Is something missing or am I just not woke enough?
1: The latter. Wait a second while I play the trumpet into your ear.
Missing link? (Of the hyper sort, not the god of the gaps kind.) I hope so because I like how doing so would transform your commentary into a much more personal and difficult mini-essay.
Link. But it's mostly just sweeping through my FB feed. Either an isolated "me too", or with commentary, or with the original "If everybody who has been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote "Me too." as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem. Please copy/paste." addendum
Thanks. My female FB friends are either not woke enough to know about these things, or so woke that they only comment on it cryptically. I have a wokeness excluded middle.
4: I knew what you were talking about, heebie. I so goddamned woke.
But I still have the soul of a troll. I keep on wanting to post something as if I'm a wannabe starlet, letting Harvey know I'm still available.
It's depressing, but it's also about the incredible range of things that are sexism/harassment. It's not just about the owner of the summer camp I worked at when I was 19 who was a massive lech who creeped on most of the female employees, it's also about the pissant junior associate who thought a good strategy when I wouldn't cave on some stupid point he was making in a LEGAL NEGOTIATION was to call me "uppity" (repeatedly, when I literally said "excuse me, what did you just call me") in order to try to throw me off my game.
He did not win the argument.
That would boil my blood to the point where it might actually throw me off my game had I any game.
I just read the follow-up article to the sexual harassment study in anthropology and had a (awful) epiphany about my time in the field. So then I went back to my normal state of denial.
But I'm so woke, I probably think this song is about me assume every woman has been harassed. And I assume women who say they haven't, are unobservant. We all have to have some assumptions about people and that's one of mine.
Some women who you consider unobservant are probably just reform.
Hmmm, I meant some of that to have a strike through but now it's super unclear.
But I'm so woke, I probably think this song is about me assume every woman has been harassed. And I assume women who say they haven't, are unobservant. We all have to have some assumptions about people and that's one of mine.
I assume people are can openers.
My main takeaway is that my 30+ year crush* on Alyssa Milano makes me a feminist. Maybe the greatest feminist.
*I even bought Wen hair products in her endorsement, before they were revealed as causing bald spots.
14: But everybody knows that you knew about Harvey and you didn't warn us!
I was too busy purchasing celebrity-endorsed shampoos.
I think we can all agree that Halford dropped the ball on Harvey, but I think pretty much everyone in Texas knew in advance it was on the way.
Yeah, I'd run from a wen with bald spots.
And I assume women who say they haven't, are unobservant
This kind of runs counter to the "Believe women" angle, doesn't it? I have a couple of friends who are feeling pretty alienated right now, because this whole process is doing a good job of counting them as not really women and/or accusing them of false consciousness.
From the conversations I've had, women discount behaviours that I'd classify because they're not 'serious' enough or they otherwise somehow don't count. The Metafilter thread on this provides some examples - like a woman who said the only thing that had ever happened to her was that her boss said she was the latest secretary he was sleeping with but that didn't count because his wife was there and everyone knew he was joking.
I'm not on the-book-of-evil but have seen this on rettiwt. Agree yuck re having to regurgitate to validate. Did find was helpful to be v concrete in providing examples to partner, he knew happened but had no clue re frequency and grossness. Latter largely bc on day to day basis I'm just not going to bother to mention it, and bc currently it's mostly low level street harassment rather than at office.
Have found myself recently having to fight the impulse to tell catcallers and inappropriately insinuating retail dudes etc they should grow up as I'm - literally - old enough to be their mother.
I guess, but right now it sure seems like making people understand that suffering through sexual assault/harassment/grossness is an absolutely ordinary, consistent part of women's lives seems way more important than mollifying the feelings of the number of women who have been lucky enough to never have experienced that. Plus there is absolutely legitimate false consciousness (I think it is better thought of as "willful ignorance") of these issues on the part of both women and men, even if that doesn't mean that everyone is being willfully ignorant.
22 to 19. Don't know why I'm getting sucked into this.
There's a 'not me' in my feed -- someone who totally has the right values. I think she's more likely mis-remembering the 70s (she's my age) than being the unicorn.
One can hope that when my granddaughter's peers are doing this in whatever medium they do such things, the unicorns will be on the other side.
19: Yeah, 'false consciousness' is a fraught term -- it reads to me as 'completely baseless accusation that the person in question isn't competent to understand their own experience or watch out for their own interests.' If you say that someone is attributing 'false consciousness' to another, the person who's making that attribution is a priori wrong and offensive. And that's why people very very rarely (never?) do attribute false consciousness to anyone else in those words.
