On Friendships With People You Disagree With

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my issues with anti sj let me show you them, my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post

[content warning: Nazis]

This is my position on who gets a say in whom people are friends with:

1. That person.
2. Not other people.

Many people seem to disagree with me on this point. I will take it first from a social-justice side and then next from the anti-social-justice side.

From the social justice side: I see people claiming that it is morally wrong to be friends with people who have sufficiently abhorrent beliefs, such as Nazis, trans-exclusive radical feminists, neoreactionaries, and so on.

 

I am not entirely sure what the goal of this ethical injunction is. If everyone followed it, then no one would hang out with Nazis except other Nazis, and they would form this little group of Nazis together, stewing in how persecuted they are by Jewish people, and gradually shifting their own Overton windows until “I don’t think murdering every person who likes a Jewish person is a good idea” becomes an extremist viewpoint. If they ever decide they might want to stop being Nazis, they’d have to give up everyone they’re friends with; some people might be brave enough to face complete social isolation for their beliefs, but most people aren’t. Conversely, being friends with Nazis exposes them to non-Nazi beliefs, creates a sense of cognitive dissonance, and gives them someone to turn to in case they want to stop being Nazis.

As it happens, at my college there was a kid who was the son of one of the founders of Stormfront. When it was found out who his father was, some people tried to get him expelled from school. (They did not succeed, because you can’t actually expel someone from school just for being a white nationalist if they never say anything racist to anyone.) Once he graduated, he said that he had become anti-racist. The people who tried to get him expelled from school did not cause this shift. Instead, what caused it was the slow accretion of cognitive dissonance: becoming friends with people of color or people in interracial relationships and realizing that his beliefs were hurting people he knew and cared about. If everyone had decided it was morally wrong to befriend white nationalists, he would probably still be a white nationalist today.

To be clear, I’m not saying you should go around befriending Nazis in the hopes of stopping them from being Nazis. That’s condescending as fuck. I am saying that if you happen to want to be friends with a Nazi anyway, there is not actually a plausible argument that this will cause more Nazis to be in the world.

You might argue that being friends with a Nazi makes you more likely to be a Nazi. I suggest that the correct solution to this problem is not becoming a Nazi in the first place. Do you cherish some deeply-held desire to become a Nazi?

You might argue that whom I’m friends with doesn’t just affect me; if I invite Nazis and you to my Christmas dinner party, then you will have to interact with Nazis. However, this is a problem faced in a lot of circumstances, such as anyone who is friends with multiple parties involved in an extremely nasty breakup. The solutions those people come up with– such as organizing multiple dinner parties or only inviting one side to the party– also generalize to Nazis and people who don’t want to talk to Nazis.

From the anti-social-justice side: I see a lot of people claiming that ideological diversity is very important, and people who don’t want to be friends with people who share certain disagreements with them are just making excuses for living in a bubble. I think this is absolutely absurd.

First, people’s factual beliefs about the world affect their behavior. For instance, I don’t want to be friends with someone who believes that gender pronouns should be used in accordance with the sex one was assigned at birth, because they are going to use pronouns for me that hurt me. I don’t want to be friends with someone who believes it would be morally right to coerce me into having an abortion or deceive me into eating meat, because that increases the chance that they’ll violate my bodily autonomy. I don’t want to be friends with someone who thinks that borderlines are inherently abusive and evil, because that thought process seems like it would lead to mistreating me.

Do these preferences apply to everyone? Of course not! Some trans people are willing to accept being referred to with the wrong pronouns; some people who don’t want to get abortions don’t mind people who might be pressurey about them getting one; some vegetarians are okay with people who might deceive them into eating meat; some borderlines are okay with being friends with people who think they’re evil. I think they’re quite strange, but other people might think it’s strange that I count a trans-exclusive radical feminist and a neoreactionary among my friends. What matters is what makes you feel safe and comfortable in your friendship. Personally, I object to people who mispronoun me, but I don’t mind the belief that I’m an autoandrophile transitioning out of a sexual fetish. Others might have different preferences, because they’re different people.

Second, preference drift exists. For many people, their friends have an effect on their values. The thing that made me an effective altruist was not reading books or blogs about effective altruism; it was joining a community in which it was routine and accepted that everyone was donating ten percent of their income to the charities they believed were most effective, and a lot of people had specifically chosen their career to help do good. And, frankly, it’s a lot easier to be vegetarian when I don’t have to constantly defend my vegetarianism to others.

I don’t think that’s just for altruistic endeavors, either. A musician who’s devoting her life to the pursuit of her art will probably do better with friends who are musicians than with friends who are constantly talking about their great vacation to Tahiti and their shiny new Ferrari; the latter may cause her to care more about money and less about the art. A devotedly child-free person may wish to have child-free friends, for fear that being left out of conversations about diapers and college funds will lead them to want children, in spite of their self-knowledge that they’re a shitty parent.

Again, this doesn’t apply to everyone! Some child-free people find that being around parents only increases their gratitude that they can sleep in until 1pm on Saturdays. Some people remain firm in their altruistic values even when they’re surrounded by the most selfish people imaginable. And a lot of people are more likely to drift with one value than with another: maybe your love of your music will never change, but you worry that being around people who mock vegetarians will make you start craving bacon.

