better toward dominant than toward equalist; and, the perhaps the biggie for this blog, better toward sexist than toward egalitarian. Or, in short, act like more of a jerk.
Remember, it’s not a formula that’s guaranteed to work, always, well, or often; the claim is just that this formula is better than all other formulas that can be stated as short general rules and don’t require looks, money, fame or talent. If you have tell of a better formula for use by the typical cis-het man, based on “studies” or whatever other evidence, then by all means hold forth — there may even be a fortune in it for you! if you play your cards right.
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davidmikesimon said:
Inspired by the “charmed circle” diagram, maybe a possible alternate name/description for the forces model would be: the cluster model.
Social categories are clusters of attributes. According to society, for each cluster a person should either have all of that cluster’s attributes, or none at all. Enforcement (to various degrees) is activated when people have just some of a cluster’s attributes; the farther away from the cluster center you are, the stronger the enforcement.
Example clusters:
1. Male gender attributes: biologically male, male genitalia, male dress, traditional masculine personality and goals
2. Female gender attributes: biologically female, female genitalia, etc.
3. Neuro-standard attributes: certain patterns of public behavior, certain interests, acceptable levels and means of emotional expression, etc.
Note that in some cases (e.g. neuro-standard) there is only one cluster for a given set of scales, while in others there are several (e.g. gender). But either way, the algorithm for activating social enforcement is the same.
And to spell it out, the negative aspects of enforcement are:
(a) sometimes the attributes of a cluster are ethically neutral (e.g. how one dresses, how one has consensual sex) and therefore there’s no benefit to enforcing them; however most means of enforcement have implicit negative side effects (e.g. stress, social denial), so there’s a net utility loss
(b) sometimes the attributes are ethically positive (e.g. ambition, wearing practical clothing when desired), but people are unable to attain or display those attributes because they happen not to display some of the other attributes in the same cluster
(c) inversely, sometimes the attributes are ethically negative (e.g. unassertiveness, being forced into cliche social scripts), but people are forced to display them because they want to display some of the other attributes in the same cluster
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J said:
I really, really, really like this model! I like it tremendously much and think it’s far better at taking into account weird interactions than privilege theory.
One thing about your cis dude who doesn’t like football being a dick example, I’m pretty sure similar examples do occur, at least implicitly and all the time, in privilege theory.
“oh I totally understand homophobia, I’ve had to call out friends for saying that’s so gay before”
“erm, but my parents kicked me out and I’ve had people literally beat me up for my sexuality”
“well they’re both homophobia, I’m going to continue making arguments about how TV shows are queerbaiting too much and it’s super offensive to help both of our positions!”
or
“I totally know what it’s like to deal with racism, I’ve had about a dozen people ask me where I’m really from”
“sure, but the police haven’t beat you up and you haven’t dealt with people threatening to lynch you”
“But they’re both racism, I’m going to continue making clever buzzfeed videos and solve both of our problems”
To be clear, There is nothing wrong and possibly something beneficial with doing anti-queerbaiting or clever buzzfeed videos, but it’s super hubristic to assume you are fighting deeply entrenched and currently deadly homophobia or racism by doing so. I have not seen the “our problems are equal thing” explicitly, but I’ve totally seen the “the reason my buzzfeed videos are important is that they will end racism/homophobia/sexism so this is literally about saving lives, don’t bother me with your privileged problems”.
(This is one of my biggest gripes with bad social justice, I can sort of understand how you might come to the belief under a very strong belief in oppression models, but it seems ridiculous to me that arguing against shirtgate was a very important fight against violence against women (as was argued to me) whereas concern about call-out culture is about “white feels”)
(Jessica Valenti for example here http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/28/pc-culture-freedom-of-speech-freedom-to-be-offended?CMP=share_btn_tw )
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stillnotking said:
Yes, the cis dude who doesn’t like football is being a dick, but the flip side is that the privilege model creates opportunities for self-appointed gatekeepers to be dicks (e.g. mocking rich white dudes who attempt suicide). I think the latter form of dickishness is actually a lot worse, in general. There is nothing more dangerous than a moralistic excuse to be cruel.
