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June 11, 2004
The privilege to not fight
Pete, the author of the blog entry that i previously critiqued apologized in the thread. I was going to address him in that thread, but i decided that it belonged as a general discussion for all readers here.
In a sexist society, men and women do not have equal voices. Men acquires a level of auto-privilege; they don't have to fight to be heard. Women, on the other hand, are often fighting to be heard or must play into the cultural norms dictated by men in order to have a voice.
Pete argued that he was just trying to express his exasperation. I believe that exasperation must be deconstructed. What does it mean for a privileged individual to express exasperation over issues of marginalization? I mean, we've all thought "wouldn't it be great if inequality just went away?" Goddess knows i've felt more than enough exasperation in my lifetime, including the exasperation over constantly fighting to have a voice and still not being heard or being misunderstood as my voice is translated by normative culture into something unrecognizable.
With privilege comes responsibility. It is my belief that a feminist man has a responsibility to refrain from expressing exasperation over this topic because that expression is a dismissal, that expression is an execution of privilege with continues the power differential. I believe that a feminist man has a responsibility to be hyper-conscious about how he throws his voice around, knowing that his voice has undue power. In other words, i think that a feminist man needs to also take on the burden of fighting that women have inherently.
Disagree. Discuss. I want to hear what people think.
Posted by zephoria at 03:02 PM | Permalink
Comments
"that expression is a dismissal" Couldn't that expression be exasperation at the *way* a topic is being discussed? Couldn't it be an expression that the *method* isn't likely to be productive, even if the message is one that's important?
I'll be honest, I agree with most of what you say. But to an average person, the people I believe we're trying to reach with your message, reading "I believe that exasperation must be deconstructed." is going to alienate them. What would be a good way for a feminist man to express that?
Posted by: Anil at Jun 11, 2004 3:55:19 PM
"With privilege comes responsibility." Exactly. Unfortunately, most of the time, with privilege also comes partial blindness. This is probably as true for feminist men as it is for middle-class Americans and well-educated people in developing contries.
Posted by: Paul Hoffman at Jun 11, 2004 4:07:48 PM
To respond to Anil, I think danah makes some very reasonable and clear assertions here:
It is my belief that a feminist man has a responsibility to refrain from expressing exasperation over this topic because that expression is a dismissal, that expression is an execution of privilege with continues the power differential. I believe that a feminist man has a responsibility to be hyper-conscious about how he throws his voice around, knowing that his voice has undue power.
I don't think that there is any way of neatly separating a message from its delivery. Opponents of feminism have frequently seized on the delivery or tone of feminist's words to dismiss and undermine them. Think of the constant use of the word "shrill", for example, as a means of dismissing women's voices.
Posted by: caterina at Jun 11, 2004 4:52:04 PM
And just to parse Pete's words accurately, he expressed exasperation with what he considered the shallow level of the discourse in some specific recent blog entries. My impression was that he was saying "why are we starting at the beginning of this conversation again when so many people have already developed it much further." Not at all "I am tired of this discussion." Does that distinction make sense? That's how I read him, especially in his clarifying apology.
This is not to suggest that other hearings of what he wrote aren't valid. I do believe that iif we wish to be as open as possible then in whatever ways we happen to be privileged or advantaged over others we owe it to them and to ourselves to share as best as we can those advantages and not hoard them for ourselves.
Doing it in language is subtle and tricky but worth the effort. Pete's a friend of mine and I know from similar experience that it's a painful lesson sometimes to hear yourself through other's ears, but an immensely valuable one nonetheless, which is why I always thank danah for asking the hard questions despite the cultural conditioning we're immersed in that favors ducking those questions and avoiding confrontation in general wherever possible.
If we truly believe that the transparency and accountability of life online has psychologically hygienic value, then the antiseptic is going to sting from time to time.
Posted by: xian at Jun 11, 2004 8:01:54 PM
So you would rather have a dishonest conversation - by having
(supposedly) "priviledged" people hold their tongues - than have
an honest discussion. That's a nice way to stay completely
inside the echo chambder, but it offers no chance to escape it and
hear voices that differ from yours. I guess anyone (especially
anyone male) who disagrees with you is automatically wrong.
Have fun preaching to the choir; wake me when you get over
yourself.
Posted by: James Robertson at Jun 12, 2004 1:41:30 AM
It's one thing to say that someone is wrong for being exasperated -- and in this case I happen to agree that men are wrong to be exasperated. It's quite another to say that someone has a responsibility to refrain from stating their viewpoint.
Free speech is free speech. Everyone gets to say their peace, then everyone else gets to tell them that they are wrong. As soon as we start limiting certain people's right to speak, for whatever reason, it all quickly goes to hell. Citizens don't have the right to censor other citizens.