A lot of people I know accept those two arguments, but they accept them in a sorrowful fashion. Of course, it would be best if everyone were able to be friends with everyone, but as a concession to human weakness and frailty we are grudgingly admitting that Ozy is allowed not to be friends with people who hate borderlines. I don’t actually think that is a useful attitude to take! The purpose of my friendships is to increase the joy, fulfillment, happiness, and virtue of myself and my friends. To the extent that diverse friends serves those goals, it is good; to the extent that non-diverse friends serves those goals, it is good. Ideological diversity is one way that my friendships can enrich my life by giving me access to new perspectives and changing my mind on issues. But it’s not inherently more important than helping me keep to my values even in stressful situations or not causing me pain. It’s just one way that enrichment can happen.

On Personal Experience In Social Justice Activism

Tags

my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post

I recently read this excellent personal essay about transness and how alienated one closeted trans woman feels from feminist discourse, and it has me thinking about discourse norms.

Social justice tends to emphasize people’s beliefs coming from their position in society. The previous belief tended to be that people of color, women, disabled people, LGBA people, etc. were biased, because they were involved in the issue, while white people, men, abled people, straight people etc. could have an objective view on things. Of course, no one has an objective view on anything, all our viewpoints are inextricably linked to our positionalities, and we just have to muddle along as best we can to get at objective truth. (The anti-social-justice reader who is about to object to this paragraph should reflect on how many of their beliefs are a product of having the positionality ‘human.’)

At the same time, marginalized people have access to a certain kind of knowledge that privileged people do not. There are quite a lot of cis academics who have a better understanding than I do of the etiology of transness, trans people cross-culturally and in history, the causes of transphobia, etc., but not one of them has felt the icicle-in-the-heart of being thoughtlessly misgendered. Of course, it is quite possible to have experienced that and also be wrong about things– just as it is possible to be an expert in the neuroscience of gender variance and be wrong about things– but just like it would be a mistake to leave neuroscientists out of the discussion of transness, it is also a mistake to leave trans people out. For these reasons, social justice tends to prioritize the opinions of marginalized people.

On the other hand, the sensible viewpoint that marginalized people’s opinions should be prioritized can create a culture of obligate self-disclosure. Marginalized identities are often a source of great pain. For many marginalized identities, such as abuse survivor or intersex person, disclosing your marginalization can mean disclosing private information that people feel uncomfortable sharing with strangers. In many cases, such as mental illness and queerness, a person may be a member of a marginalized group and not know it themselves. And of course being publicly a member of a marginalized group sets you up for all sorts of bad experiences, ranging from familial rejection to harassment to well-meaning people attempting to keep you from going to hell.

So what does this mean?

• Any person you talk to about homophobia could be a closeted gay or bisexual person.
• Any person you talk to about poverty could be poor or have grown up poor.
• Any person you talk to about transphobia could be trans, whether stealth or closeted, or a non-transitioning gender dysphoric person.
• Any person you talk to about sexism could be female. (And for the MRAs in the audience, they could be male too.)
• Any person you talk to about disability could be disabled– whether neurodivergent or a person with an invisible physical disability.
• Any person you talk to about race could be a mixed-race or white-passing person.
• And online, any person you talk to about any subject could be anything. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

Now, you might be thinking, “Ozy, does that mean I am not allowed to criticize anyone for being oppressive?” Of course you can, because marginalized people are routinely oppressive to other marginalized people. You can even criticize them in a snarky or vicious way, if you think that tactic is warranted: it is perfectly reasonable to be snarky about Debi Pearl’s misogyny, in spite of her being a woman. However, it seems wise to me to direct snark at people with stupid ideas, and not people with privileged identities. The ideas, after all, are the bad part.

There are certain tactics I would advise avoiding in one-on-one discussions. For instance, do not tell people what they did or did not suffer; it’s rude and always an asshole move. People can suffer things they don’t tell you about, and being told you didn’t suffer something you did feels like shit. Similarly, don’t tell someone they couldn’t possibly understand X experience because they are privileged; even if they’re not closeted, a lot of experiences are shared across marginalizations anyway. It’s probably wise to avoid speculating about the group membership of people you don’t know very well; there have been far too many awkward cases in which the privileged neurotypical turned out to be a mentally ill person. In general, whenever possible, stick to arguing about facts and evidence, instead of exploring why the person you’re arguing with believes the thing they believe; the latter often winds up condescending.

On the other hand, it doesn’t make sense to give everyone the same treatment you would to a person you know is a member of a marginalized group. Think about neuroscience. In general, people will give more weight to the same neuroscience claim coming from a neuroscientist than they would coming from a layperson. Of course, neuroscientists can still be wrong, and non-neuroscientists can still lay out citations to peer-reviewed papers that show their claim is correct. But if you wanted to not disclose that you’re a neuroscientist for some reason– perhaps this identity is the one you mostly use for writing very embarrassing fetish porn– then you’re not going to get the respect people give to neuroscientists. Similarly, people give more weight to the same claim about what being trans feels like when it comes from a trans person, as opposed to a cis person. But if you are not out as trans, you cannot expect to be given that benefit of the doubt.