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osberend said:
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Myca said:
This gets into something that’s really near and dear to my heart, and which I’ve found deeply upsetting in recent years – the (wrong wrong wrong wrong fucking horribly wrong and evil) idea that geeks and feminists are natural enemies.
Don’t get me wrong, being a geek didn’t “make” me a feminist, but to the degree that it had an influence, it was almost entirely a pro-feminist influence, and it was because of what Ozy outlines here: I realized that life was hard for me, as a weird guy – and that as a straight, white, middle-class weird guy, I had so many goddamn advantages that other people didn’t have. If my life was hard, how much harder must it be for others?
I think that first step, that empathy, is crucial. More than pro-feminist, or pro-sexual freedom, or pro-whatever, I’m pro-empathy.
I think that my experience as a geek is not atypical. Ampersand is a geek – he may be more of a geek than me, actually (which is goddamn impressive). Half the commenters over at Alas are role-players or genre authors, or something. I randomly ended up in a Call of Cthulhu game with one of our commenters, and we didn’t realize we knew each other for several months. Geeks are feminists. Feminists are geeks. There is not, and does not need to be, a conflict.
Ozy’s right, also, that:
Sure, but I think you have to separate people who have that conversation disingenuously from people who are sort of cluelessly groping for empathy and thinking they grabbed a handful of understanding.
The first sort are assholes and can be dismissed. I’m not sure there’s all that much that can be done about them, either … I mean, assholes gonna ass, right?
The second group could use some education, but they’re on the right track. Your pain is not my pain is not her pain is not their pain, but the fact that we have all been badly-treated based on who we are is something real and something to build on.
—Myca
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Nita said:
Thank you.
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MCA said:
Maybe it’s just because of the science-centered way my mind thinks, but I think the solution to the problem is in the name: forces. Forces, as vector quantities, have not only direction but magnitude. Something that’s always annoyed me about the privilege model is that it is largely categorical (if not fully in theory then largely in practice), while the very name of this concept makes me conceptualize it as quantitative variation – the anti-weird force affecting me is greater than someone who’s only oddity is liking art films, but less than someone who is quite far on the Aspergers/autism spectrum.
It even automatically implies context dependency – just like how the force of gravity is more important the fluid forces when I’m walking around, but the importance is reversed when I go swimming, my particular Weirdness has forces against it in the normal world, but actually seems to function as an advantage in academia.
Hell, you could even draw more analogies. It’s easy under the privilege model to think “oh, this oppression is cancelled out by this privilege” (even if this is incorrect) in the sort of bean-counting that leads to Oppression Olympics. But if we keep up with the Forces analogy, adding two orthogonal forces, regardless of direction or magnitude, will only ever produce a new force of non-zero length.
OK, who wants to calculate the eigenvectors of Western Society?
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Lambert said:
Scott Aaronson gave it a go.
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1820
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Ghatanathoah said:
>>>And a lot of nonfeminists or antifeminists tend to think “well, that’s saying bad things about men, so it is Feminism Gone Too Far.” It is neither of those things! It is Feminism Gone Not Far Enough And In Fact Using Anti-Suffragette Rhetoric What The Fuck Is Wrong With You People.
It seems to me that feminism has done a decent job fighting Hostile Sexism, but Benevolent Sexism kicked its butt. Not only is Benevolent Sexism still around, a large amount of feminist discourse reeks of internalized Benevolent Sexism. For example:
-Benevolent Sexism tends to treat violence against women as more serious than violence against men (“You wouldn’t hit a lady, would you?”). There is definitely a tendency in some parts of feminism to not take male survivors of domestic abuse and rape as seriously as female ones, even if you control for the lower total amount of male survivors. Many feminists also get upset when violence against women is portrayed in fiction and accuse people who do it of being misogynistic.
