Thanks for the post, it is nice to see a lot of this laid out.
As for my comments that you highlighted, I understand that they had no place in the discussion that was taking place. Sorry about that. At risk of starting another gigantic clusterfuck of a thread though, I do not think they are wrong, and especially not absurdly wrong, in so many ways.
Dude. This is very, very good stuff. Good to the point where I can't think of anything to add because adding something would imply disagreement.
Tia! Back with a bang!
Thank you for saying all this.
The longer version of this post
I'm trying to imagine it. ... No, it's gone.
Wow. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to find the nearest woman and just hug her and tell her I absolutely love and value her, just the way she is. I'm not sure such behavior is appropriate for work, though. I guess I'll save it for when I get home tonight.
Thanks for the post, Tia.
The part that I think especially deserves highlighting, especially because I think it may be novel to Unfogged (and broader) thinking, is the fallacy of proclaiming that feminist women are hypersensitive to sexism.
Before I became a feminist, I did not experience sexism because I was too busy absorbing it, changing and mutating myself to become exactly what was desired of me. No, I couldn't become the little pixie hipster all the guys seemed to want, so instead I tried to become a guy. I quickly found that my efforts weren't good enough. I had to be a different person to deserve love. I was supposed to speak in a high-pitched baby voice and cock my head to the side and clutch my knees to my chest and emulate the posture of someone who is afraid of being raped in order to be truly sexy.
Women who do this, who tie themselves in mental and physical knots to be what men seem to want, end up, then, earning the hatred of individual men who don't want that and the hatred of women who can't. Hence the murderous hatred for Paris Hilton. It's not fucking funny.
So, as an undesirable outsider, someone who neither fit in as "attractive woman" nor as "man," I found all my efforts to earn love had marginalized me even further. It was around this time that I learned not to give a shit anymore. It was when I became insensitive to being ignored and insulted by men that I became a feminist. Being a feminist, for me, meant I didn't have to be hurt anymore.
But feminism is also about looking at women who aren't feminists, remembering what it feels like to be hurt, constantly, by the ignorant, casual talk of men, and to say, "That's not okay. Stop doing that. You're hurting her."
Not to violate too much the hugfest, dude, but
This is the kind of thing that makes me want to find the nearest woman and just hug her and tell her I absolutely love and value her, just the way she is.
I think I just threw up in my mouth.
s/b "the hatred of women who can't be that."
9: This is the kind of thing that makes me want to find ttaM and just hug him and tell him I absolutely love and value him, but only of he rinses out his mouth first.
Wow. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to find the nearest woman and just hug her and tell her I absolutely love and value her, just the way she is.
God damnit Brock, you're forgetting the distinction between a class and individual members of a class. This is exactly what Tia is complaining about. Please make sure you're hugging a woman who has been victimized by unfair standards of some sort, instead of assuming that every woman needs a hugging.
They all have, though. (It's of course okay to pretend otherwise for the purpose of your joke.)
9- please don't throw up in your mouth, ttaM. The empathy would of course be purely cynical. I'm really just trying to get in my co-workers' pants. (Which I will subsequently criticize for being too large.)
Feel better?
I was going to post a relevant anecdote here, but I think it's going to be long. I'll put it on my blog.
Understand that if lots of women say something is important, it is. Your opinion, as a man, about the extent and nature of the problem is not valuable when the specific problem pertains to women's experience... So especially on occasions when you get a basically uniform chorus saying they experience some aspect of society as harmful, and your response is that it is not important, you're wrong, and you're being a dick. If you think it might be a little important, but not quite as important as we say it is, you’re still wrong.
Couple of points here:
First, note that this blog is a) very small and b) very unrepresentative. It's quite possible to have a uniform chorus of women here saying that something is important (and someone is being a dick), regardless of the opinions of, say, millions of Chinese women, thousands of women without internet access, or a few hundred women who happen to be commenting elsewhere. Unfogged /= the world.
Second, and more important, there is a difference between "something that lots of members of set X think is a problem for set X" and "something that actually is a problem for set X".
More Americans think that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction are a problem for America than think that global warming is a problem for America. But if I say "no, you are wrong, Iraqi WMD are a non-issue and global warming is real and dangerous for Americans" then I hope not to be dismissed as being a dick. People are not the final authority on the details of all matters affecting their own lives. Michigan auto workers are not experts on the credit default swap markets, but are nonetheless affected by them - even if they think (erroneously) that CDS prices are irrelevant.
In summary: if lots of women ( which means about 3 or 4) on the blog say that something is important, they could a) be wrong about it being important for all women everywhere, or even all women in the US, and b) be wrong about it being important at all, even for them. And saying either a) or b) shouldn't be enough to get you called a dick.
But it is.
Dude, ajay? I think you're being a dick.
Tia, this is a great post.
So, as an undesirable outsider, someone who neither fit in as "attractive woman" nor as "man," I found all my efforts to earn love had marginalized me even further. It was around this time that I learned not to give a shit anymore. It was when I became insensitive to being ignored and insulted by men that I became a feminist. Being a feminist, for me, meant I didn't have to be hurt anymore.
AWB, this is a great comment.
I don't have anything else to say.
ttaM, can I throw up a bit in your mouth too?
20: You are confusing Tia's claim of contingent knowledge about the world we live in with a claim about what must be true in all possible worlds. Sure, Tia's claim isn't necessarily true. It is simply the case that it is true.
It is not necessarily that you are a dick for denying its truth -- there's a counterfactual world in which you might be right about women's experience of the world, and all the women you talk to might be wrong. We do not live in that counterfactual world.
Thanks Tia. Now I can link to this instead of writing it all out again, when I run into this in discussion.
One additional point.
I think many people, male and female, who I've talked with in university classes or online about feminism or women's marginalization are people who
(a) have been raised in *relatively* feminism-aware environments, that is they are girls who were brought up with Astronaut Barbie and who played soccer, they are boys who were told what sexual harrassment is and who experienced girls having academic successes around them.....
and (b) they're smartypantses, inclined to a kneejerk rejection of what they see as the conventional wisdom. For them the conventional wisdom includes some generic watered-down feminist slogans, but their privileged experience does not bear out the (strawman, extreme versions of) those slogans, so they say "Feminism? Baloney. Feminism is the old idea, which everyone automatically believes in, but I have the revolutionary new truth: sexism is all better now."
About point (a): I see this especially in students entering university, both male and female. They have been privileged enough to be shielded from the worst effects of oppression (sexism and other forms), so it just doesn't seem real to them. (In just the way that young westerners may just really not realize that there are places in the world lacking basic sanitation, or understand what that might mean.) Here, the only solution is to gain experience.
