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Don't Confuse Authentic Privilege, Which Should Be Extended to All, With "Privilege," Which Shouldn't

Thu, 2010-09-02 13:56 — figleaf

Quick follow up on my previous post about privilege. From comments in to the same Slacktivist post I cited previously, a commenter called “Mark Z” had this nifty illustration of the hidden benefits of classic “white, male Baptist” privilege.

It’s like running in a race in which half your competitors have had their shoes stolen. You benefit from it even if you didn’t steal their shoes. You don’t normally see that they have no shoes because they’re behind you and in a foot race you keep your eyes forward. If they fall far enough behind, you might forget they’re even in this race.

He said it here.

That analogy seems even more apt than the standard “wind at your back” or the snarky “born on 3rd base and thinks he hit a triple” ones.

On Extending the Authentic Privilege of Exemption from Collective Guilt

Thu, 2010-09-02 13:37 — figleaf

So a couple of weeks ago Slactivist said something that I, even though I’m not specifically a white male Protestant Baptist, should have said because, hey Baptist, Catholic, Unitarian, agnostic-but-with-a-vaguely-Protestant-sounding-last-name, it’s all the same thing with us people.

Head’s up: it starts out sounding ordinarily Jon-Stewart-y snarky…

Please forgive me for the actions of extremists I have never met who commit acts of violence that I have never advocated

As a white male Baptist, it is my duty today to denounce the violence perpetrated by Patrick Gray Sharp, 29, who yesterday attacked the police headquarters in McKinney, Texas, in a heavily armed but ineffectual assault involving a high-powered rifle, road flares, “gasoline and ammonium nitrate fertilizer.”

I understand that this denunciation must be swift and unambiguous and that, in the absence of such denunciations made by and on behalf of every and all white male Baptists, others are entitled to assume that every white male Baptist is fully in agreement with the actions of Patrick Gray Sharp and to therefore deny white male Baptists the rights others enjoy.

So I denounce this attack and state unequivocally that we white male Baptists do not believe in this kind of violent extremism. I beg you all not to condemn all of us for the actions of this lone member of our community, although of course I will understand if you decide that you must do so and will humbly accept whatever restrictions on our full participation in society that you see fit to impose. That’s only fair.

I further beg your forgiveness for my not denouncing this violent act sooner. Unlike the nearly identical failed attack in Times Square, this attack wasn’t the lead story on our local news and the newspaper I work for somehow didn’t mention it at all. Then today I was outside most of the afternoon cutting the grass and just didn’t hear about the story until now. I plead with you to understand that as soon as I learned of this incident, I rushed to post this denunciation.

Read the quote in context here.

...but the twist makes it not only generally relevant to the context of grossly unfair expectations that all even-vaguely Muslim people should apologize for and denounce violence committed by other equally vaguely Muslim people (even if they’re, say, Shiite and the perpetrator was Suni, even if they’re ethnically Persian or Turkic and the perpetrator was ethnically Arab or Pashtun.) The twist makes it appropriate to the context of sex, gender, and relationship blogs like this one. Slactivist continues…

UPDATE: Boy is my face red. This is so embarrassing — I totally skimmed past the fine print on the unwritten rules and completely missed the exemption for hegemonic classes. It turns out that we white people, males and Protestants never have to worry about extravagant displays of vicarious contrition. As a white male Protestant, apparently, I don’t need to promptly denounce every evil act committed by any and every other white male Protestant.

This is awesome. Do you realize how much time this is going to save me? Plus just the relief of no longer having to watch the news on pins and needles, worrying every time there’s a crime or a gun-nut on a spree that it’ll be some white male Protestant guy and that everyone is going to assume we’re all like that. What an enormous relief to be judged only as an individual and not prejudged according to the worst thing ever done by anyone ever claiming to belong to my faith community, or sharing my gender or my ethnicity. It’s not just a relief it’s a … oh, what’s the word? ... privilege. Yes, that’s what it is — a fantastic privilege.

Two points to this twist, incidentally.