-Benevolent Sexism treats sex and sexuality as inherently degrading to women. A very large portion of feminism believes this as well. It has permeated our culture to such an extent that someone can say a work of fiction is “sexist” because it contains sexualized women without everyone looking at them in confusion. And then there are SWERFs…..
-Benevolent Sexism treats women as being purer, sweeter, and kinder than men. Many feminists consider cooperation to be a “woman’s way” of solving problems, that is opposed to the masculine way of conflict.
-Benevolent Sexism treats women as more emotional and less scientifically minded than men. Some feminists have said that there are special “womens’ ways of knowing,” which are generally more emotional and less rigorous than science and reason.
-Benevolent Sexism treats women as so fragile that they cannot be exposed to rude language or serious criticism. Some feminists claim that people who expose women to rude language or serious criticism are “silencing” them.
To bring things back around to the main topic of this post, I think that feminism is one of the forces that keeps benevolent sexism around. There seems to be a large amount of people who claim to be feminists, but are actually espousing Benevolent Sexism that has been dressed up to look like feminism. So it’s not enough to say we need more feminism. It’s also necessary to expose all of these disguised benevolent sexists.
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Patrick said:
Not entirely disagreeing, but as a sort of point of order- a lot of feminists don’t necessarily think that women need protected, so much as they relate to feminism on a sort of anti-colonialism/cultural appropriation level. So violence against women in movies gets trashed not because they think it’s worse than violence against men, but because it’s “you guys [non feminist culture]” talking about “our [women’s] thing” in a way they don’t like.
A number of other issues you mentioned sometimes are treated in related ways. Male raise victims? Not “their” issue. Sexual violence against women in fiction? “You” talking about “their” thing. Sexual representations in media? “You” portraying “them” sexually without “their” permission.
Looking for cultural appropriation buzzwords is usually a good way to get a handle on where the person you’re talking to is coming from.
Understanding this dynamic is CRUCIAL to understanding TERFs, but non TERFS don’t want to understand them so lol whatev, I guess.
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Ghatanathoah said:
>>>Understanding this dynamic is CRUCIAL to understanding TERFs, but non TERFS don’t want to understand them so lol whatev, I guess.
Now that I think about it, I did get this vibe from some TERF stuff I read. It made me hate them even more. They combine two things I hate, people who are cruel to transpeople, and people who claim ownership over public domain things. My typical response is to say that people the reason people act like they’re entitled to X (where X could be a gender, or using another culture’s products) is because they are entitled to X, since X is in the public domain.
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osberend said:
@Ghatanathoah: My typical response is to say that people the reason people act like they’re entitled to X (where X could be a gender, or using another culture’s products) is because they are entitled to X, since X is in the public domain.
A-fucking-men!
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Maxim Kovalev said:
I remember reading an article several years ago about a fight between supporters and opposers of same-sex marriage in France. If I recall correctly, some, if not most, of the supporters who were hit were women, and they were hit by men from the opposing protest. And some public official, a woman if I recall correctly, reacted to that by saying something along the lines of: “They violated one of the fundamental principles of our society – a man does not hit a woman.”
I really cannot find it, so I may as well be misremembering something, and without the name I cannot look up whether this official identified as feminist of left-wing (could be the case that she opposed same-sex marriage, but was feeling that this case went too far), but I remember being struck by this irony.
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Sniffnoy said:
I think it’s worth pointing out here that some of these “feminist” ideas you list are, as I understand it, fringe positions — in particular, the idea about cooperation being a women’s way of solving problems, as well as the bit about “women’s ways of knowing”. Those sound like cultural feminism or something (someone who knows more about feminism please correct me if I am wrong); not exactly an influential group these days. (Honestly it doesn’t really seem like feminism at all, but, I mean, history, right?)
On the other hand, the other three you list seem pretty widespread to me.