About point (b): Just because an idea is the orthodoxy doesn't mean it's wrong. For example, the current orthodoxy in astronomy is that the earth orbits the sun. But it would be stupid to have a kneejerk anti-orthodoxy reaction there. Getting to the heliocentric theory was *progress*. Similarly, getting to a point where we have a lot of tools to articulate feminist ideas was progress.
Tia -
::holds lighter aloft::
Hmm, scratch that.
::holds blowtorch aloft::
I liked the rest of the post, but the 1st point was confused, or maybe just confusing me. Most women in the US or the world aren't feminists, and it's not like one can do a poll on all women when you have an argument.
Also, I suspect you don't give enough weight the amount of "false consciousness" among women. I dunno if that's because of a substantive disagreement or just the emphasis in the post.
they're smartypantses, inclined to a kneejerk rejection of what they see as the conventional wisdom. For them the conventional wisdom includes some generic watered-down feminist slogans, but their privileged experience does not bear out the (strawman, extreme versions of) those slogans, so they say "Feminism? Baloney. Feminism is the old idea, which everyone automatically believes in, but I have the revolutionary new truth: sexism is all better now."
Repeat this procedure for every major principle of contemporary liberalism, and congratulations! You have now founded The New Republic.
::::::applause applause applause:::::::
That. Was. Awesome.
Thank you, Tia!
Ajay, granted, members of a group don't automatically know everything about what's best for their group.
But it's often the case that members of a group have insights -- better knowedge -- about what affects them than non-group-members have. For the simple, painfully obvious reason that non-group-members, by virtue of being non-group-members, are not affected by those things. So the principle being advocated by Tia is totally reasonable: listen to the people in the group. If all of them agree that something affects them, consider that there is probably something to it. If you're not a member of the group, consider this in contemplative silence... roll it around in the mind... rather than leaping into the discussion to tell the group members that they don't actually know what they think they know about their own lives and experience of the world.
Recognize that if you leap in, and do the latter, you might sound like a dick. Regardless of your pure intentions, you might sound like you're saying "Hey hey, look at me, stop looking at them! Over here! Ladies, I know what's best for you! Pipe down so you can hear my great idea!"
20 hit on exactly the point that I was going to make (and I'm sorry, LB, but I don't see how your 25 is an adequate response).
Tia's point 1 is the only real flaw in her post, but it's a serious one, and at bottom an endorsement of sloppy thinking. It's like saying that if a majority of coloured people tell you X about subject Y as it relates to race, they're probably right and you're a dick for disagreeing. I'm sorry, but no; speaking as a coloured person, I can see how that line of reasoning would be tempting and convenient, but it simply doesn't follow. You need more than just the majority consensus of group such-and-such on a thread to determine whether or not someone is being a dick.
This doesn't mean that anecdotal opinion is useless -- it's just that it's not enough. What people say they experience is always relevant, but it doesn't always follow from this that in evey case it's relevant in the way they think it is and to the extent they think it is. This is true of all of us, whatever our political leanings, feminist or otherwise. It's incredibly irritating to me that more of the feminist blogosphere really doesn't seem to grasp why "you're not validating me enough" is not just an insufficient argumentative tool, but a counterproductive one.
As for the rest of Tia's post, I can only agree.
the 1st point was confused, or maybe just confusing me
She was saying that the women on this blog, who argue with each other all the time about other aspects of feminism, pretty all chimed in to say: body image, big fucking problem. So that should be taken as something of a clue.
31: Sorry, posted before I saw this. "Listen to members of the group" is perfectly reasonable, but Tia is saying something stronger than this. Listening to people does not mean "agree with what they say about their experiences or you're being a dick."
Ajay,
The difference between the case of women's oppression and the economics case is that women's oppression deals with directly perceived pains. Women thus have a privileged perspective on the issue the same way people have a privileged perspective on pains in their own body. If I go to the doctor and say my leg hurts, and I am not intentionally deceiving anyone, then my leg really does hurt. This is true even if the pain turns out to have psychological rather than physical roots.
(I know, I am using one controversial and debated phenomenon to make a point about another, but I think my basic argument is clear.)
And yet, I still think saying "your experience isn't as relevant as you think it is" is the height of patronizing dickishness.
Tia said: on occasions when you get a basically uniform chorus saying they experience some aspect of society as harmful, and your response is that it is not important, you're wrong, and you're being a dick
I don't see how this can be contested. Is it not fair to say that a matter of societal harm is important to the degree that the harm is felt? "You're not feeling what you think you're feeling" or "your feelings aren't important" is not somethink you can say without being a dick.
"somethink" s/b without the ridiculous Boris and Natasha accent
First off nice post Tia.
One question for everyone. I agree completely with almost all of the points in the post (which doesn't surprise me, because I consider myself feminist/pro-feminist, and have been trying to learn about these things). In fact, they all seem basic topics, and I imagine that there could be a whole feminism 202 post with another dozen topics. However, I must admit I don't follow why point 3 fits in with the rest, and was wondering if someone could enlighten/convince me on this point.
The thing that felt so frustrating to me about that 800 post thread was that it seemed that many posters seemed to genuinely not understand say the "sports disucssion" analogy, rather than understanding but considering it unimportant. There's a world of difference between "this is wrong because of X" and "X is totally fine in other contexts, but even though it's ok to talk in manner X elswhere, when you're discussing women's attractiveness you shouldn't because of reasons Y and Z." The former I strongly disagreed with, while the latter I agreed with. 3 seems to be saying that the former always means that latter, and that's where I'm confused. Am I missing something here? Should point 3 be as obvious to me as the other points?
32: Actually, I think the claim does work for ethnic groups, or really any time a large group of people say "This is hurting me." If you are poking someone, and they say "Stop it, that's irritating," you can’t say “No, this is not irritating you; you think it’s funny,” without being a dick.
36: The difference between the case of women's oppression and the economics case is that women's oppression deals with directly perceived pains.
This doesn't say much. Any number of political perspectives -- including the unsavoury ones -- can claim to be dealing with "directly perceived pains." What's interesting in all cases is the relationship of perception to reality. It's in going beyond "perception" that feminism has so often done (and still does) important work in helping us to assess the basis of fact from which we can address gender issues.
So especially on occasions when you get a basically uniform chorus saying they experience some aspect of society as harmful, and your response is that it is not important, you're wrong, and you're being a dick.
When I was a sophomore I was at a party with a bunch of people I didn't know. Somehow, abortion was brought up. I was in favor ofo the state staying out of it. All the women in the area converged on me, about 6 of them. They all plied me with anecodotes of the personal and social ill of abortion. I didn't think abortion was important enough to warrant state intervention, but, I didn't want to be a dick, and so agreed with them and changed my opinion to pro-life. Until, of course, the opposite situation happened. I continue this policy to this day, and am beloved by all.