Language Policing: Intersectionality

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language, ozy blog post

Someday I will die, and on my grave will be inscribed the sentence THAT’S NOT WHAT ‘INTERSECTIONAL’ MEANS.

Intersectionality, as developed by black feminist thinkers like Kimberle Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins, does not refer to the idea that some people are oppressed in multiple ways. The knowledge of this fact is what is scientifically referred to as “having eyes.”

Instead, intersectionality is about the idea that each positionality is unique. The natural way for people to think about oppression is to think “well, white women experience sexism, and black men experience racism. Therefore black women experience the racism that black men experience plus the sexism that white women experience!” However, that’s not how it works. Black woman is not black man plus white woman. Black woman is its own, unique experience.

(This is traditionally referred to as “oppression is multiplicative not additive,” the idea being that you don’t just add the numbers together, you produce a totally new number! Yes, gender studies people are bad at math.)

Think about it this way: white women’s oppression, historically, involved being put on pedestals and sheltered from work. Black women’s oppression, historically, involved working long hours in traditionally female fields such as domestic or nanny and returned home to take care of their own houses and children. What a white woman saw as liberating– working outside the home instead of caring for your own home– a black woman experienced as oppressive, because her experience of sexism was fundamentally different from the white woman’s experience of sexism.

Intersectionality applies to a lot of oppressions other than race and gender. For instance, a cis neurotypical woman may experience street harassment which she finds degrading and upsetting. A trans woman may have a complicated experience: on one hand, she finds it upsetting, but on the other hand it’s an affirmation of her gender that was so often invalidated. And a developmentally disabled woman may experience desexualization and treatment as an unperson, which means she isn’t harassed on the street. (Of course, I’m only describing experiences that some people have– many developmentally disabled women are street harassed and many trans women have no complicated feelings about street harassment.)

Intersectionality also means that people in relatively privileged groups also have unique experiences. For instance, black and Latino men are disproportionately likely to be victims of the prison-industrial complex– a fact that’s related not only to their race but to their gender, as men are considered to be more violent and dangerous than women. And poor rural whites have been subject to eugenics and discrimination based on the anxiety induced by white people who acted like black people. (For more, I highly recommend the excellent book Not Quite White.)

Intersectionality is about more than just two oppressions affecting each other, too. The experience of a upper-middle-class cis black butch abled lesbian is fundamentally different from the experience of a rich trans white masculine man with schizophrenia. When you carry through intersectional analysis far enough, each of us has a unique experience of marginalization, based not only on our identities but on our experiences, personalities, and luck. (Fortunately, it is possible to notice trends.)

The problem is that privileged identities tend to be invisible. It’s really easy to say “sexism is when you’re harassed on the street! Anti-autistic ableism is when people don’t want to date you!” An intersectional analysis says things like “while autistics of either gender do experience both, autistic men are more likely to have a hard time finding a partner, while autistic women often can find a partner but have a hard time identifying and avoiding partners who are predatory or abusive.” Or “for many women, street harassment is an unpleasant violation of their boundaries that reminds them that men care only about what they look; however, some women don’t experience street harassment because of pervasive desexualization that means no one sees them as a sexual being at all.”

If you’re not doing that sort of analysis, you’re not doing intersectionality. Please stop using that word.

Be Cautious About Saying That Things Have Changed

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality

Every so often, I see people remark on how in the last few years Tumblr has made up the concept of genderqueer people.

This is, obviously, not true. Even leaving aside the historical complexities of whether other cultures had third genders, the term ‘genderqueer’ was used in the mid-nineties. Before the popularization of genderqueer identity, many people articulated their sense of gender as being neither male nor female: for instance, many stone butches did, as did many drag queens and crossdressers. While one could argue that genderqueer identity was made up by special snowflakes, the historical evidence suggests that it was made up by special snowflakes two decades before Tumblr was even a thing.

But it’s interesting to me to think about why people believe that nonbinary identities are a Tumblr thing. Heterosexual crossdressers are usually closeted and most people, being heterosexual, are not part of queer culture; by extension, most people in the nineties were not aware of how they conceptualized their gendered selves. However, Tumblr people will not stop navel-gazing about our genders, so suddenly a lot of cisgender and heterosexual people are exposed to the existence of nonbinaries. From their perspective, it looks like nonbinary people suddenly started existing.

Similarly, I have seen many people make claims about how social justice movements have become toxic; often, they provide causal explanations, such as “the Bush Years made everyone think in a polarizing fashion”. They may also make cute graphics like this one:

However, Jo Freeman’s Trashing and The Tyranny of Structurelessness describe extremely well the dynamics of the average social justice clique, despite being published in the seventies. Furthermore, it is notable that lists of misandric feminist quotes rarely have a quote that comes from later than 1995, which is at least some evidence that the feminist movement is improving; similarly, the modern feminist movement, for all its faults, does not seem to have produced a Mary Daly or an Andrea Dworkin, and its wars are not as vicious as the Lesbian Sex Wars.