1) If you’re white, male, and Protestant it really is a privilege that you don’t have to apologize ever time another fuckwad shoots up a school, a church, an office, a clinic, his family, random passers by, an Oklahoma City federal building, a Texas or California IRS office, random police officers, and so on. No, really, it’s a privilege. Not a resentment-driven, anxiety induced, demanded for male-privilege privilege, I mean it’s a real actual privilege. One that should be extended to anyone else who isn’t directly responsible for supporting, endorsing, instigating, or participating in such incidents should receive.

2) Yeah, Mary Daly was really separatist. Yeah, Catharine MacKinnon is really anti-fellatio. Yeah, Twisty Faster is really antagonistic towards men. And sure, somewhere, some time, someone who identifies herself as a feminist… or more to the point someone you identify as a feminist (even though like Lorena Bobbit or Wendy Vitters they aren’t) may have said or done something that hurt your feelings. But unless you want to start taking responsibility for the behavior of Timothy McVeigh, Dick Cheney, David Koresh, Scott Roeder, and Randall Terry and you might want to ask why you think every feminist should be held responsible for the most extremist, and occasionally even obscure feminist positions.

Of course none of this means one can’t take on responsibility for wrongs committed by others. Whether or not they resemble you in some way superficial or real. It just means your resemblance doesn’t oblige you to.

It's About Putting Shoes On Both Feet, Not On the Other Foot: Courtney Martin on the Myth of the Fairer Sex

Sun, 2010-08-01 17:38 — figleaf

Courtney Martin of TAPPED has an excellent, excellent post up about the pitfall of gender essentialism both outside feminism and (to a lesser extent as its influence wanes) in it.

Bitch Magazine co-founder Lisa Jervis wrote of this tendency in her powerfully original 2005 piece, “If Women Ruled the World, Nothing Would be Different.” She describe a disturbing rise in “femmenism,” in which all women, just by virtue of being female, are to be elevated and glorified. Instead of focusing on gender, as radical feminists should, she argues, feminists have become obsessed with women. This, she writes, “causes sloppy thinking, intellectual dishonesty, and massive strategic errors.”

...

There has been a lot of buzz in international development and feminist circles as of late about the rise of girls and women. Last year a video called “The Girl Effect,” produced by the Nike Foundation, went viral faster than a cute-cat clip, solidifying the suspicion that development dollars in the hands of girls and women are more bang for the buck. Microlending, Greg Mortenson’s girls’ schools, and community-education models like Tostan — all of the most beloved trends in the social change of the moment — are fueled by a belief in the goodness of girls and women.

As they should be. I, too, am perched upon “the girl effect” bandwagon, feminist flag flying high, wallet open, and heart happy. But just because we champion the notion that girls and women, when empowered — economically and educationally, have the capacity to change the whole dang world, it doesn’t mean that we have to deny their twin power for destruction. Just as we take female empowerment personally, we must take female cruelty and immorality personally. We must, at the very least, admit that it exists.

She said it here.

Yup. In places where gender equality is horrifically out of balance its tremendously effective to invest things like girl’s schools, women-side microlending, healthcare, legal reform, wage and workplace reform, and the whole power-balancing shebang.

But the reason repairing the imbalance is so effective specifically isn’t because women are somehow magically superior to men but because women aren’t meaningfully different from men. The differences being superficial, it makes no sense to withhold power or resources from women that are available to men.

But! Because the differences aren’t meaningful it also makes no sense to imagine that when women have equal resources and power to men they’ll be any more (or, of course, any less) responsible with their use of them.

The same would be true if the shoe were on the other foot — men kept in subservience would also be seen to have the qualities ascribed to women: wisdom, patience, resourcefulness, compassion. (See the cartoonish treatment of the eponymous character in Rudyard Kipling’s Gunga Din, the waterboy who proves to be “a better man than I am” in the eyes of the Colonial narrator.) But I digress…

Speaking of shoes and other feet, though, a good analogy would be what kind of assumptions one might make about a society which, for whatever mad reason, had shoes only for their left feet. Yes, you’d quickly note that everyone’s right feet were more tender and delicate, more sensitive, more vulnerable, even more tentative when walking or working. And you’d also notice that when violence was perpetrated kicks would inevitably be delivered with the rough, tough, and shoe-wearing left feet. It would be silly, though, to imagine that there were essential differences in the feet themselves rather than the fact that they weren’t treated equally.