40: Actually, I think the claim does work for ethnic groups, or really any time a large group of people say "This is hurting me."
So, to take a somewhat inflammatory example: when a large group of white folks say that Mexican immigration is "hurting them," the rest of us are being dicks for disagreeing? I think that's quite evidently wrong.
The point is not to tell them what they think. When someone says they hate and fear the Mexican Aztlanists, obviously none of us is in a position to tell them they don't. All of us, however, are in a position to say: "is that a sane and realistic opinion?" and to judge it on this basis.
Tia's point 1 gives the impression (perhaps unintentionally) of wanting feminist opinion to be exempt from that sort of subject. And it can't be exempt without sabotaging its own legitimacy.
29: This also sounds like the guiding principle of the "2Blowhards" blog, which I somehow continue to read because of the pretty pictures.
Anatomy of a "2Blowhards" post:
1) Assertion that the poster is a brave iconoclast for daring to disagree with the conventional wisdom ("conventional wisdom" here being defined as "what Christina Hoff Sommers thinks Naomi Klein believes")
2) Statement of an obvious fact that almost everybody has agreed upon for the past 50 or possibly 5,000 years (e.g. "Hot women should not be ashamed to be hot" or "Art that is beautiful has value because it is beautiful").
3) Request that if anyone else is so brave to agree, please agree in comments, and maybe they can somehow use the power of common sense to change the conventional wisdom (that is, save college men from being oppressed by college women).
It's like a club of 60-year-olds who want desperately to be the protagonists of the movie "PCU".
"from that sort of subject" s/b "from that sort of judgment"
Actually, I think it is important that nativist groups feel hurt by immigration. That doesn’t mean that we should seal the border or purge the nation of minorities. It does mean that if we are going to create a polity where everyone can live together, we will need to understand why some people feel hurt.
I took Tia’s point to be “when a lot of people say something is important, it is important,” but not to be “and the correct response is to do whatever those people say they want.”
46: Good point. Looking at it again, maybe I'm reading more into Tia's 1) than is actually there.
I took Tia’s point to be “when a lot of people say something is important, it is important,” but not to be “and the correct response is to do whatever those people say they want."
Well put, and I think an accurate reading.
Thanks, Rob. That's a much-moderated version of what I was about to say.
women you know are bothered by the way men and our culture regard women, laughing it off when in the company of men because they wanted to belong to a boys’ club
Too true. It would be fabulous if more men who like women who like men realized how often this happens.
Re. Dr. Slack's point: of course it's not true that if a random group of X people says Y is an issue, that Y is a fact. But it is true, I think, that if person Z says "no, Y isn't an issue" or some equivalent to that, that Z is being a jerk.
E.g., white people bitching about immigration. Now, they may be wrong that, say, "immigrants are taking our jobs." But that feeling/perception/idea *is* an issue, and it needs to be addressed.
This, you see, is the key to the psychology of the man-loving feminist: the ability to see that even when the guys are just plain ol' wrong that, say, feminist argument A is aimed at them personally, that their feeling that it is is something that needs to be dealt with. You can (and I do) just say, "it isn't about you, Mr. Conceited," and if you have a good relationship with the person to whom you're speaking, that can work. Or it can be rhetorically effective, not for Mr. Conceited himself, but for other people present.
But if you want to reach Mr. Conceited, and all the other Mr. Conceiteds out there who are inclined to think that feminist criticism of "men" means "hey, you, guy, over there. I'm talking about you," then you have to acknowledge that this perception is real, that it matters, and that it needs to be addressed. Otherwise Mr. Conceited and his friends will consider you a dick. Or rather, in this particular situation, a bitch.
Comity indeed!
But... not so fast. Something is still kind of bugging me, here: It does mean that if we are going to create a polity where everyone can live together, we will need to understand why some people feel hurt.
Fine as far as it goes, but if we're accepting this as a parallel case: won't we also in the course of "understanding" have to at some point argue against rationales for why the "hurt" nativists imagine from immigration may not be real, or as bad as they believe it to be, or the obsession for all white people that they imagine it to be? Couldn't such arguments be construed as running afoul of a number of Tia's guidelines, above?
Cross-posted with Dr. B, to whom I'll have to respond later.
Thank you for the post, Tia. I will save & study it at length.
Happy Labor Day ...Marcotte
"Anyway, while trying to think up my blogging version of the essay of “What Labor Day Means To Me”, I happened across this post by R. Mildred, who is dealing with the very fringe radfem argument that sexism is the heart of all oppression and so it must be dealt with first." ...Marcotte, who goes on to discuss her socialist feminism.
If there is an argument here, it is not one I am at this time making or involved with. Link posted only because I am listening, and feel I must listen to multiple voices.
Okay, so I wrote the above-promised anecdote up here, for those less irritated by lengthy AWB anecdotes.
I don't have time right now to engage with these comments, but I did want to say, particularly because a couple of people in email mentioned that this post was rhetorically effective, that it owes a great deal of whatever effectiveness it possesses to ac, who helped me edit it, even though she was quite busy at the time. Thanks, ac!
AWB -- very good post, thank you.
The image of struglling to find ones body's natural behavior / position/ voice is a poweful one.
I would say more, but I want to reflect on that image before commenting upon it.
Tia, I also appreciate this post and am reflecting on it as well.
Re: #39
The thing that felt so frustrating to me about that 800 post thread was that it seemed that many posters seemed to genuinely not understand say the "sports disucssion" analogy, rather than understanding but considering it unimportant. There's a world of difference between "this is wrong because of X" and "X is totally fine in other contexts, but even though it's ok to talk in manner X elswhere, when you're discussing women's attractiveness you shouldn't because of reasons Y and Z." The former I strongly disagreed with, while the latter I agreed with. 3 seems to be saying that the former always means that latter, and that's where I'm confused. Am I missing something here? Should point 3 be as obvious to me as the other points?
I'm not sure I totally understand your confusion with point #3, Unfoggetarian. But I will chime in on the "sports analogy" problem, and it is this: Basketball (or baseball, or whatever) players have not been subjected to hundreds of years of societal discrimination and debasement. Therefore, when you discuss their relative merits and call Michael Jordan an "idiot" for missing a shot, it does not carry with it the same reach that calling, say, Nicole Richie a "fat cow" does. If you called Michael Jordan a racial slur, then it might begin to approximate the experience, I think.
The point is that the sports analogy was a bad one, not that no one understood it. While you may think of those things in the same terms, they are not being received in the same manner by your audience.
I think Tia's point was that male perspectives on feminism are welcome, but they cannot become the whole sum of the issue. In fact, they are not even the point of the discussion at hand. And when men try to make their perspectives the point of a discussion on feminism, it tends to make us feel subjugated all over again. (Although I admit I might be misreading Tia's point as well.)