But... I 'me too'ed on FB. But I only did it after spending an hour or two waffling about whether anything that had happened to me really did qualify as sexual harassment: I've been harassed much less than most, I have the impression. And it took me an hour of 'well, that wasn't really all that bad, and that other time wasn't a big thing, and that other stuff was just par for the course, and so on' and I finally realized that if I was stewing over that many incidents, I was being kind of silly wondering if I really qualified as someone who had been sexually harassed. So, if you want to talk about 'false consciousness', I wouldn't use those words, but I'd diagnose myself with it.
I don't know your friends' experiences, and if they've never been harassed at all that's certainly possible and they've been fortunate. But I don't think you should think of an implication of 'false consciousness' -- that is, that any given woman who doesn't think of herself as having been harassed may discounting or ignoring real harassment as not a big enough deal to count -- as automatically self-discrediting. People do think that way about their own experiences, or at least I do.
god is it uncomfortable to dutifully perform vulnerability for the sake of spreading awareness about how fragile our safety is.
Me too, and heartfelt thanks for saying this.
Then, arguably, the best feminism would involve using the hash tag to imply that another commenter was sexually involved with the fixtures at a Chinese restaurant.
Fuck this meme so hard. Good dudes knew it was this bad. Why do women have to turn themselves inside out for men to get it? Who is this going to reach? The good dudes I know find this utterly wrenching. Everyone else? Probably going about their business. Will my voice make it more meaningful? Like the dudes who suddenly realize when they have daughters what cards life deals girls? Did they hear when their wife dropped clues? I want to be patient, but I have had this conversation enough. I am a private person. Of fucking course I've been harrassed and assaulted. And none of my friends list who doesn't already know that about me should need for me to post it on Facebook to decide to be a decent fucking human being. I hope it didn't cost any of my female friends a moment's pain to post their truth, but I know it cost a lot of them. They think it will make a difference in the world. I wish I could summon their optimism.
Like someone else said, I want to see a meme where men admit fucking up on this issue. It probably wouldn't budge anyone over to the side of the angels, but it might be nice for them to hurt over this issue instead, just this one fucking time.
Like someone else said, I want to see a meme where men admit fucking up on this issue.
Oh my yes. "Here guys, let us ladies clean up the mess you made yet again."
I went back and forth before posting, because I do think it's problematic to put the burden of action or disclosure on the victims. Given that it was becoming a *thing*, though, and I'm already semi-public about (some of) my experiences being sexually abused and harassed, I wanted to post to let other people there know that they weren't alone.
I mean, IDAF about the people who didn't know or care about this before. BUT last year I had mentioned, offhand, something about being a survivor, and a freshman came up to me later to say she had never heard anyone say that aloud, and that she was so relieved to hear that she wasn't alone. So now I'm more likely to disclose, even when I feel uncomfortable. This works for me, and I don't think everyone else needs to, but I do feel like it's doing a tiny bit of possible good.
I've been "lucky" in the most egregious instances of street harassment I've seen have been happening to other people, though I've had my share. The thing that I get exasperated about -- that I don't think is really false consciousness, but something like it -- is the kind of thing that people just pretend is "normal." I have too many female friends and relatives who will insist that the significant restrictions they place on themselves for walking, traveling, and using public space are just "what you should do" to "keep yourself safe" and not a disturbing set of constraints that even their most vulnerable male friends rarely abide by.
Of course, I do some version of it too -- when I walked into the hotel gym tonight and prepared to take off my glasses and do yoga, I checked first to see where the exits were and make sure that I wasn't positioning myself such that someone could prevent me from escaping. It took all of three seconds, and I hate that this is even a thought that passes through my mind, but it is indisputably true that faced with a deserted, isolated gym with no security cameras, my mind went first to "How do I keep myself safe?"
****
The best tweet I saw on this topic was "Men, don't worry about protecting us. Just STOP protecting your rapey friends."
(Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that safety measures can't be useful; I'm arguing that women accept as necessary an enormous amount of curtailing their own behavior that in a just world, or Sweden, would be far less necessary. And yes, I know there is sexual violence in Sweden.)
That's just it, right? I posted a twitter rant yesterday that ended up being MUCH longer than I originally anticipated, about how this stuff is just a pervasive cloud that we basically have to wade through on a daily basis. There's so much of it that I have literally FORGOTTEN incidents in my life until someone else mentions something and it immediately reminds me "oh yeah, that happened to me too!"
I changed the link in my name to the beginning of my twitter rant, if anyone's interested. There's some...stuff...in there.
Everyone being cranky about the reactions this is drawing, yeah, I know how you feel. I was ambivalent about joining in, and now sort of irritated by the reactions, which feels unfair because I don't know what I want from people.