Nevertheless, this is easy to explain from a personal perspective: a person grows up knowing mostly reasonable feminists, then meets some awful feminists, and quite naturally concludes that feminists have become awful. (They may also, in this case, be primarily familiar with feminism from being taught about it in school, and schools have a tendency to concentrate on inspirational heroes and leave out the controversies.)

So I think that when you are asserting that something has changed, you should consider and rule out the hypothesis that what actually happened is that your social groups changed. When possible, the best strategy for doing this is to examine historical evidence: for instance, looking at when ‘genderqueer’ was coined and reading second-wave articles about intrafeminism dynamics. Sometimes, of course, this is impossible, in which case I think the best course is to admit one’s ignorance rather than making broad claims.

Living in A Gender Bubble

Tags

my issues with sj let me show you them, not feminism go away, ozy blog post

One of the big problems in talking about gender is that there are just too many people.

“Men” is 3.5 billion people. If one assumes that most people talking about gender in English on the Internet are only intending to talk about the Anglosphere and not men in Saudi Arabia (which seems right), men is still 225 million people. That’s a lot of different people. That’s a hell of a lot of diversity.

And yet most of the time when people talk about ‘men’ and ‘women’ they aren’t basing it on survey data about those 225 million people. They’re talking about, well, their personal experiences. Over the course of their lives, they’ve met a few hundred, perhaps a thousand men. That’s not a lot. And the sample is systematically biased in a whole lot of ways. Of course, there are the obvious ways: my sample has way more trans people and way fewer black people than would normally be expected. But there are subtler things too.

Here’s an example I happen to know from my personal anecdotes. In high school, I was friends with some frankly entitled nerdy guys. They were universally under the impression that they were Nice, as shown by their willingness to pay for dates and buy their girlfriends flowers on Valentine’s Day, and that it was sheer injustice if a girl they were interested in said ‘no’, given that they were Nice. Girls more attractive than I was would occasionally find themselves subjected to severe social pressure to go out with whomever had a crush on them, and labelled a ‘bitch’ and isolated if she continued to refuse.

Right now, I’m friends with a bunch of nerdy guys who are scared shitless of women. They have never asked a girl out because it is too frightening, and when girls flirt with them they tend to radiate terrified body language which makes the flirting girl assume that she is being crushingly rejected. Many of them feel that, simply by having a crush on a girl, they’re doing something wrong; their sexuality, being male, is burdensome and creepy, and they should avoid ever letting a girl know about it.

Now, by luck, I happened to be in both groups. Imagine if I had only known entitled nerd guys: every time one of the scared guys was like “I am afraid of doing something wrong when I ask a girl out!”, my instinctive response would be “well, maybe you are doing something wrong, you fucking creep.” Or imagine if I’d only known the scared nerd guys: every time someone complained about the entitled guys pressuring them into dating them, I’d be like “Christ! Nerd guys have it hard enough! Knock it off! You’re just unfairly stigmatizing socially awkward people.”

As it happens, I’ve been in both groups, so I have a fairly nuanced viewpoint on the subject. But there are lots of cases where I’ve only been in one group, and I don’t know which ones. I can’t make my thoughts more nuanced when I don’t even know what ways my samples are distorted.

So whenever I say something about ‘men’ or ‘women’, take it as ‘this is the pattern I have noticed among people I have happened to interact with, which may or may not be similar to people that you have interacted with.’ And when you get into arguments with people about whether men are sexist or women can’t communicate, have as a hypothesis “both of us are telling the truth about different groups of people.”

Solidarity

Tags

my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post

One of the values at the core of my intersectional feminism is solidarity, which means to me: I want my experience of marginalization to make me more compassionate to those who are different than me.

I am nonbinary. I want to use that experience to allow me to relate to binary trans people, who experience gender dysphoria as I do; to gender-non-conforming and LGB people, as well as anyone who’s had a hard time fitting in their gender role, who are harmed as I am by the gender binary and oppositional sexism; to otherkin, people with bodily identity integrity disorder, and some anorexics, who just like me experience proprioceptive hallucinations, what-is-this-body-I’m-looking-at-it’s-not-mine, and weird floating preferences about category membership that don’t connect to any disagreement about empirical facts or fact about how the categories are treated.

Of course, our experiences are not the same. I can get top surgery; an anorexic who has a similar relationship to their weight that I do to my sex characteristics may die if they get the body they prefer. This is a tremendous difference. But I think there is a lot to saying “here, this is the experience I have, let me use this as a tool and a motivation to understand you, person who is very different from me.”

And I’m not saying I’m good at this, mind you. It took me a surprisingly long time to connect “I have this strange preference that I be considered nonbinary, despite agreeing that I possess all the traits typically associated with women and knowing that my life would be far easier if I were a woman” to “I have this strange preference that I be considered nonhuman, despite agreeing that I possess all the traits typically associated with humans and knowing my life would be far easier if I were a human.”

There are costs to this perspective. Right now, the legitimacy of trans people’s genders is very fragile. Most people, even in relatively trans-positive countries, do not see trans people as the genders we identify as. Even fewer people see otherkin as the species they identify as. If the trans movement as a whole said “otherkin with social species dysphoria are just as valid as trans people with social gender dysphoria!”, I’m pretty sure the response of people in general would be “so what you’re saying is that both of you guys are fake?” It wouldn’t do much good.