And yes, AWB's post is also excellent.
I think that there's also a point to be made w/r/t Dr. Slack's concern, that there is a substantive difference between, say, white nativists and feminists, and that this substantive problem is in addition to the rhetorical issue I was addressing above.
That is to say--hence my nom de plume--that when push comes to shove, the feelings/needs of members of X dominant group about the threat posed by being asked to consider the feelings/needs of Y non-dominant group, are less important than the latter.
For example, it is a fact that if women do less housework and childcare, men will end up doing more. It isn't an exact equivalence, because some of the work women stop doing may end up being unnecessary, or might end up being farmed out in gender-neutral ways. We might, as a society, seriously lower our standards of what constitutes an acceptably clean house. We might also set up more effective communal childcare solutions, say. Both of these would mean that women could offload work without increasing the work on men, up to a point. But basically to get to a point of "fairness" both women and men would, across the population as a whole, be doing equal work, which means less for women and more for men, again, across the population (regardless of whether individual women or men ended up doing exactly 50%).
It's reasonable, then, that men, as a class, are going to have to give up free time. And it's reasonable that they will resent it, feel aggrieved, feel they've lost something. Even if we make the argument that they'll gain in closeness, or empathy, or whatever previously "feminine" compensation women used to get, there is still a loss for the guys that can't be argued away.
Of course, my answer to this is: tough shit. At some point you have to either be committed to equity/fairness/justice/whatever, or else you have to say straight up that you aren't. If you are, then you might have to accept a sacrifice and realize that your sense of grievance is less important than the sense of grievance that (say) women have over having done *more* than their fair share for X hundred years. If you can't do that, then you're not committted to fairness--which means the rest of us have to figure out how to manipulate/bribe/fool/marginalize you and folks like you, either by weakening other men's sense of group solidarity with you, or by giving you some other tradeoff that's psychologically valuable to you, or whatever. But that's a realpolitik kind of thing, as distinct from the question of whether your sense of collective grievance is as important as mine.
Point 1 and the latter part of point 8 appear to combine to create an unfalsifiable position.
I very much like most of the post, and this point is sort of already sort of dealt with in comments, but not quite to my satisfaction, though it might be dealt with by the part of the post that says, "Guidelines for avoiding actively irritating women who are discussing feminist concerns."
Let's say Tia, ac, LB, AWB, bitchphd, alameida, Becks, Cala, Moira, a suddenly returned Profgrrrl and a couple other awesome Unfogged-commenting women all say that the (hypothetical) trend of the increasing popularity of Linux-based operating systems is a serious feminist issue of concern. Seeing all of these women I respect make this point, I'll probably wonder first if it's an elaborate joke. Then I'll ponder if I'm missing something. I'll ask about that, trying to figure out why they think so. But if these answers aren't satisfying to me, especially me being open-minded because all these really smart women who I respect think it is an important issue, I'm going to disagree and I'm going to say so, and hope that's not irritating. But I think people can be wrong about almost anything, including, e.g., "I am happier ten minutes ago then I am now now," and (as I argued earlier this summer), "I am Jewish." So it would be strange for me to except that women can't be wrong about what is and isn't a feminist issue, unless things can become feminist issues (properly so-called) by the stipulation of (certain) groups of women.
But it really hasn't occurred that we've conspired to make Linux a feminist concern. We've been talking about how men talk about women's bodies. Is that so difficult to accept, that all these smart women you respect think talking about women's bodies might have some relationship to feminist issues?
That is, I think your example makes the subject of the conversation arbitrary, while I hold it's not arbitrary.
It would only be arbitrary if we could assume that, just as men and women can have fairly objective, non-gendered experiences with Linux that are clearly communicated and unemotional, the representation of female bodies were also something men and women experience objectively, apart from other experiences, and could communicate their relationship to clearly and unemotionally.
For AWB
What Does Voice Pitch Indicate ...Tyler Cowen, but I couldn't like skip thru him. Wouldn't be right.
"Women in almost every culture speak in deeper voices than Japanese women. American women's voices are lower than Japanese women's, Swedish women's are lower than American's, and Dutch women's are lower than Swedish women's."
I also recommend Patsy Rodenburg's book The Right to Speak, in which she describes many of the voice exercises I mentioned, and she talks about her experiences with voice training and women clients whose voices had been damaged by sexual abuse and plastic surgery. Very interesting reading.
Seeing all of these women I respect make this point, I'll probably wonder first if it's an elaborate joke. Then I'll ponder if I'm missing something. I'll ask about that, trying to figure out why they think so. But if these answers aren't satisfying to me, especially me being open-minded because all these really smart women who I respect think it is an important issue, I'm going to disagree and I'm going to say so, and hope that's not irritating.
A, what Bear said about the topic under discussion being non-arbitrary. B, if you actually do what's in the bolded section, which, knowing you, I expect you would, you're fine.
I think Tia's point was that male perspectives on feminism are welcome, but they cannot become the whole sum of the issue. In fact, they are not even the point of the discussion at hand. And when men try to make their perspectives the point of a discussion on feminism, it tends to make us feel subjugated all over again. (Although I admit I might be misreading Tia's point as well.)"
Its certainly important that the people who feel agreived can explain how they feel. But once they've done so, when men/less-feministic-people say what they were intending, how their behaviour shouldn't have certain symbolic associations, ask what it is about certain things that elicit such a much stronger reaction than they would have supposed, shouldn't those thoughts be just as important? "we didn't mean to make you feel shitty" doesn't seem like "hey shutup," but as a intiation of the discussion "lets think about what to do since innocently intended behavious has pernicious results?"
"5) Do not draw up a bunch of hierarchies about which form of oppression is worse than which other. When you do this, you’re not responding to a claim that what we experience is the worst thing ever; you just show up and start talking about why what the women say they experience is not as big of a deal as X, Y, or Z. [SNIP] Being a woman, no matter what demographic you come from, is an overwhelmingly structuring and determining aspect of your life."
this seems like a misreading of what at least some people were saying, which was that male-female inequality isn't unique as far as inequalities go. they could be, but i've not been convinced of this. which seems to get interpreted as:
We bring up men's problems because we want things to change. You bring them up because you're invested in the current system, and you want to tell us we don't have that much to complain about.
i don't have a goal of "not listening," i've a goal of trying to see why women qua women having it rough are solvable by anything other than universal good things like "listen to people and don't hurt them" or even by universal but more specifics like "don't say things that otehr people will be hurt by"
which isn't to say i don't agree with most or all of what you said.
To describe a dynamic:
People say X. Devil's advocates say Y. The more people who say X, the more devil's advocates who say Y. The more strenuously people say X, the more convinced devil's advocates become that Y is the more rational position.