Now, there’s a number of obvious potential explanations for this (e.g. infiltration by pseudofeminists), but if we want a charitable explanation, then I’d say that the feminist movement is reinforcing benevolent sexism inadvertently, because they haven’t put enough effort into making their message clear and unambiguous, and haven’t seriously taken the time to understand/observe how their message will come across to someone who’s already internalized benevolent-sexist ideas (namely, that it will often reinforce them rather than tear them down). Regardless of the explanation, though, it’s a problem.
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Nomophilos said:
My first reaction to the term “benevolent sexism” is that it’s not necessarily a bad thing, or rather that it can be used to describe any way of treating men and women differently whether it’s actually harmful or not.
Looking at the actual examples tho, most of them do seem somewhat harmful.
But I’m mostly okay with “violence against women is more serious than violence against men”, and my objection to “but it’s sexist!” would be “maybe, but is it bad?”
And for things like “Benevolent Sexism treats women as being purer, sweeter, and kinder than men” – I don’t know about those specific traits, but there are (statistical) differences between men and women’s minds, and I don’t like the idea of empirical facts being labelled “sexist”.
To bring this back to feminism, a more charitable view is that of all the things that could be called “sexist”, feminism has attacked (and defeated?) those that suck the most, and has internalized some of those that aren’t really harmful. I don’t know enough about feminism or all the subtleties of gender relations to tell whether that’s actually the case tho.
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Ghatanathoah said:
>I don’t know about those specific traits, but there are (statistical) differences between men and women’s minds
It is true that women often rank statistically high higher on traits like agreeableness than men. What makes this view sexist is a bunch of other things bundled with it. Benevolent sexism holds these statistical differences as normative, men should not try be more agreeable no matter how badly they want to, and women should not try to be less agreeable, even if they’re sick of being the agreeable one all the time. It also holds that men need to protect women to keep them pure, even if the women would rather be strong on her own than be protected. It’s rather similar to the way many people treat children.
>a more charitable view is that of all the things that could be called “sexist”, feminism has attacked (and defeated?) those that suck the most
A super-duper uncharitable view is that feminists attacked hostile sexism, but decided to keep benevolent sexism because they could use it to make men do stuff for them. I do not hold this view. It seems to describe the views of many of the more unpleasant MRAs, however.
I think the most likely explanation is that benevolent sexism looks similar to genuine niceness at face value, so many people have trouble telling the difference between the two. I seem to remember reading a study that found that not only was this true; it also seemed to show that people interpreted men who lacked benevolent sexism (and treated women and men the same) as being hostile sexists. I can’t find it at the moment, however.
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Ginkgo said:
“It is neither of those things! It is Feminism Gone Not Far Enough And In Fact Using Anti-Suffragette Rhetoric What The Fuck Is Wrong With You People.”
Yes, yes, yes!
In fact, I wonder if you would call the feminists who engage in this patriarchal type of thinking anti-feminist?
“gay men are more likely than any other sexual orientation subgroup to experience hate crimes.”
Are you sure about this, Ozy? We gay men get bashed a lot, but nothing like the incidence of trans women getting murdered.
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ozymandias said:
Transness isn’t a sexual orientation, and the FBI’s hate crime statistics are bizarre for transness anyway (only 33 gender-identity-based hate crimes? really?).
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Ginkgo said:
“Transness isn’t a sexual orientation,”
You did restrict to sexual orientation specifically. I was seeing both as sexual minorities and lumping them together.
“and the FBI’s hate crime statistics are bizarre for transness anyway (only 33 gender-identity-based hate crimes? really?).”
Don’t even get me started. Those stats are all based on reporting from local jurisdictions so there is no control for accuracy or completeness, or standardization really. It’s the same problem as with male IPV victims. The overwhelming majority of incidents don’t get tallied as IPV. Mary Winkler shooting her sleeping husband in the back with a shotgun didn’t get counted as DV. A trans woman typically will not even get tallied as a female victim.
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Toggle said:
It is also worth pointing out that rates of self-harm and certain disorders are more common among bisexuals than among gay men or lesbians. Those of us in the gay male bracket suffer some disproportionate risks, but not uniformly so.