It would also be silly to imagine that if the shoes were literally on the other feet that people would be any less inclined to kick their neighbors than before. And it’s just as silly to imagine that women with power and resources equal to men would be any more (or any less) virtuous than men. That’s no reason not to give everyone two shoes, though, any more than it’s a reason for women not to have the same power and resources as men. The benefits in all cases tend to far outweigh the differences.

On Dismissing "Vanilla" Sex As Common But Not "Salty" Sex... Even Though Salt Is Common Too

Tue, 2010-06-22 16:10 — figleaf

In comments to my post Ok, Time to Stop Treating Healthy Vanilla Relationships as if We Already Know Everything That Needs to be Known About Them ImogenQuest said

Even the label “vanilla” is interesting in that respect. I noticed the other day that, as I’ve gotten older, the taste of vanilla is no longer bland/neutral/sweet. It tastes that way to kids, and artificial vanilla is like that, but real vanilla is dark, smoky and spicy as well as sweet. Make of that what you will.

I say oh heck yeah!

Like a lot of other heavily-oxidized aromatic natural ingredients vanilla’s awesomely complex. And, at least until they synthesized vanillin and started putting it into everything on the planet, it was considered exotic, erotic, and mysterious. But they put it in everything not because it’s cheap but because it’s delicious! Or check this out — you know what ingredient is even more basic, universal, and “generic” than vanilla? Salt, right? And yet nobody scorns someone else for being sexually “salty.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Puts a Spotlight on Trafficking in the U.S.

Mon, 2010-06-21 23:42 — figleaf

Katy of Jezebel passes along some news from UPI (and elsewhere) that now she’s in charge of the State Department Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is following up on her interest in human trafficking that goes back to her alliance with the late Senator Paul Wellstone in the 1990s.

There’s a first time for everything: the US State Department’s annual report on human trafficking has included a rating for the United States. “We believe it is important to keep the spotlight on ourselves,” explained Hillary Clinton.

She said it here.

Incidentally, what’s significant about trafficking isn’t how open-eyed victims are going into their situation. Nor is it how bad things were, or even how much worse they were before they left their homes. It’s whether and how easily they can get out of their situation. And from slaves and convicts transported to America in the 18th Century to the “owe my soul to the company store” miners and loggers of the 19th Century to the sharecroppers and “adopted” orphans of the 20th to sex workers, agricultural workers, domestic servants, and industrial laborers today the U.S. has had an ongoing history of pretending trafficking is somebody else’s problem.

Good for Sec. Clinton.

Oh yeah, and fuck all the assholes who claim it only counts if you’re trafficked for (commercial) sex. It certainly does count, of course, it’s just not the whole story. And never has been.

Lindsay Beyerstein on Sarah Palin: Feminism Being a Spectrum and Not a Point, There Can Be Both Good and... Very Bad Feminists

Mon, 2010-06-21 15:09 — figleaf

Summary: There are plenty of different schools of feminism, including some that are in conflict with others. Sarah Palin often sounds like she belongs to the “difference” or essentialist school of feminism from the 1970s and early 1980s. That’s legitimate feminism but it also puts her in pretty stark opposition to, say, equally real (and in my opinion more legitimate) classic NOW-style feminism, radical feminism, 2nd-wave feminism, equality feminism, 3rd-wave feminism, libertarian feminism…

Cool distinction about people like Sarah Palin and feminism from Lindsay Beyerstein over at Big Think

Arguing about whether Sarah Palin is a feminist is like arguing about whether a framed pile of cat puke is art. It’s a pointless semantic dispute. Why not save time and concede the premise? Okay, it’s art, but it’s the worst art I’ve ever seen.

She said it here.

I think that works pretty well. Maybe 10-15 years ago Michael Moore had a television series where he did his Bowling for Columbine/Roger and Me schtick in generally nicely-paced 10-15 minute segments. I didn’t see very many episodes (I’m not sure how many episodes there were) but in one of them he managed to get himself invited on a skeet-shooting trip with the wives of a bunch of conservative Republican congressmen.