I don't see this as particular to this debate so much as endemic to the medium, though. In this debate, however, I can't sympathize with washdreyer's position that he thought people were pulling a fast one with X. Most debates, yes; but one as fraught as body image and female sexuality? I'm not buying it.
That said, one feature of this particular debate is that it always begins with people trying to be understood and understanding, but by mid-thread all that goodwill turns into passive-aggression. The "aggreived" male says-without-saying "I know you're not talking about all men, but I know you know you're specifically not talking about me." People respond "Of course we're not talking about all men." Because the "aggreived" male isn't not being talked about by name, however, he repeats a variation of his original comment, &c.
61: there is a substantive difference between, say, white nativists and feminists, and that this substantive problem is in addition to the rhetorical issue I was addressing above.
Of course there is, but my point is precisely that we ascertain those differences by employing many of the kinds of argument that Tia rules out of bounds above; for example, by finding claims of "psychological harm" less morally urgent and convincing (or in other words, less "important"*) when they are grounded in fantasies, cherry-picked anecdotes, skewed statistics and so on.
(*The ambiguity of "important" is, ummm, important here. Obviously there's some significance to any claim of psychological harm, but not all such claims are equally significant and have equal claims on our attention. If this is true in a general way of feminist vs. nativist arguments writ large, I think it's also true of some specific feminist arguments vs. others. I guess what's still nagging me about Tia's post is that it doesn't seem to acknowledge this.)
Also, 71 has something of a point. Tia's not wrong, exactly, to say "don't try to make it all about you," but I see this gambit used way too lightly by way too many people.
cross-posting from AWB's place:
Without in any way being dismissive of the real harms that can arise from them, I would say that the type of talk under discussion (men, talking about women's bodies) also simply exists, and will continue to exist, whatever the upshot of our discussions. That is to say, maybe ogged was wrong to write his post and all of the men who participated in the initial sexist discussion were wrong to do so, but, in all candor, that's how (heterosexual) men talk among themselves.
(A separate, but related issue is whether ogged/we was/were wrong to post it in a forum that is now largely populated by women, rather than the frathaus of yore--I'd lean towards yes, but I dunno.)
Anyway, the type of talk under discussion serves a lot of valuable purposes in how men communicate and relate with each other, how we construct our emotional lives with other men, how we show respect, how we nurture, gauge our own worth, etc. (This isn't to say it's the only thing that serves this purpose, but believe me when I say it's an important one.)
Simply (or not so simply)saying "some discourses are not reasonable," meaning that the behavior is negative and should not be engaged in by all right-thinking persons, when I and most of the men I know derive so much value from it, without any identified alternate way of deriving that value, feels like an attempt to take something critically important away--an emotional life with other men.
I hear, respect, and acknowledge the arguments and emotions coming from you, Tia, LB, B, AC, and all of the other women of unfogged--I just don't know what a practical solution is.
Chopper, as a lurker who has been following this thread with interest, I must ask: are you saying that men naturally construct their senses of worth, nurture (each other, right?) and construct relationships with other men by evaluating women? I am particularly interested in how these discussions would be about showing respect. Thanks!
77: I'm not trying to answer for Chopper, but I would say that I agree with him to some extent. Talking about women is a not insignificant part of many male conversations, and, to the extent that it part of the lingua franca of such relationships, asking men to stop having such conversations is asking them to at least risk not having such relationships. That's a fairly big cost for most men, and that's why you start seeing justifications and comparisons of harm for such conversations crop up. (I'm not sure I'd tie it directly to a sense of worth, nurturing, and respect; to the extent those things are by-products of male relationships, then, yeah, probably.)
I realize that Tia explicitly said she wasn't asking men to give this up; I'm only responding to the above comment.
Chopper (76):
There are two ways to take hot-or-not talk:
1. harmless trivial fun
2. nontrivial, important element of male community and emotional relations
If we take it as 1, and women complain, then those women get called humorless. After all, it's just silly fun, what reasonable person could complain about that, since obviously nothing is meant by it?
On the flip side, if we take it as 1, and it obviously hurts women, then the men who insist on having their trivial fun at the real expense of others seem like real jerks.
But suppose we take it as 2, as you're suggesting. (As a way of defending against the latter point.) Then the men who insist on continuing are not just jerks out for trivial fun, but rather they're protecting something really important. If they have to hurt others to protect it, that might be a cost we all have to accept because the value of the hot-or-not talk is great. (I take it this is your suggestion.)
Then what we're saying is that male emotional life is centered around the degradation of women. (Or, around talk that many women here have said they find to be degrading, dehumanizing, harmful to them when they hear it.) This might be true, and it might be more true for some social groups of men than for others. If it is true, and especially if it's true for "enlightened" men, I think the women here are right to find that pretty fucking disturbing.
Frowner, you're not a lurker--just a new and as yet infrequent commenter.
I guess I'd say that "evaluating women's bodies" (distinct from "evaluating women") is a subset of the communicative tools [many] men use to do emotional work with each other. In my experience, a significant portion of how men construct our relationships with each other as men is done by discussing women and our interactions and problems with them.
In terms of showing respect--well, I know I'm walking into a minefield here, so everyone keep in mind that I'm just trying to describe the behavior as it exists and as I have experienced it. Anyway, the "showing of respect" as I intended it in my comment above revolved around the establishment of a shared context--an establishment of brotherhood that is, or is assumed to be for the purpose of the interaction, universal.
It's not the conversations themselves though, but the failure to acknowledge their inherent power dynamics that's the issue here, right? I mean, of course straight, single men bond via discussions of women. So, too, do gay, single men bond via discussions of men; gay, single women via discussions of women; and straight, single women via discussions of men. In short, I think it's a perfectly acceptable conversation, in and of itself; the inability to recognize that, despite being so, it's also sexist (in the broadest sense of the term) is the problem...
...as is the inability to modulate such conversations in mixed company, I'd suspect. Continuing to have such a conversation despite people saying how uncomfortable it makes them is the unacceptable part, no?
If they have to hurt others to protect it, that might be a cost we all have to accept because the value of the hot-or-not talk is great. (I take it this is your suggestion.)
It's not so much my suggestion as an attempt to provide a window into why being asked to stop this kind of behavior meets so much resistance. When I say "I just don't know what a practical solution is" in 76, I mean it. I am attempting to honestly describe a barrier to solving the problem in hopes of helping others construct new ways of dealing with the issue.
82: Yes, sorry; I didn't mean to say that you are advocating we all just stop talking about it and go home. I think what you've said is probably true, or at least for many men it's true. I just also think this fact you've described is incredibly disturbing.
There are two ways to take hot-or-not talk:
1. harmless trivial fun
2. nontrivial, important element of male community and emotional relations
These are really my only options?