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stargirlprincess said:
This was a really great post. Lesswrong seems to suggest its a good idea to loudly signal agreement with really good ideas. So I will do that before I give any criticism. This is just such a cool piece and I really think something similar to this might be able to solve so many problems.
I will however mention the distinction between “traits you can change” and “traits you cannot change” feels very sketchy to me. The best example is weight imo. People in the USA have a very strong incentive to lose weight. People of above average weight are regularly, badly, mistreated (especially if they are women). However for most people it is certainly physically “possible” to lose weight (ex prisoners of war all lose alot of weight). However only a very, very small number of people manage to lose weight long term. This suggests that losing eight is psychologically extraordinarily difficult. And despite clearly being physically possible it actually makes much more sense to round long term weight loss to “impossible” imo. At least if one is in the business of classifying things as possible/impossible.
It is incredibly hard to know how hard it is to “Stop being a furry.” Or how damaging it is for a group to have to publicly repress their deeply felts sense of identity. So I am very sketchy about people saying being a furry or an otherkin or such is in any way a choice. These communities certainly claim that this stuff is deeply important to them. So I basically do think furries and otherkin and tattoo’d people are oppressed (Idk what “obsessive fan” is meant to refer to).
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Daniel Speyer said:
The asshole problem is tricky…
Of course, it could be worse. The non-football-fan could claim his pain is greater and mock the transwoman for her weakness or accuse her of trying to derail a more important conversation. As happened to Scott Aaronson.
One thing *not* to do is hardcode specifics. That’s a major failure mode of the privilege model. Somewhere in the US there’s probably a man being beaten up for being a “sissy who doesn’t get football” and who will need hospitalization. His experience isn’t typical, but this is no consolation to him. A few thousand miles away, there’s probably a transwoman who’s in such a tight trans-friendly bubble that she can almost forget she’s a minority for days as a time. Her experience isn’t typical either, but it’s still what shapes her. We want a solution that’s robust if they ever meet.
I think the problem breaks down into two pieces. There’s the “my pain is commensurate with yours and therefore worthy of the same effort from society to cure” problem and the “my pain is identical to yours and therefore I understand your situation and can give you advice” problem.
The first problem basically reduces to interpersonal utility comparison. The closest thing I know of to a universal metric is life. “I would accept a 25% chance of death for a magical solution to this problem.” “I would only accept a 1% — your pain is greater.” It fails if you have other big problems: “My life sucks no matter what because I’m poor — sure I’ll take a 75% chance of loosing it to not face sexism too: what’s the risk?” But if we specify that this metric only applies to the biggest problem in your life, things become pretty commensurable.
That’s just a metric, though. Unless Omega is holding Vickrey auctions, people are incentivized to lie. A community in which everyone rejected that incentive would probably be better for every single member than one which succumbed to it, so some of our existing community-building techniques might get us there. I’ll admit, that’s pretty handwavy.
Or we could try to convince people that Omega really is holding those auctions. Superstitions are a classic way to fight co-ordination problems.
The second problem reminds me a lot of telling a depressed person “I’ve been sad too, what helps me is…”. Suppose we just establish a rule that if someone tells you that you don’t understand their situation, you believe them. Does anything terrible result?
Sometimes we’ll be wrong: we did understand but were underconfident. As a result… we’ll miss opportunities to make things better. Those opportunities will usually be pretty small: a small impact, or a high replaceability. Occasionally they won’t. It’s possible for an entire community to turn inward and produce a cognitive death-spiral, in which case they need an outside rescue. That’s pretty rare, though. Also, occasionally, the problem itself makes thinking about the problem difficult: such as by limiting access to education.
So if someone tells you that you don’t understand their situation, you believe them unless you have specific evidence that their thinking is impaired. Does that work?
There’s a failure mode where one group uses ideas like this to seize control of all discussion of a dynamic. But the correct response to that is to acknowledge that they understand their lives, but not the other people’s, and someone will have to get the experience across somehow.