Besides, if we let them speak up, then they do us the favor of identifying themselves as people who still need to be convinced -- which is preferable to not knowing who we still need to convince. Let the stupid men state their stupid opinion. Help them to understand why they are wrong. Turn them from the dark side and enlist them in the cause.
Posted by: Kevin Schofield at Jun 12, 2004 2:15:31 AM
I would hope that all feminists, women and men alike, are exasperated at marginalization's persistence.
I suspect a feminist man's exasperation, not unlike a woman's, derives in part from the congenital nature of his station. Kierkegaard said, "How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted?" A similarly minded feminist man might ask "How did I come into a station of privilege in an unfair world? Why was I not consulted?"
As women bear the burden of being women in a man's world, feminist men bear the burden of being men in a man's world. I believe both burdens, while exhibiting vastly divergent triage priorities, fit the feminist model. And each is exasperating, in its own way, to the person who lives it.
Posted by: scott at Jun 12, 2004 4:32:00 AM
That's a nice way to stay completely inside the echo chambder, but it offers no chance to escape it and hear voices that differ from yours. I guess anyone (especially anyone male) who disagrees with you is automatically wrong.
You know, I would have put it a little nicer than that, but yeah: I'd take honesty over 'the feminist man's responsibility' any day. Sacrificing a productive and honest response for the general comfort of all involved is a crappy tradeoff, IMHO.
Posted by: Raena Armitage at Jun 12, 2004 5:40:23 AM
'ist' should not be limited to the female experience, what you assert carries over every and all categories of difference in a consumer society, where difference is as much a reason to prize something as to despise it. this is not meant to de-emphasize the feminist perspective, but to realize that the problem with voice is the problem with difference and that it varies across all populations.
Posted by: jeremy hunsinger at Jun 12, 2004 1:51:28 PM
I don't believe that dishonesty and silence are the only alternatives and i certainly do not believe that they are more desirable. Free speech is not so simple - Kevin, do you promote hate speech as part of free speech? When you have privilege in an environment, you must be conscientious of what you say and how you say it. Scott - certainly, men must bear the burden of being men and ideally, a feminist man understands that part of his burden is to be conscientious of how his voice can marginalize others and choose his expressions accordingly. Dissenting expressions are certainly welcome, but when an expression is theoretically supportive, but linguistically abrasive, it serves as neither a dissenting nor a supporting opinion; it serves as an oppressing expression. Jeremy - difference is certainly valuable, but not at the price of oppression.
Posted by: zephoria at Jun 12, 2004 2:57:05 PM
"Dissenting expressions are certainly welcome, but when an expression is theoretically supportive, but linguistically abrasive, it serves as neither a dissenting nor a supporting opinion; it serves as an oppressing expression."
Or, as the present thread illustrates, it serves as an opportunity for discourse, cooperative analysis, and learning more constructive ways to articulate feminist support.
Posted by: scott at Jun 12, 2004 5:07:54 PM
At the risk of turning this into a discussion of hate speech...
I am not a fan of hate speech -- on the other hand, whose definition of "hate speech" do we use to legislate restraints? I'd put limits on anonymous hate speech -- if you're going to say something publicly, you should be accountbale for it, and be willing (forced?) to debate its merits in an open forum. But beyond that, I really worry about the "tyrrany of the majority" creating a fluid definition of "hate speech" that serves their needs.
Posted by: Kevin Schofield at Jun 12, 2004 6:00:46 PM
An anecdote: at a Fortune 100 company's law department meeting to evaluate performance of annual department goals, the department staff sat around a long conference table. All attorneys (male) on one side, all paralegals/admin assistants (female) on the other. The department head (a woman who was also the assistant general counsel) arrived at the last goal in her evaluation. Diversity? she said. Haven't we beaten this horse to death?
Yeah. Right. I spoke up and said no, pointing out the obvious physical division right in front of them from my place as lowest ranking person at the far end of the table; it mirrored the formal and informal power structure of the department. She was defensive about this; I don't know if it was a case of a woman finally having enough privilege that she simply couldn't see the issue or whether she was trying to win over the political power in the room. Or perhaps it was just that a lowly junior staffer had questioned her authority in front of men or in front of the department...I don't know. I watched the body language around the table; the men bobbed their heads in agreement with her, the women crossed their arms and looked away. A couple women took me aside later and expressed their thanks, but said nothing in front of the men during the meeting.
What could the women say in that environment that would have been heard?