...as is the inability to modulate such conversations in mixed company, I'd suspect. Continuing to have such a conversation despite people saying how uncomfortable it makes them is the unacceptable part, no?
See, this depends on a whole series of other factors, I think. At a minimum, we generally believe that it is bad to have single-sex spaces for men to hang out, with good reason. But, to the extent any woman might be (reasonably) offended by such talk, that means that it really needs to take place in exclusive spaces. This turns out not to be very important, practically, as it really isn't that hard to hang out with "the guys." But I think it's one of the reasons men get defensive about this sort of thing. (I should note that I recall most men on that thread being terribly defensive; I may be mis-remembering.)
These are really my only options?
I doubt it. What else were you thinking of?
84: Er, yah, should have said "Consider these two ways" or something like that. Or "There are two general types of ways to take hot-or-not talk as being positive"?
79:
Really well said.
Generally, to Chopper, and Tim, and everyone else -- it is possible to discuss people you're attracted to without being all that problematically sexist. I'm not saying it's easy -- it's very hard being conscious about this stuff -- but I don't think talking about sexy people in the manner that will solve your need for bonding is necessarily going to be offensive or harmful. It's in how you do it.
I doubt it. What else were you thinking of?
Something more along the lines of "grotesque macho posturing for overgrown adolescents."
Obviously there's some significance to any claim of psychological harm, but not all such claims are equally significant and have equal claims on our attention. If this is true in a general way of feminist vs. nativist arguments writ large, I think it's also true of some specific feminist arguments vs. others.
I dunno if it's true that Tia didn't acknowledge this; it's certainly true that this argument forms the substance of a hell of a lot of feminist debate. Which I think is cool.
Re. Chopper's point: for my part, I like the frathouse thing up to a point, and I do, in fact, think it serves a really valuable purpose to have convos like that in mixed company. And frankly I value the fact that this is originally Ogged's place and have less than zero desire to dictate content to him. The only thing I'd say is that the place *has* changed, and part of that change is that feminist women are going to say something occasionally about ye olde frat house posts, and that this'll probably go more or less smoothly as long as it doesn't result in a lot of defensive assertion of the right to be fratty.
89: So, 1b: Harmful trivial fun?
I feel the momentum building. Take it to 1000 people, you can do it.
I'll throw in my 2 cents about number 10.
Do not use sexist or anti-feminist tropes when women are talking about feminism. I can't believe I even have to type this one out, but there it is. Do you know what's an example of a sexist trope? That women are illogical.
Jesus Christ. If someone genuinely thinks you've made a poor argument, a ridiculous analogy, or gasp, poor logic, god forbid they actually say so. Because now they're invoking a sexist trope.
At least, one of the things I like about this place specifically is the ability to have conversations that *aren't* happening in an "exclusive" space, but where the general goodwill and intelligence of most participants creates an expectation of thoughtful engagement. (Not exclusive from occasional snark or joking, however.)
I'm not saying it's easy -- it's very hard being conscious about this stuff -- but I don't think talking about sexy people in the manner that will solve your need for bonding is necessarily going to be offensive or harmful. It's in how you do it.
I think you're misunderstanding something about the way many men talk: it is often mildly-to-not-so-mildly abusive. Soon after ogged went home and had surgery, he posted some comment that I wanted to make fun of, and I sent him an e-mail saying something like, "I thought they only took your kidneys, not your nuts." (About ten seconds later, I sent an e-mail saying something like, "Jeebus. I am so sorry about sending that; I've been assuming it's OK to joke about it." He, in turn, said it was.) I initially assumed it was OK to treat him in that fashion--he was not, to my knowledge, clearly out of the woods--because he evinces a certain sort of male personality, and I assumed he would read the comment in a certain way. I have a really hard time imagining myself sending a similar e-mail to a woman who was dealing with cancer.
Which is to say, I think it's possible that a certain amount of the arguably* degrading way in which men talk about women is a function of it being men talking, not a function of women being the object of such talk.
*Different guys talk in different ways, and they aren't all equally degrading; that's all "arguably" is there to signal.
In case anybody cares, a hiring freeze for all federal public defender offices has been announced. Because the Senate refuses to fund them. So, you know, another reason to vote for your local Democratic Senate candidate. Not to change the subject.
92: Gswift, seriously: what's so hard about realizing that in a conversation about gender, some things are going to be loaded? And why is it so difficult to realize that instead of, for instance, saying "that's illogical," it might be more helpful (not to mention respectful, non-defensive, and not dismissive) to say, "your analogy of X doesn't work for me b/c of Y" or whatever? Saying "that's illogical" doesn't actually engage anything; it just dismisses.
omething more along the lines of "grotesque macho posturing for overgrown adolescents."
So your solution is to have us "grow up." Awesome. I have no idea why no one has ever proposed that before. I'm totally going to do that.
(A separate, but related issue is whether ogged/we was/were wrong to post it in a forum that is now largely populated by women, rather than the frathaus of yore--I'd lean towards yes, but I dunno.)
I've largely avoided this debate (being out of town helped), but I'm not sure this is a wholly separate point. While "I'm not saying don't have these conversations" was stated, it takes some impressive logical gymnastics to deny that is the underlying message. I've got no special dispensations here, but IMO Ogged can say whatever he pleases, and Tia can respond as with this post, but I'd be loathe to start proscribing what somebody can or can't say here. Particularly, y'know, the fellow who founded the place.
Moreover, the original post said simply the Levi's woman is fantastically pretty and that Jessica Biel has a great ass. Those aren't sexist statements; they are facts.
95: I honestly would expect that (1) the women here get that and like it for many of the same reasons the guys do; and (2) we're all intelligent enough to be able to occasionally muse about whether that particular kind of male bonding is gendered, how, why, what are the effects, etc.--while still doing it.
You know, kinda like acknowledging that high heels are a sexist conspiracy, but buying them anyway.
90: it's certainly true that this argument forms the substance of a hell of a lot of feminist debate.
I'm not saying it doesn't, and the more the better.
92: In all fairness to Tia, I think she's saying "alleging that women in general are illogical" is a sexist trope -- which is true -- as opposed to saying that "calling a woman's argument illogical" is a sexist trope, which would be false. Of course, there are obviously those who have trouble distinguishing the latter from the former.
If someone genuinely thinks you've made a poor argument, a ridiculous analogy, or gasp, poor logic, god forbid they actually say so.
Best not to try to call someone on being illogical while you yourself are making stupid arguments. This comment, for example, seems to be based on the premise that you have never before encountered the literary device we earthlings call "the analogy."
we're all intelligent enough to be able to occasionally muse about whether that particular kind of male bonding is gendered, how, why, what are the effects, etc.--while still doing it.