And a very common way marginalization works is that people have the mistaken belief that Widely Disliked Group A are really all Widely Disliked Group B. If a masculine gay man hears someone say “all gay men are flamers!”, he of course responds “no, we aren’t! I am gay and I’m just a regular guy: I lift weights, drink beer, and don’t know Cabaret from Carousel.” On one hand, his desire to not be mistaken for someone who knows things about musicals is quite reasonable; it’s not a great feeling when people believe inaccurate things about you because of your marginalizations. On the other hand, he is distancing himself from feminine men. In many, perhaps most, cases, the subtext is: “I’m gay, but that’s not bad. Now, being a feminine man, that’s really bad and awful and deserving of derision.” The insult gains its sting from the cultural horror of feminine men; if someone said “gay men all have blue eyes!”, he would be nonplussed, not offended.

A quite natural way of dealing with marginalization is to say “I don’t deserve it. They deserve it.” This can work on an external level– “you shouldn’t use that condescending tone when you talk to a person in a wheelchair, it’s not like they have Down syndrome or something”– but I think it is most pernicious on an internal level.

Neurodivergent people who have high IQs or good academic skills tend to wrap up a lot of our self-esteem in being smart. We go, “I don’t deserve to be treated this way, I’m smart.” We go, “actually, I am better than the people who are being cruel to me, because I’m smart and all those bastards are going to work for me one day.” We go, “I’m not worthless, because I’m smart. If I were this fucked up and I weren’t smart, then I would probably be worthless, but actually I’m an eccentric genius and did you know Albert Einstein didn’t wear socks because he thought they were a waste of time.”

On one hand, we don’t deserve to be treated that way, we aren’t worthless, and we may very well be better than the people who were cruel to us; if this mindset allows us to understand those facts, it is good. It rubs me the wrong way to take away people’s coping mechanisms from them. On the other hand, the whole idea of having to earn not being mistreated is harmful, and it inevitably happens that at some point you’re not the smartest person in the room anymore and if you’ve wrapped up your self-worth in being smart when that happens you suddenly feel like you are really worthless. And, of course, it’s kind of shitty for intellectually disabled people. Intellectually disabled people deserve to have autonomy over their lives and not be bullied or abused, because everyone deserves to have autonomy over their lives and not be bulled or abused. A politics that denies that is harmful to intellectually disabled people.

And… I don’t like doing it. I don’t feel right when I deny my similarities with others, when I refuse to have empathy for people who are like me in order to maintain the shreds of rights or worth we’ve been able to grasp. Which I guess is my true rejection.

Motte Definitions

Tags

effective altruism, not feminism go away, not like other ideologies, ozy blog post

[Commenting note: As one may tell from the title, use of the forbidden words “motte” and “bailey” is permitted in this comment thread. Please do not abuse this privilege.]

One thing I’ve noticed is that all three of the movements closest to my heart have standardized definitions that are, well, things everyone can agree with. Feminism is the radical notion that women are people. Rationality is systematized winning. Effective altruism is the use of evidence and reason to make the world the best place it can be. Why is this such a common impulse?

One common explanation is that it’s public relations. No one disagrees with the idea that women are people; no one doesn’t want to win; no one thinks that we shouldn’t use evidence or that it’s a good idea to make the world a worse place. Therefore, we can get people to agree that rationality, or feminism, or effective altruism is a good thing under one definition, and then while they’re not looking smuggle in our more controversial claims about Bayesian reasoning, structural sexism, or culices delendi sunt.

However, I don’t think that that’s all of it. I think, when one is looking to characterize a movement, the easiest way is to characterize it by its goals. Effective altruism is evidence-based do-gooding, feminism is about fighting sexism against women, and rationality is about improving people’s thinking. While there’s a certain amount of PR in characterizing “fighting sexism against women” as “believing women are people”, it doesn’t seem like an absurd mischaracterization to me– particularly if you believe (as many feminists do) that a common form of sexism is treating women as Pure Perfect Angels Of The Home and/or Sex And Children Dispensing Objects.

The problem is that a lot of movements’ goals are pretty uncontroversial. The red pill‘s goal is to help men reach their relationship goals; Communism intends to end exploitation of workers; the anti-gay-marriage movement intends to preserve families. I don’t think most people who oppose those groups object to helping men reach their relationship goals, ending exploitation of workers, or preserving families. They object to the empirical claims associated with those groups, like the alpha/beta/omega theory of dating, the labor theory of value, and the gay cooties theory of family dissolution.

So defining a movement by its goals inherently ends up presenting a more palatable version of the movement, because you’re leaving out the empirical claims people find controversial– whether it’s the idea that the differences between men and women are caused by sexism, that volunteering is a less effective way of doing good than charitable donations, or that going to CFAR will improve your thinking.

Mandatory X Studies Classes Is An Astonishingly Counterproductive Strategy

Tags

my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post, this is a prussian education system hateblog

When I was reading up on the University of Missouri protests, I noticed that their list of demands included mandatory ethnic studies classes for everyone. This is a mind-bogglingly bad idea and I can’t imagine why anyone would support it on the grounds of making the campus more welcoming for people of color.