I'd left the department before the next annual meeting; I have little faith that things changed, particularly in a company where the only women that got ahead were more like men than women. This particular department head was a classic example, being in her forties, married without children, spouse's career subordinate to hers, mannish in behavior and attitude. Was it the way she spoke to and with men in power that got her to senior management? Was it the mindset in which this skill was based that prevented her from seeing the issue before her? Do men at large, particularly feminist men, see this, too? How does one point out the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room when everyone else appears to be completely unaware of its existence? and how to get to a point where ALL the women at the table feel completely safe and free to speak their mind?
And how do we tell the rest of the population that "shrill" might simply be the way we sound when we've gone WAAAYY too long without being heard?
Posted by: Rayne at Jun 12, 2004 10:54:02 PM
Dissenting expressions are certainly welcome, but when an expression is theoretically supportive, but linguistically abrasive, it serves as neither a dissenting nor a supporting opinion; it serves as an oppressing expression.
So who defines abrasive? I've seen too many potentially useful debates turn to crap because someone decided that the terms a particular person or group were using were not to their liking.
Posted by: Raena Armitage at Jun 13, 2004 6:52:17 AM
the worry i have in these debates has to do with.. um, i fear i'm going to express this badly.. let me call it the privilege to not be evil. that's what we get instead of the privileges of the oppressor's demographic. i think jumping on the original language was excellent, and pete's apology showed an understanding of the issue you raised. now i think the incumbent action on the part of a woman feminist is this situation is to find a male feminist a way out of being evil; to accept the apology, to re-examine the moral of the story as it were, and to do so publically. without a way out of having made a mistake the process of small course corrections that makes the only real road to progress stalls. privilege or not, we are humans, and our brains learn through reward systems. i think this is one of the ways you end up with people like james roberson up there; seeing those small corrections go unrewarded gives him internal justifications for dismissing the discourse altogether. i'm not making any excuses for his post, though i am trying to understand its context. i'm thinking that if he didn't need those justifications, he wouldn't have been motivated to post in the first place.
this was my problem with the left's critique of the right in the run up to the iraqi war- we were so harsh that the only way to cross over the middle was to publically declare yourself to have been evil, wrong, and/or stupid. there wasn't any way to slowly come around to the other point of view, and i think a lot of people realized they were wrong and ended up digging in deeper, because the humiliation of re-aligning themselves was too ego-destroying to face. we in the anti-war camp seemed to adopt the pov that that was all very tough for them, and they should just do The Right Thing, which involved eating a ton of crow right in fucking front of us. whatever one thinks of this morally its effectiveness sucks, historically.
the same thing can happen here. i'm not claiming it has, but it's the worry i have in the discourse. in the feminist discussion, as with all discussions of power inequality, our only gift to give men is the power to not be evil. we're doing a lot to make it generally desirable, and we must also make it publically attainable.
Posted by: quinn at Jun 13, 2004 7:33:52 AM
quinn, if we're going to use the Iraq War as an example, I beg to differ. Colin Powell exemplifies the example of the moderate's critique of the run-up to war; even in a position of some power he was completely and utterly ignored. As were any number of moderates, both on the right and left, I might point out.
The same goes for continuing gender inequities -- we are still up against a considerable number of people who are either completely blind and unable to see what they wreak or who are completely obsessed. How do we communicate with them? Keep in mind that this may be only 25 to 30% of the entire population, but they may be the segment with the greatest political power.
[An aside: I wonder what would happen if all working women participated in a general strike for one day? Hmm. Seems a shame to have to have this kind of thought three decades after Title VII.]
Posted by: Rayne at Jun 13, 2004 11:04:58 AM
what is marginalized mean? and who determines what it means to suffer. within suffering, consciousness and truth of being human comes to mind. A woman separated from her inner biologic self is a lost person afar from being human. Post Humanism is an act of self determination, and blashamy against biology. Such actions will react as the earth will react from greenhouse effects. The individual as an enginneered entity, with biologic clocks tampered with, will only give way to other genetic tampering as our quest to be immortal and to alter biologic clocks comes into being. Feminism is new and will end with the human race evolving into something quite horrific within the next generation of columbine misanthrops.
Posted by: rasha at Jun 13, 2004 10:52:19 PM
rasha, if you are right, then dentistry and lightbulbs are far more fundamental blashamies on what it means to be human than woman looking to be treated as equal citizens.
i know i'm responding to a troll, but i just love any oppurtunity to point out how unnatural our lives are now, with dentistry and lightbulbs in them. and the whole living past 35 thing. unnatural unnatural unnatural!