He seemed to get along well enough with them, and they with him, but at one point he made a leading statement like “you know, I didn’t think women could be so handy with a shotgun. You’re better than a lot of men I know.” There was a little general laughter and one or another of the women said something like “women can be better at a lot of things.” He said something like “maybe some of you could run for Congress, you might be really good at that too.” And the women just sort of clammed up and looked at each other like that was a terrible idea. And that seemed like the point where he wore out his welcome.

Fast forward to today and, thanks in surprisingly large part to Sarah Palin, I don’t think Moore would have gotten the same shocked or embarrassed silence were he to try the same stunt now.

Which means that on the one hand you can’t deny that Palin’s done as much to increase the space in which gender isn’t a barrier to political office as, say, Hillary Clinton has. Probably more than, say, Nancy Pelosi.

On the other hand, her policies and the policies of the women she’s promoting are…

Anyway, that’s why I like the way Beyerstein put it.

I just gotta say, by the way, that from a rhetorical perspective it’s actually a really good idea to say that Palin’s a feminist, even while saying she’s the worst feminist you’ve ever seen. The idea that feminism is a monolith is so ingrained. It’s ingrained only in ardent anti-feminists but even among people who if you were going down a checklist would come out better qualified as feminist than, oh, say, Palin would. Acknowledging Palin as a perfectly real but regressively-conservative feminist, like acknowledging Donna Hughes or Ann Althouse as feminists who are also regressively neoconservative or callously libertarian, might make it a lot easier for the vast majority of people, mostly other women, who excuse themselves with “I’m not a feminist but…”

Because an awful lot of the time the “but…” isn’t the position of the majority of feminists in the first place.

Update: In comments TLT added an excellent point: “[I]n the process of trying to argue that Palin isn’t a feminist you’d almost be forced to reduce feminism to a checklist of beliefs and behaviors (as anti-feminists frequently do) just to demonstrate that she fails the test.”

Socially-Conservative Definitions of Porn Require Invisibility and Othering of Those With Less Narrow Definitions

Sat, 2010-06-12 16:55 — figleaf

If you, like the organizers and presenters at the Stop Porn Now conference underway in Boston this weekend, accept the strict definition of “pornography” I mentioned in Define Your Terms Before Debating: The Social Construction of Porn and Erotica then you’re going to have to go to considerable effort to deny that people like Matie Fricker and Molly Adler, the narrators in the video below, exist.

Again, it’s highly unlikely that Fricker and Adler are any more tolerant of exploitative, coercive, violating, violent, high-risk, unsafe, objectifying, and disrespectful porn than they’re likely to tolerate dangerous and phthalate-laden sex toys. But they call what they do sell “porn.”

Thinking Outside the Coffin: Non-Stereotypical, Nonviolent Solutions to Zombie Invasions

Sat, 2010-06-12 16:38 — figleaf


Image “The Shape of Things to Come” via bookofjoe.com.

You know, I’m sorry, I know this is supposed to be a blog about the sociology and politics of sex, gender, and relationships but this image via cool-hunter extraordinaire Bookofjoe really nicely illustrates my strongly-held belief that unexamined stereotypes limit our options. With a minor in a belief that non-violent, non-angry, and non-macho solutions exist to many problems… if we take the time (or, in the case of zombies, have the time) to think about them.

Generally speaking the cliché response to zombie invasions is to break into the local WalMart, smash a display case, rip out an armful of shotguns and shells, load ‘em up and blast away at the lurching, hulking, tireless, persistent but also… stupid-as-an-upside-down-bucket monsters.

And yet nearly all modern WalMarts have track machines. So as long as you’re already in there being implacably pursued all you really need to do is get the sucker on there, set the speed to “lurch”, and Bob’s your uncle.

An even greener solution would be to put them on treadmills so they could generate electricity while lurching.