I don't think intelligence was ever the issue; at issue was/is whether some things are so harmful that behavior should be changed, be it by prohibiting it (some folks), modifying it (other folks), or being discreet about it (the rest of the folks).
I was thinking about this as I bicycled home--It seems important to interject that a lot depends on the kind of hot-or-not talk that's going on and that it varies considerably. When I am (extreeeeemely infrequently) bonding with female friends over talk of male attractiveness, it's pretty positive rather than "yes, she's hot, but her ass is too big/small...and that other woman over there? She has SUCH GROSS [redacted]" It's also not detailed sexual talk about people we know well and see routinely but are not actually sleeping with. The purpose of the talk isn't to rank but to praise what is praiseworthy, occasionally to argue for the introduction of previously unappreciated yet praiseworthy characteristics. Naturally, this all doesn't bother me, and I wouldn't be bothered by straight male talk of this kind. (my female friends and I are of course so perfect that we will be assumed into heaven any minute now.) Another anecdotal thingy: this kind of talk usually isn't about jockeying for status among women by saying that we have the most impossible-to-realize fantasies, along the lines of "Cute celebrity isn't good enough for me because of [minor physical failure] so therefore I am a very manly man/womanly woman indeed because my standards are so high."
I think that certain types of hot-or-not talk are so mean-spirited, hurt women so much when they are overheard, and represent such power games among men that I do not approve of them. (Which isn't the same as saying that no one can engage in them).
So yes, I tend to feel that if men bond with other men by saying really intimately mean things about women, and if they prioritize that bonding over the feelings of women friends and significant others, that's pretty jerky. If they bond with other men by saying, with perhaps more explicitness, , that they wouldn't kick X Pretty Person out of bed for eating crackers, that bothers me not at all.
Moreover, the original post said simply the Levi's woman is fantastically pretty and that Jessica Biel has a great ass. Those aren't sexist statements; they are facts.
Apo, those weren't the statements that set off the rest of the thread. The thread got into a good couple dozen comments of which ones weren't that pretty and why, and particular faults with their particular physiques. I don't want to have the same 800 comments over again, but the issue isn't the right to say "X is hot." The issue is the practice of saying "Impossibly Attractive Celebrity X isn't all that hot because of Blemish Y. Now if only she would alter herself according to Standard Z..."
95: I think you're off base there -- giving your friends hostile shit is a timehonored tradition; men probably do it more than women, but lots of women do it to, and I think most of us get it. It's different from giving a third party who isn't playing hostile shit.
and 104:
Yup, exactly. It's not nearly so much don't talk about women's bodies at all, as don't do it in that fashion.
106: And don't whine or get hostile when women (and not only women) say they are uncomfortable with the turn of conversation.
I think you're off base there -- giving your friends hostile shit is a timehonored tradition; men probably do it more than women, but lots of women do it to, and I think most of us get it. It's different from giving a third party who isn't playing hostile shit.
IMLE, the extent to which this forms the baseline of communication is vastly different. It is really, really hard for me to imagine me or anyone else here making jokes about a woman's bout with, say, breast cancer, particularly if (a) she were in the process of dealing with it, and (b) it had killed her mother at about her age. Maybe that's overstating it, and certainly part of it is simply ogged. I guess I just wouldn't feel comfortable making jokes to a woman in that situation.
I don't really get the third party issue.
You're giving ogged shit because he's your friend -- he's given you (implicit) permission. Random celebrity, or passing woman, X hasn't.
Gswift, seriously: what's so hard about realizing that in a conversation about gender, some things are going to be loaded? And why is it so difficult to realize that instead of, for instance, saying "that's illogical," it might be more helpful (not to mention respectful, non-defensive, and not dismissive) to say, "your analogy of X doesn't work for me b/c of Y" or whatever? Saying "that's illogical" doesn't actually engage anything; it just dismisses.
You're right. It just at times I wonder if what 101 says, there isn't some trouble distinguishing the different ways it goes down.
Moreover, the original post said simply the Levi's woman is fantastically pretty and that Jessica Biel has a great ass. Those aren't sexist statements; they are facts.
Oh, c'mon Apo. This is teh lame.
being a celebrity isn't licence for being given shit?
It is really, really hard for me to imagine me or anyone else here making jokes about a woman's bout with, say, breast cancer
Or rehab? Because Alameida got some teasing. The tone was different, but not all that different.
108: Twisty jokes about breast cancer all the time (and some of the women who comment are her place do too).
Best not to try to call someone on being illogical while you yourself are making stupid arguments. This comment, for example, seems to be based on the premise that you have never before encountered the literary device we earthlings call "the analogy."
And apparently you've never encountered the devices called "deliberately bad faith over the top analogies", and "responding in kind."
Um, we need the consent of Jessica Biel (a/k/a Esquire Mag's "Sexist Woman Alive") before we can talk about her looks?
115:
Aw, come on. "Deliberate bad faith"? I was trying to make the point that if we're talking about a claim that we're being injured, intent becomes less important -- that is, at that point you have to argue "I'm justified in hurting you" rather than "My intent isn't to hurt you, that's just a side effect."
"Deliberate bad faith" seems a little harsh.
115: That's the thing. If you honestly think that arguments about feminism (or a specific argument about feminism) is being made in bad faith then there's nothing to be done.
That said, it's a bit unkind to assert that anyone here is deliberately making a bad faith argument, nuh?
116: Well, that little Freudian slip just about says it all right there, but I'm going to respond to 80 anyway: I think you're occluding the issue by including "evaluating women's bodies" as a subset of "discussing women and our interactions and problems with them." I'd go along with the idea that relationship talk or "why can't I get a date" talk or even some "garsh, she's purty" talk could form an important and relatively benign part of straight male bonding rituals. But the precise kind of talk that we're talking about here: oogling, slobbering "man, wouldn't I like to get her alone" sleaziness, especially when it contains an element of "yeah, I'd fuck her, but she's not truly fuckable" has not been an important part of my male bonding with my straight male friends. I dunno, maybe every guy I know sees me as completely emasculated, and the first thing that crosses their minds when I sit down at the bar is "shit! minneapolitan's here, now we can't talk about tits." Somehow I doubt it.
I guess one of the structural problems with trying to discuss any serious issue, but especially gender stuff, in this medium, is that there's a mode of discourse that (I would argue) is gendered heavily male, in which someone with no obvious stake or opinion on the matter at hand pops in with what they hope will be a clever comment, which is intended to destabilize the discussion. Thoughts?
It's at least equally unkind to state that someone here engaged in behavior analagous to beating women.
118 and 119
At the time and the context of the discussion, that the analogy used was domestic violence I took to be deliberately over the top. But yeah, in retrospect, that was uncharitable on my part. My bad.