What about the original concept of privilege? That people are uniquely *unable* to understand their own lived experiences? As near as I can tell, when it holds, explaining tends to be pretty easy. It’s hard to be certain of that, of course.
Is this going to make it harder to have a single community? If we can’t understand each-other’s lived experiences, that’s a lot like not being able to understand each other, which is a lot like being varelse, which is a lot like a permanent state of war. On the other hand, one-way beliefs of understanding aren’t good for forming a community either. Let’s remember that this is a standard for current understanding, not a declaration of fixed mindset.
I feel like I’m still missing something, but I can’t think what.
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osberend said:
Broadly agreed, but . . .
What about the original concept of privilege? That people are uniquely *unable* to understand their own lived experiences?
Except that that’s not the original concept of privilege; it’s that privileged people are uniquely unable to understand their own lived experiences or anyone else’s. If I get in an argument with a woman about my experiences as a man, then I’m “blinded by male privilege,” but if we’re arguing about her experiences as a woman, then I need to “respect her lived experience” and stop “mansplaining.”
“Privilege” is a superweapon, and always has been.
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Nita said:
I’d like an example? I’m kind of mystified how arguing about someone’s experience works.
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osberend said:
I’ll try to recall some specifics from my life (a good example not from my life is asshole-feminist reactions to Comment 171).
But broadly, I’d say that it’s often not about the objective facts of the experience, but about motivations and the like. As in, a woman will say “when men do X, it’s because Y,” and I’ll say “that can’t be universally true, as I have done X, and my motivation wasn’t Y at all, it was simply Z,” and I’ll be accused of lying, being deluded about my own motivations, and/or “mansplaining.”
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Siggy said:
I wholeheartedly that the privilege model has serious problems.
It sounds like basically every problem that social justice people ever talk about–except for privilege–could be understood as a force. For example, heterosexism is a force where people take heterosexuality as the default. Sexism is a collection of forces, including oppositional sexism and a number of other more specific things we haven’t named.
So this alternative to the privilege model simply sounds like “anything that isn’t the privilege model”. I totally approve of that thesis if that’s all the post is saying, but I wonder if I might have misunderstood.
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osberend said:
I think it’s partly that, and partly also an observation that certain particular forces each cause harm to multiple different groups. So it’s not just a replacement for “privilege,” but also for “kyriarchy.” But I could be mistaken.
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luciabevilacqua said:
Reblogged this on Female Rights Activism and commented:
This brilliantly captures an issue I have with the social justice movement and offers an alternative way to view social issues.
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Maxim Kovalev said:
“Think about how often trans people assigned female at birth talk about “transphobia” as if their experiences are as bad as those of trans people assigned male at birth (they aren’t)”
This is actually interesting how intersectionality model correctly predicts that transwomen are likely to have more problems than transmen, but for completely wrong reasons.
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megaemolga said:
“But it’s hard to read anti-otherkin stuff without thinking about how obviously they are being conceived of as mentally ill: “something wrong with them”, “delusional”, “sick”, “they should go to therapy”.”
The problem with this example is that mental illness language is used to describe any behavior people don’t like. Dictators, annoying celebrities, mass shooters, religious fundamentalist, and people of opposing political parties are all described as having “something wrong with them”, “delusional”, “sick”, “they should go to therapy”. But I am pretty sure people dislike these people for more reasons than simply believing they are all really mentally ill. In practice most people use mental illness language as a all purpose insult for “that thing I don’t like”.
Explaining prejudice in terms of not liking “weirdness” is confusing cause with effect. A concept like “weird” is highly relational and culturally determined. A billionaire, a paraplegic, a person with an I.Q of 200, and a pedophile. Are by any objective standard different. Yet all of these people are not judged in the same way or given the same value in our society.
In order for some groups to be considered “weird” and some “normal”. Social norms have to be created to make it so. For example in Ancient Greece, Ancient China, and Feudal Japan bisexuality would have been seen as “normal”. But today bisexuality is considered “weird”. That didn’t happen spontaneously. Through a combination of religious dogma and pseudo science sexual behavior that was once considered “normal” had been to be redefined as “weird”.