It absolutely should not be necessary but it has affected me, a white male, seeing it in my circle of friends, not just Twitter users at large like when it was #YesAllWomen. It's made me consider that although I can't think of any way I've committed, enabled, or ignored harassment or abuse, I did at some points in the past make sexist jokes ("ironically"), and my long-term cluelessness means I've likely, without realizing it at the time, enabled someone, or at least made some women feel like I'm not someone who would help.
I confess to being slightly annoyed about some people posting "me too" when I know for a fact that they are the reason that other people are also now able to post "me too".
Trying to think about what I want from men generally (which is obviously not what all women want from men generally):
(1) Don't take responsibility on behalf of your sex generally for men being terrible if you're not the one doing this stuff. Sexual harassment and assault isn't an inevitable outcome of a miasma of testosterone, it's something individual men do because they decided to. If you're not someone who's harassing or assaulting people, 'taking responsibility' for it turns it into some sort of vague thing that's not really wrong, you're just supposed to feel guilty about for no good reason. (This may be an idiosyncratic reaction on my part, but I feel strongly about it. If you're going to 'take responsibility' for something, I expect you to know specifically and in detail what you did wrong and how to not do it again. If you don't know that, but you're still convinced you should feel guilty, think harder and figure it out before you say anything about it.)
(2) Implicit in the above is #notallmen. Which I genuinely believe. But #lotsofmen. I don't literally expect everyone to believe every single thing any woman says about sexual assault or harassment. But I do expect that if you hear something, your sense of the odds that it's true relies on the fact that harassment and assault are really, really common, and that a very large percentage of men are willing to commit them.
(3) Following up on that last, if you hear something about a man you know? You get to say "He wouldn't do that" for your two or three closest friends -- someone where they have keys to your apartment and you know all the inner details of their emotional life. Anyone you don't know that well? You don't know if he'd harass or assault a woman, and you shouldn't form an opinion based on your guesses about his character. Guys who would do that sort of thing are very common, and you know lots of them, whether or not you know who they are.
This is irritable and not completely thought-out, but it's what I'm thinking.
Maybe I am. You want to make something out of it?
You should randomly assign men to hear true or false stories of sexual harassment.
Or maybe sometimes Bayesian base-rate adjustments work.
All of 38 seems sensible to me.
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Was this what someone mentined recently as a lock for the Physics Nobel?
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Oh, huh. I guess I should throw in:
(4) Once you've become aware that someone you know is harassing people, do something about it. I don't know what, depends on context, depends on what it is you know, depends on how sure you are about it. Use your judgment, but don't just ignore it as not your problem. And I do believe that if you're paying attention and starting from the premise that this stuff does happen quite a lot, and that people you know are very probably doing some of it, you're likely to notice some of it in a timely enough fashion that you could productively react somehow.
Don't take responsibility on behalf of your sex generally for men being terrible if you're not the one doing this stuff.
I dunno. I find myself wanting to defend the concept of collective responsibility, which I don't think one has to conflate with personal guilt.
I mean, when my lovely niece posts her awful little story on Facebook, I have to think: I've been an adult on this planet for decades, and have known this shit was going on since I first came of age. The fact that it's still going on is "our" fault.
No, I didn't vote for Trump and wouldn't have considered it, but "we" did vote for the pussy-grabber - or a near-plurality of us did, anyway.
I think the whole "guilt" thing is a real problem for people, in the sense that they don't like feeling guilty, and the only mechanism they have for not feeling guilty is ignoring or deflecting the problem: saying #notallmen or "I don't do that."
Perhaps I'm solving the same problem a different way: Acknowledging my own passivity as a contributing factor, while still understanding that it's not entirely clear to me what I need to do or should have done.
46: If you want to feel responsible for not healing the world, that's legit. We all should in different ways about different problems.
I just want to avoid the kind of feeling of 'responsibility' that puts you in solidarity with Harvey Weinstein as both men who are part of the problem, and need to think deeply about your relationship to masculinity (and you didn't say you were, I'm just redescribing the reaction I dislike). If you're not, yourself, abusing women, then you should be treating and thinking of men who do as people who are doing something notably wrong -- not something that's on a continuum with the sort of thing that's an inevitable part of participating in our messed up society. (If you are, yourself, abusing women, of course, quit it.)
I mean, I feel bad about Trump and I feel responsible for Trump, but I don't feel guilty about Trump. Is that coherent? I'm not sure.
It's not terribly coherent. If you feel responsible for something that happened, and it's a bad thing, you should feel guilty about it, because you helped make it happen (or stood by and let it happen). I suppose the exception would be if the bad thing wasn't a reasonably foreseeable result of your actions.