I mean, there is the obvious fact that many people of color already know that racism exists, and don’t want to sit through an entire class in Did You Know That Everyone Hates You? It’s True! Perhaps they would rather study physics so that they don’t have to think about the structural racism that shapes every aspect of their daily lives.

But it gets worse.

When I was a gender studies student, I had several classes that debated whether nonbinary trans people existed, or whether we only thought we were trans because of internalized misogyny.

And this isn’t an isolated thing that only affects trans people. My classes also debated whether men being forced into PIV intercourse or being hit by their partners counted as rape or abuse. My classes debated whether mental illness is a real thing or just society pathologizing deviants. And we had a Maoist, which I can’t imagine would have been a great experience for people whose families had fled China during the Chinese Civil War.

I’m not talking here about abstract debates like “does male privilege exist?” or “are black women structurally oppressed?” I’m talking about things that would genuinely be hurtful for everyone: “am I really the gender I say I am?” “is the person who beat me actually the real victim?” “am I faking my problems?” “was the man who killed my relatives actually a great guy if you think about it?”

I don’t know what those debates specifically are in ethnic studies, because due to budget cuts my school didn’t have an ethnic studies professor until the year I graduated. But I promise you that there are debates like that. Any time you talk about oppression there are debates like that.

There are civility requirements in a classroom. In most environments, my response to the idea that nonbinary trans people have just internalized misogyny is “fuck off”. But in a classroom, you must be calm, you must be civil, you must carefully lay out evidence for the viewpoint that you are worthy of basic respect and human dignity, you must treat the opposing idea respectfully as a valid alternate opinion.

And the thing is… if you’re a student who’s generally privileged, you are in general not going to have this experience. Classrooms do not discuss whether cis men only feel that they’re men because of their internalized misogyny. If your family never had to flee a mass murdering dictator, the mass murdering dictator’s supporters are mostly funny.

To be clear, I’m not saying that this is something that should be changed. There is debate in the field of gender studies about whether nonbinary trans people actually exist, and one of the purposes of my classes was to familiarize me with active debates in the field. This is something I signed up for when I decided to major in gender studies.

And even if you tried to change it, how would it work? The whole reason those topics are up for debate is because people don’t agree which positions cause harm; if there was already an academic consensus on it, they would just teach that instead of hosting a debate about the subject. You certainly agree with me that forcing men into PIV is rape; but many of the professors are people who will say “well, obviously forcing men into PIV isn’t rape, and we shan’t debate it because of the tremendous harm it would cause to real rape survivors.”

Furthermore, debating issues is a lot of x studies education’s pedagogical method. None of my teachers were Maoists, but Maoist Student would still have made the classroom tremendously hurtful for many people, and it is unclear how to prevent this without simply stopping Maoist Student from talking (which is probably bad precedent, as much as I would have appreciated it at the time). Even worse, transphobic people voicing their transphobia is a necessary step to them having their transphobia challenged; if they aren’t allowed to speak it up, you’re not even accomplishing your goal of making people less bigoted.

So for multiple reasons gender studies classrooms have to be this way, and it is probably good that they are this way. What I am saying is that participating in this should be optional. It is inhumane to require trans people to civilly debate whether they should be misgendered as a condition of graduating college. And therefore no one should require gender studies courses.

X Studies classrooms are, of course, far from the only classrooms that have this problem. The personality disordered student taking abnormal psych may very well find herself debating whether she is inherently abusive; the developmentally disabled student in a philosophy class may have to write a paper about whether he should have been murdered at birth. However, as far as I am aware, no one is trying to make those classes required– and they’re definitely not trying to make them required in order to make schools more welcoming to disabled people. So I wish to express my fervent disapproval of this strategy.

Identities Are Not Arguments

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my issues with anti sj let me show you them, my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post

[Content warning: brief, vivid description of footbinding and female circumcision.]

If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing about the social justice movement, it would be to get everyone to stop fucking using group membership as an argument.

“This can’t be sexist, I’m a woman.” “This is transphobic; I know, I’m trans.” “Listen to LGB people about what homophobia is.” “Actual people of color don’t think that’s racist.” This is a terrible argument and all of you should stop.

(“All of you” includes anti-social-justice people, by the way. Don’t like this post and turn around and reblog a “twenty people of color say cultural appropriation is stupid!” picset.)

Debi Pearl is a woman who argues that women should never say ‘no’ to sex with their husbands, leave an abusive husband, work outside the home, or use birth control. Anne Lawrence is a trans woman who is one of the major researchers involved in the division of trans women into homosexual transsexuals (men who are, like, really super gay) and autogynephiliac transsexuals (straight men with a sexual fetish for being women). Courage is a Catholic organization whose members are mostly LGB people, which argues that if LGB people ever have an unrepented orgasm they will be tortured for eternity. Does “listen to trans women about transmisogyny” have an implicit “except for Anne Lawrence”? If we say “I’m a woman; I know what’s sexist and what isn’t”, how can we respond to a woman who says that what’s really sexist is denying women’s essential feminine nature which limits her to marriage and babies?