I’m just sayin’

John Hawks on Misunderstandings About the Sex of Eurasian Human's Neandertal Ancestors

Sat, 2010-05-15 15:13 — figleaf

Anthropologist john hawks weblog uses a rather blunt stick to beat what’s at hints of the dominant but bogus “no-sex” class paradigm, and at worst plays to what could be called ancient racism. The issue? Genetic assays show that, thanks to interbreeding, modern humans have traces of Neanderthal genes… but no evidence of Neandertal genes in maternal mitochondrial DNA. If you want to skip ahead the last sentence reveals the problem.

I keep seeing people, who really ought to know better, saying that the new Neandertal genome results show that the gene flow must have been Neandertal men mating with modern human women, and not the other way around.

You see, they’re fixated on the idea that the mtDNA showed no signs that the Neandertal clade survived into the present-day population. That result really convinced some people that interbreeding was impossible. They’re flummoxed that some of the rest of the genome has significant signs of intermixture. It’s like their world is spinning out of control. I’m not naming any names, but if you’ve followed much of the press around the Neandertal genome, you’ve probably seen this suggestion.

I don’t know why it hasn’t occurred to them that the Neandertal mtDNA type was probably lost because of natural selection.

To avoid raising the awful specter of Darwin, they’ve been talking about weird mating restrictions. Well, I suppose that if you really have to find a way to get Neandertal nuclear genes into us, without bringing mtDNA along, a total lack of Neandertal women contributing genes is formally one way to get that.

I’d just like to see these people explain how exactly we managed not to get any Neandertal Y chromosomes, either.

He said it here.

If your biology’s a little shaky you just need to know the Y chromosome (which determines gender) is passed down only through male parents, mitochondria only by female parents. (X chromosomes are shared by both genders. They’re more easily mixed and so they’re not as helpful for determining geneology as mtDNA and Y chromosomes.)

Anyway, the point is that a) it’s really hard to explain how natural selection (itself a taboo topic) can winnow out genes and b) easy to play on stereotypes of prognathic cavemen dragging winsome and probably-unwilling modern-human women back to their caves and so given a choice? We’re going to get a lot more of the latter than the former.

Craigslist Ad Reveals Misconceptions About Feminism, Jessica Wakeman Provides Reason For Optimism

Sat, 2010-05-15 14:53 — figleaf

And speaking of The Frisky, earlier this month Jessica Wakeman wrote Craigslist Dating Experiment: Looking For A “Feminist Man”. A young woman wanted to meet a compatible young man and got a good cross section of how people perceive, or maybe more accurately misperceive feminism.


[Alexandra ] Tweten posted her ad under the heading “Looking for a liberal guy”:

You are between 21 and 27, smart, and NOT a creeper. Do not respond unless you consider yourself a feminist/pro-choice. I would love it if you have good grammar, too. I don’t really have a type but send a pic and describe what we have in common.

Tweten received 68 responses for her Craiglist personals ad. Here are some of the doozies:

Real men do no [sic] like left wing feminists. Just saying.
Feminists killed Marriage and Trust [sic] between men and women. That’s why there are so many divorces and single parents in the western world.
I hope you wrote that ad from the kitchen, where you belong.
Well, I’m definitely a feminist: I mare sure they pay their own way, that they make the first move a fair share of the time, allow them to drive and make a fair share of the plans and decisions, even!

And my favorite:

I am a single white college educated 27 year old male who is a strong believer in Female Surpremacy [sic] and Feminism. I love everything about it.

Fortunately, the majority of Alexandra Tweten’s responses weren’t this bad.

Wakeman said it here.

Because yup, them dang feminiminists are all female supremacists and they invented divorce just to show how much they hate men. Because, you know, divorce only hurts men. But for once I don’t want to dwell too much on the negativity.

Wakeman says its a shame that Tweten chose not to share any of the positive responses she said she got. And I agree. The good news, I think, comes in the last lines of her post.

Maybe some losers got their jollies off by writing obnoxious responses to Alexandra Tweten’s personal ad looking for a feminist man. But I’m also inclined to think some guys just seem hella oblivious.

I think that’s about right. There’s definitely more to sex and gender equality than just saying, or thinking, or believing, or even being for equality. But once you start actually doing the work it turns out it’s both a little easier and a lot more rewarding than listening to people like Rush Limbaugh trying to define it for you.

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