I can reconcile that by putting it as "I feel responsible for doing something about Trump." Whether or not I was any part of the cause of his being in power, I have a responsibility to do what I can to make it stop.
There is also a distinction between being responsible for someone and being responsible for an event. LB's mother and father are responsible for LB being born, but they aren't responsible for LB because she's now an independent adult.
I raised him to be racist, but not that stupid.
Going presidential bc in part this is my son's, not my, story, but seems relevant and perhaps helpful on the male responsibility-awareness-action axis.
I have since he was v young told my son (fill in age appropriate as needed from this point on) about concrete instances when i stood up to bullies-harassers on behalf of others, as well as providing practical examples of how to discourage bullies-harassers from targeting yourself. And I've been very very clear that i fully expect him to do the right thing when needed.
In ~6th grade he began telling us about the notorious reputation of a gym teacher as a hideous misogynist. He himself hadn't heard or seen anything yet, but i made clear if the stories were true i absolutely expected him to stand up to support his female colleagues.
In 8th grade the asshole struck, systematically humiliating one young woman. Her female classmates closed ranks in the moment. And i didn't know anything about it until late that night when my kid asked me to read a detailed written statement he'd spent the evening drafting, addressed to the school administration, with the express aim of making it near impossible for the school to blow off the young women's collective complaint. He turned it in the next day, had a follow up meeting, and the asshole is no longer allowed to interact with the young woman he targeted and is juuuuust enough less horrible to have kept his job.
That's what you can do - speak up AND RAISE YOUR SONS TO SPEAK UP.
Indeed. Although, WTF? The girls in the class complained en masse, and a statement from one boy was what made the difference? I question the school's decisionmaking authorities.
I didn't read "closed ranks" that way.
I guess you didn't say that -- the school might plausibly have responded to the girls' complaints alone. Never mind, this is a topic that makes me cross.
Indeed. Young women en masse in prior grades had spoken up and quelled his shittiness somewhat with respect to their own classes - they are the ones doing the heavy lifting here, my kid isn't a hero, he just did the minimally decent thing. I will say though that none of the other young men did jack shit.
'Closed ranks' is ambiguous as to whether the girls went to the school about it, but she referred to the 'young women's collective complaint', which isn't. Anyway, well done young whatever name is appropriate for the son of sissi of bavaria.
Yep. You read 'closed ranks" right. The school administration does kind of suck.
The young women closed ranks physically in the moment and complained en masse. They learned from their foresisters! What a pedagogical tradition this school is fostering! Impossible to know if my kid's contribution made a material difference except that the young women felt supported and he acted to place down a marker of human* decency.
*not male, just human.
I assume human decency can be marked with a small piece of plastic, like the kind golfers use.
Use to mark the spot of their ball. Obviously golfers have no decency.
The 'not a hero' thing is funny, because I feel strongly on both sides of it. You're absolutely right, he's not a hero, that is the minimally decent thing to do. On the other hand, if we could get most people up to a minimally decent standard like that, the world would be a wonderfully improved place, and it's absolutely fantastic seeing a kid step up to that level.
So, your kid's great! But what does he expect, a cookie? But he's great!
I vacillate.
I had a brownie I would share except I just ate it.
All I have left for treats is two clementines that I don't trust because one from the same bag yesterday was all dried inside.
A middle schooler standing up against a horrible teacher is generally commendable. The power dynamic there is strongly against doing such things. I think a cookie is warranted.
I think the whole 'cookie' thing really is misdirected. Reward behavior you want to see more of.
I'm shocked that LB has come out against giving cookies to kids.
67: Yes. And I recall my gym teachers as fairly terrifying.
We made clear we are proud although in undemonstrative duty bound etc fashion.
Sounds like a good job threading the needle.
At any rate, the point isn't cookie-for-rudolf* it's to provide a concrete ex of what you can do, and for God's sake if a weedy 13 year old can do it so can grown ass men.
*Rudolf 1 if you please not tawdry double suicide, thx.
1: I was offline over the weekend and Monday and was surprised at what had blown up so intensely & so quickly. On Wednesday or early Thursday, the talk was about the intent/effectiveness of a women's twitter boycott -- it was odd to hear this big thing had come and gone since.
The cost is absolutely on the wrong people, but in my experience (and as we discussed in the catcalling threads), having someone near the victim seems to deflect most instances of predatory behavior, which means it's no surprise that our baseline assumptions (for frequency, etc.) are way off.
If somebody gave me weed, I'd have been more brave in high school.
And you would have mastered even fewer tenses.