Members of marginalized groups have the same diversity of opinion that people who aren’t members of marginalized groups do. This is because members of marginalized groups are people, with people’s tendency to have their own opinions, rather than members of the Oppression Borg. In fact, the whole argument is oppressive, I think; it pedestalizes oppressed people by assuming they are always correct, and erases the differences and diversity among marginalized people, presenting them as a stereotyped group that all shares the same opinions.

Now, I don’t mean to say that the argument from opinion poll is never relevant. Some arguments are similar to the argument that you shouldn’t chew with your mouth open because it will disgust people at the dinner table; they are about some small matter, easily avoided, that predictably upsets people. You shouldn’t draw Mohammad, because Muslims will be upset; you shouldn’t say the n word unless you are black, because black people will be upset.  Such common courtesies make up the stuff of civilized life. In that case, if it turned out the majority of black people or Muslims were just fine with white use of the n word or drawing Mohammad, the argument would lose its force.

(Caveats: I said ‘small’; while it is easy for me to go through my whole life without drawing Mohammad, it is not easy for a lesbian to go through her whole life without holding hands with her girlfriend in public, and the offense caused to homophobes in the latter case does not outweigh her desire to hold hands with a woman. In addition, there are good reasons to deliberately cause offense, most notably protest.)

But the majority of social justice arguments do not take this form. Women should be able to leave abusive partners because abuse causes people pain, and it is bad for people to suffer unnecessary pain. The division between autogynephile and homosexual transsexuals does not reflect reality, and it is bad to have models that do not reflect reality. LGB people should be able to have orgasms because orgasms are nice. These arguments do not depend on the input of Ms. Pearl, Ms. Lawrence, or the esteemed members of Courage. At best, an opinion poll of marginalized people provides slight evidence about what may or may not be harmful to them– but this evidence can be clearly outweighed.

It is time to take up the thorny issue of internalized -isms– when women, or LGBT people, or poor people or people of color, or disabled people believe -ist things that hurt themselves. A lot of people don’t like talking about internalized -isms. This impulse comes from a kind place. There is a long history of people using “oh, you’ve just internalized sexism” as a way to ignore other people’s arguments. This is called Bulverism and it’s rude. As my friend Keller says, treat people you’re arguing with as though they came to their opinions through a disinterested process of pure reason; psychologize those not involved in the conversation.

The other reason a lot of people dislike the concept of internalized -isms is that it has so often been used to delegitimize people’s preferences. Women who wear lipstick, do sex work, stay at home to raise their children, or enjoy kinky sex have long been accused of only doing those things because they’ve been brainwashed by the patriarchy. Fat people who want to lose weight, autistic people who want a cure, and trans people who think being trans fucking sucks may frown on the idea that they’d be perfectly happy the way they are if not for the evil forces of society.

But without the concept of internalized -isms many things do not make sense.

For one thing, many people report feeling ashamed of their bodies because they were fat, or like they were worth less if they had promiscuous sex, or like they would be ugly if they did not wear lipstick, or like slowly limping along in pain is better than painless, fast use of a wheelchair– and then finding social justice and realizing that those things aren’t true. It would be very strange indeed if every person that applied to had already found social justice and realized those things aren’t true. 

For another, women are fifty percent of the population. Sexism could not last long unless there was considerable buy-in from women. There was a point when the majority of American women didn’t want the vote, because it would tarnish their purity and anyway they had the real power through influencing men. This isn’t something that men imposed on women; it’s something women and men agreed on. It is not that men cruelly denied the vote from women who were thirsting for it; it’s that both men and women agreed that the women shouldn’t have the vote. Was denying women the vote unsexist until it ticked over and 50.1% of women thought they ought to have the right to vote? And, of course, if you buy that logic, how would women ever get the vote at all? How could you convince half of women that it was sexist, if you don’t think it’s sexist until half of women agree?

And if you’re willing to bite the bullet on that– Chinese women, with crippled feet, who could barely walk, and who spoke about how happy they were to be so graceful, so delicate. A woman whose clitoris was burned off and her labia sewn together, glad about how it helped her preserve her chastity. Women who iron their daughters’ breasts the way their own were ironed, who jump into the funeral pyre when their husbands die, who can count on one hand the number of times they’ve seen the sun.

Because make no mistake– those institutions did not survive over the opposition of women. As Andrea Dworkin said in a different context, “Have you ever wondered why we [women] are not just in armed combat against you? It’s not because there’s a shortage of kitchen knives in this country.” Patriarchy survived because women believed, women were taught, patriarchy was right, and just, and the way things ought to be.

I confess I don’t know how to deal with internalized sexism; I expect “oh, you don’t know what’s good for you, you poor thing” to be as ineffective and offensive directed at the footbound Chinese woman as it is directed at the modern sexual submissive. Indeed, that thought process seems oppressive in itself; the allegedly benevolent denial of autonomy, the assumption that others know better than the individual what is good for them, is at the core of much sexism (particularly that direct at white women) and ableism. But not knowing how to deal with internalized isms doesn’t mean we should pretend internalized isms don’t exist.  