Posted by: quinn at Jun 14, 2004 1:25:39 PM
In response to Rayne's story above, and one in the original thread, a chunk of the problem is the number of people who are unwilling to speak up in public. Sure, YOU can go ahead and mention the gorilla, and I'll be glad you did, but I'M not mentioning the gorilla, nope, not me! I hate it. If people genuinely disagreed with Rayne, fine, then air out the issues, have a discussion about it. But the reason no one wanted to talk about it is that they knew she was right, and they were happy to have someone else do the dirty work and step around the gorilla and its shit. Either that, or they thought they deserved their privileged positions, perhaps even "merited" them, and any discussion of a hierarchy would have forced them to defend those thoughts.
Posted by: carla at Jun 14, 2004 4:56:59 PM
We-l-l-l...
I went back and read the posts that Pete was writing about, and *I* felt that they were really shallow. The assumption that anecdotal or even simple statistical discrepancies between numbers or prominence of women and men bloggers constitutes defacto proof of gender inequality or differences is exasperating to me, where "me" is female minority tech-enabled liberal. I would like to think that if "me" were a white male tech-enabled conservative that I would be similarly entitled to that reaction.
While it is true that Pete could have refrained from expressing his exasperation with the term "done to death," he was actually making the same point danah made in her rebuttal, which is that there are more interesting things to say about the difference between how men and women participate in the blogsphere. I think danah could have (as a woman who sympathizes with feminist males) cut him a little slack, enough to see that his tone and message was not actually as insulting as it may have first seemed.
I gather from reading the comments that we've long since moved from talking about Pete's post in specific to a kind of attitude in general. I think there is a lot to say about being dismissed, about being labelled shrill, etc. etc... but isn't it unfair to unload that on the first person who comes along and unwittingly pushes our buttons by picking the wrong words?
Posted by: wednesday at Jun 15, 2004 4:26:22 AM
Wednesday/Quinn - you're totally right and i definitely don't harbor anger towards Pete in any way. It's more that the situation prompted me to think more widely (which is why i pulled it to a new post). I was concerned about the theoretical underpinnings of the situation. Of course, reading my post, i also see how my beginning, which i wanted to frame that it came from that discussion, can also be read as it all being about Pete. And for that i apologize to both Pete and anyone else; it's not; i've long since accepted that apology and appreciated his willingness to speak up. The point of this post was to talk about attitudes in general, but my thinking came through that situation. This is one of the things about blogs - they become text and they become open to textual discussions that often leave traces that are hard to untangle.
Posted by: zephoria at Jun 15, 2004 11:49:20 AM
well quinn, this is the idea: that there are no ideas but in things: now is the spirit a thing: does it exist in things without a biologic brain. I often think my body is possesed buy thoughts not mine own. The thoughts of men have been inspired by women. Would there be a War and Peace story without the wife of Tolstoy: and by Tolstoy, who is it that we think of, the mrs or the great aberrant count. So all that remains now is a book that has been published the world over. So the thoughts inside the book are a thing once read. But what is a thought without the thing of biology: of passion and of hate and complete repulsion. Think of a dead rat in your refrigerator, and the bottle of ether that killed the rat. Would the milk still be drinkable in a nuclear explosion: or after a terrible fight with your a lover from the future. A lost soulmate found within the collective memory of fragmented blog entries? So how does the female factor become more then the flesh...or is there nothing better then the love and repulsion of flesh, live of dead: memories are like works spoken or read: the personal intercourse the process of passion naught now.
Say it: no ideas but in things: read it and rant the words: the lungs aching in the yell of hoarse voice...such is passion.
Posted by: rasha at Jun 15, 2004 11:55:43 AM
As for the general attitude ("when will the wimmin stop NAGging?") it ticks me off... but I think we all understand it, too. Sure, being ignored makes me want to yell, but when I finally get my voice at the table, I'd also like to keep it. There are lots of ways to get your message across, but charm works best.
haven't we beaten this horse to death?
and yet, still it lives!
Posted by: Wednesday at Jun 15, 2004 1:55:56 PM
difference is certainly valuable, but not at the price of oppression.
Maybe I'm being too sensitive but personally having someone telling me what I can and can't say sounds pretty oppressive.
I consider myself a feminist, I hate inequalities. But these things have to go both ways! Well I think they do anyway. Just because someone has a different viewpoint than you doesn't mean you should try to shut them up.
I have been very interested in some of the comments above, this is a great discussion. I was all ready to be angry at what I thought were extremely sexist words. Words which I felt were telling me to just shut up and be good. Which I thought was precisely the kind of attitude that we were trying to get rid of, for women anyway. But then I read further on and was somewhat mollified.
I still think however that it is a mistake to start telling people when they are allowed to speak. Maybe I look at it strangely but I do not think feminism is just an issue for women. If both sexes do not work together to solve issues then we are only going to create new ones. For every problem we solve we will be creating a new one.
Posted by: scottbp at Jun 17, 2004 1:48:51 AM