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Distribution said:
This person is being a tool, but I don’t think it’s the fault of your model. The best response is that yes, they experience sexism, but it’s different in degree and kind.
Also, I think this response will occur less often if social justice people stop denying the suffering and mistreatment of non-officially-oppressed groups.
SJ people really do go around saying silly stuff like “men can’t understand what it’s like to be catcalled / fear sexual violence / be objectified,” or “white people can’t understand what it’s like to be subject to racial bigotry.”
As an example, take the disgusting quote from Margaret Atwood / Gavin De Becker that so many feminists love: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” This erases men’s risks of female-to-male abuse.
Social justice often make some really strong claims: that men, heterosexuals, and white people lack entire categories of negative experiences or victimization. Meanwhile, they ascribe status based on the number of victimized categories people are in.
It’s not surprising that people say “me too!” and raise their own experiences as objections to these exclusionary generalizations about their suffering and risks. And that they don’t like to be treated as lower status or morally less qualified on the basis of these unfounded generalizations.
It’s especially offensive when people tell me that I’m privileged to avoid experiencing some type of suffering when I have actually experienced it, even if I know that I experienced it less than other people.
If social justice people were simply to make a weaker claim: that women experience more sexism and white people experience less racism, then they would not be open to contradiction through a small number of anecdotes.
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nancylebovitz said:
I really appreciate the idea of people who just oppose weirdness. I’ve fantasized about an alternate world where people who like similarity have to have conventions where people who want to see people dressed similarly can gather. It weirds out the hotels, though.
“you are Evil because you are an Oppressor and you need to work endlessly until you aren’t Evil anymore.”
I’m not sure where the emphasis falls in this sentence with the “endlessly”. The way I see Social Justice, it’s saying “no matter how good the world gets, you will be blamed forever for the past behavior of whatever privileged categories you’re in”.
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osberend said:
I really appreciate the idea of people who just oppose weirdness.
Ditto.
Personal experience: My ex-girlfriend used to be really bothered if I described her as “weird,” even affectionately (which is generally what it was—I’m weird, and unashamed! Also, frankly, she was pretty weird), and while I don’t think she ever described me as “weird” as an insult, she’d sort of (toward the end of our relationship) do the same thing reverse: She’d talk about how what she wanted/needed was normal and therefore, ipso facto, reasonable, in way that what I wanted/needed was not. That bothered me a lot. Still does, I think, to some extent.
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megaemolga said:
I made the mistake of reading that essay by “Andrea Smith” and it’s so full of BS. First it perpetuates the “Noble Savage” myth were Native Americans were peaceful angels up until evil whitey came along. I mean some Native American cultures were less authoritarian and patriarchal in comparison to the European settlers. But they weren’t egalitarian utopias either. Their was patriarchy, slavery, and warfare even before European colonialism.
Also the claim that heteropatriarchy is necessary for imperialism makes me wonder if that person has even looked at a history book. Imperial China had both extended families and gay marriage and yet that in no way prevented it from being a genocidal expansionist empire. Also the nuclear family didn’t become the norm in the U.S until WWII. And claiming that nuclear families are necessary for patriarchy. Again look up China and well any place that is not the U.S for that matter.
The conspiracy that Black people are arrested in disproportionate numbers because the prison system is a secret front for slavery. Kinda ignores that poor minorities being arrested in disproportionate numbers is a problem everywhere not just the U.S.. Are they all engaging in secret slavery?
And apparently America goes to war for the fun of it? Not due to a desire for resources or genuine fear of an impending threat? And the U.S always needs to be at war in order to sustain itself? Which is why apparently America was an isolationist country prior to WWII.
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MugaSofer said:
Reblogged this on Pseudonym Writes.
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Pingback: Privilege is real, and we need to stop talking about it so much. « Not Peer Reviewed
Autism Candles said:
Reblogged this on Autism Candles.
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