I say: it is possible for women to be sexist against themselves, to believe sexist things, things that cause them tremendous pain; indeed, this is the normal condition for members of oppressed groups, and correctly identifying that it is unfair when people hurt you and they should stop is the exception. Therefore, when we make arguments, we must make them based on facts about the world, and on values, not based on opinion polls or the Marginalized Group Hivemind.

Love Me I’m A Liberal

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catherine mackinnon, not feminism go away, ozy blog post

[ETA clarification: This is “liberal” in the sense of “Enlightenment classical”, not in the sense of “the left.” MacKinnon is not a liberal but she is more to the left than I am.]

My favorite summary of my political views was written by Catherine MacKinnon in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State to describe the political views she opposed. Say what you will about Ms. MacKinnon’s… everything… but the woman could certainly pass an Intellectual Turing Test.

If you would like to read MacKinnon’s explanation of my political viewpoint, it is on pages 44-47 of the linked PDF. However, I am with Susie Bright that:

Aside from the fantastic pornographic passages (“penises ramming vaginas,” etc.), MacKinnon disdains the use of subject-verb in a common sentence. Andrea Dworkin, MacKinnon’s collaborator and mutual inspiration, can write up a storm–I ate up Intercourse like a box of chocolates. MacKinnon, on the other hand, is the typical academic who must publish but can’t write.

So I am going to write my own explanation and save you the tedium.

According to MacKinnon, liberalism consists of five interrelated dimensions: individualism; naturalism; voluntarism; idealism; and moralism.

Individualism is the idea that the fundamental unit of society is the individual who stands alone, apart from any groups of which she or he is a member. (This is sometimes called the “liberal subject.”) It is opposed to collectivism, in which the fundamental unit of the society is the group.

Voluntarism is the idea that those individuals are autonomous. We make our own choices for our own reasons, not being shaped by manipulative or distorting external forces. It is opposed to the idea that our desires are shaped by the society we’re part of: a woman may genuinely desire to wear lipstick, but the reason she genuinely desires to wear lipstick is that she was told since infancy that it was what she should want.

Naturalism is the idea that the world is ultimately knowable and understandable; there is an objective truth that you can communicate to other people, even outside of a social context. If everyone works really hard to overcome their biases, then we will manage to come to the truth. It is opposed to the idea that people are just biased; if there is an objective truth, we’ll certainly never be able to reach it. Rationalists and leftists actually have broadly similar claims here: both of us have noticed that human brains are fallible and the Descartian model of finding truth by sitting down and thinking about it very hard doesn’t work very well. However, rationalists tend to be most interested in fallibilities that all humans share, such as the sunk cost fallacy and the conjunction fallacy. Leftists tend to be more interested in the social context of thinking– either in specific, like “how does Ozy being white affect their opinions about linguistic diversity?” or in general, like “how does the concept of ‘productivity’ taught to Ozy as a small child affect their opinions about capitalism?”

Idealism is the idea that thought is a prime mover of social life. This one is perhaps easiest to understand by contrasting it with its opposite, materialism. Materialism is the idea that society is fundamentally shaped by vast formless things. Materialism claims that if you’re in a society with a lot of unhappy poor people next to a lot of showoff rich people, something a lot like Communism will naturally appear; if Marx died in infancy, someone else would have catalyzed the anger of the poor into an ideology about how the rich people’s money should be given to them. Idealism claims that Communism happened because Marx sat down and thought about it and came up with some pretty interesting ideas, and if he had died as a baby there might not have been any USSR at all. (In practice, I’m a lot leerier about idealism than I am about the other four– I’m inclined towards a moderate, “both ideas and vast formless things are important” position.)

Moralism is the idea that one must conform one’s behavior to abstract rules. It might be a single rule, like “do what causes the greatest good for the greatest number”, or a lot of different rules, like “don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t interfere with people’s freedom of speech…” Moralism is opposed to suspicion about the whole “abstract rule” project, often because the abstract rules are made up by people in power and have a strange tendency to conclude that powerful people should stay powerful.

I think MacKinnon’s list serves as a useful explanation of the difference between liberal feminism and other feminisms. Liberal feminism is feminism that agrees with individualism, naturalism, voluntarism, idealism, and moralism. Radical feminism, cultural feminism, and socialist feminism is feminism that doesn’t agree with one or more of those claims.

(This is not a very useful heuristic for identifying feminists in the wild. If you wish to classify feminists you encounter, I would use the following guidelines: socialist feminists are the only ones who give a shit about class; radical feminists are extremely angry about sex work, BDSM, and/or trans people; cultural feminists leave you with the feeling of “I have no idea what you’re talking about but I’m pretty sure you’re a misogynist”; and everyone else is a liberal feminist, except Christina Hoff Sommers, whose brand of feminism begins with “anti-“.)

However, I think it goes beyond that: this is a succinct statement of my political commitments in general. I believe that people should be understood as individuals, not as part of groups; that these individuals are capable of free choices which should be respected; that as difficult as it is, we can know objective truth; that it matters what we believe, not just what social conditions are; and that you should follow abstract principles.