121: Eh, I had a point to make, and that's the analogy that came to mind.
here's a mode of discourse that (I would argue) is gendered heavily male, in which someone with no obvious stake or opinion on the matter at hand pops in with what they hope will be a clever comment, which is intended to destabilize the discussion. Thoughts?
That it seems doubtful you have a penis. (Had to be done; overripe fruit only draws the birds.)
102: I'm having trouble distinguishing between that one and throwing acid in Cindy Crawford's face.
102: seems to be based on the premise that you have never before encountered the literary device we earthlings call "the analogy."
Of course, some of us have also encountered the literary device we earthlings call "the ridiculously tendentious analogy," which gswift looks to have been responding to there.
104: A lot of general sex / beauty conversation would benefit enormously from a better understanding that there are different registers of discourse, some based on self-consciously taking-the-piss / telling tall tales and others not. It's not always easy to tell when the different registers are going on (a content-driven critique alone just won't cut it), and much harder to demonstrate that some forms of the humorous register are inherently harmful than is sometimes appreciated. OTOH it's not uncommon, either, for openly hostile attitudes to masquerade as "humour" -- all depends on the cases where one is willing to extend the benefit of the doubt or not. In a setting like Unfogged I should think it would be somewhat easier to manage this.
111: Tell me which one is untrue, B.
128: Tell me what difference the claimed truth-content makes to the points at hand.
113: As I said, I may have been overstating it, and I would only feel truly comfortable asserting that I wouldn't be comfortable making such jokes. Cripes, LB, you recently took me to task for a jokey comment to a woman about her weight that I'd made almost 15 years ago. And this was several months after I'd admitted it had been thoughtless and cruel on my part. And years after I had apologized to her. I would have thought that both cancer and rehab trumped weight. Suffice it to say that I'm less than absolutely sure of how much friendly malice is OK in many circumstances with women. I feel on more familiar ground with men, though I'm often wrong (in the other direction).
113: Cripes, LB, you recently took me to task for a jokey comment to a woman about her weight that I'd made almost 15 years ago. And this was several months after I'd admitted it had been thoughtless and cruel on my part. And years after I had apologized to her.
I am sorry about giving you a hard time -- I didn't mean to take you to task about being a uniquely bad person; I brought it up (IIRC) in the context of a claim that people don't make jokes like that.
"And in that case, the wealth hierarchy is precisely equivalent to the beauty hierarchy, morally speaking: it is a zero sum game in which a lucky few feel better only when the others feel worse."
...Megan McArdle, in her recent update on the Cindy Crawford Acid Olympics. Well, since an accomplished, intelligent, attractive woman said this...
I would have thought that both cancer and rehab trumped weight. Suffice it to say that I'm less than absolutely sure of how much friendly malice is OK in many circumstances with women.
Seriously, the difference is one of percieved motivation. You give ogged, or Alameida, a hard time about their real problems because you know they'll know you don't mean it for real, and you're being affectionate. The vast majority of women, on the other hand, have gotten serious criticism along the lines of your joke. It comes off differently.
130: I think we've been saying (or am I wrong?) in this thread and the other, that hurtful intent is not necessary to make this kind of negative evaluation of beauty hurtful. If you simply choose not to believe me when I say that X instance of such conversation creeps me out/hurts my feelings/makes me feel bad about myself, then why would I care what you think about this subject or anything else? Why should I need to demonstrate harm? Why cannot you, as a person of good will, take for granted that I am being truthful about my feeling?
Of course you are all perfectly free to discuss any subject, in any fashion you wish. This post is just some information for you: how women perceive these particular behaviors. If women's subjectivity is of no interest to you, you may as well skip the post and not bother to respond. That will be just as effective as explaining to us that we are experiencing our own feelings and reactions incorrectly.
I guess I'm not quite sure about the whole idea that all (or even most) men bond happily around sustained meanness and competition. My experience (which means, of course, only that there is a statistically insignificant number of men who...) has been that men who are lower status in their groups put up with the meanness and try to take part, so as not to seem weak. I've had, I think, four conversations with different straight male friends about how much they hated the pressure to bond through saying mean things about each other and how much they hated the fake-but-not-really-fake competition that was always going on. Now, even though I find the bonding-through-meanness incomprehensible (that is, when it's the main mode of interaction and when saying sissy stuff about your feelings is not allowed, rather than when it's just some teasing sometimes)...well, even though I find it incomprehensible I can believe that it's just jolly fun to some people. I can even believe that it's not inextricable from crappy patriarchal ways of behaving. But I can't believe that it's the default male setting.
The story text pointed to in 96 is actually really sad and disturbing.
We can all agree on that. Especially for those of us who had been considering applying to a federal public defender's office in the next few years.
133: At the end, I was making a claim about how I interact differently with men and women. I doubt I made a joke about ala's rehab; I don't think I would have comfortable doing so. I just wrote out a comment calling bob a psycho for linking to the Galt. I've certainly called him the same before, though I don't know him and though he has acknowledged some quasi-serious mental health issues in the past. In fact, I sort of remember wondering if I should so refer to him the first time I did it, and my recollection is that my fear of offending him by insulting him in a possibly hurtful way was trumped by my fear of offending him by not insulting him. I wouldn't casually insult him (or w-lfs-n, or ogged, etc.) if I didn't like and respect him, and if I wasn't sure that they would know that by virtue of the insult.
This matters, in part, because Unfogged has transitioned from a mild-ish frat-haus to something like that with women in charge. So the way we should speak--as if still in the haus, or modified in some way--is in transition. People (or maybe just penised-people) are still sorting out how open and frank to be about various things. (This isn't very clear, even as I write it. Nonetheless, I'm sure it's critical. Critical! Crucial, even!)
134: Why cannot you, as a person of good will, take for granted that I am being truthful about my feeling?
I think you mistake the thrust of the explanation here. I'm not denying that you are being truthful. I'm not denying that you are harmed. I'm saying I might do it just the same because you're asking me to give up something I value a lot--male companionship. #130 was part of a larger argument that the way men talk with each other is often fairly cruel, and that, in part, discussions about women are cruel not because they are about women but because they are by men. This wasn't meant as a justification, just an explanation.
135: well, even though I find it incomprehensible I can believe that it's just jolly fun to some people. I can even believe that it's not inextricable from crappy patriarchal ways of behaving. But I can't believe that it's the default male setting.
I don't know what "default" means here. Guys do this, I suspect, because it is done in the groups in which they congregate. This is true from a fairly young age. That is, if someone's doing it, it's probably because it was what I would have called the assumed default mode of interaction. Lots of us don't like it, or like it at different levels. As we grow up, we sort out what level of aggression we're comfortable with, I guess.
Anyway, I'll shut up now. It's not that important. Look: the Galt! (How's that, bob?)
To respond to Chopper's "what do we do about it" problem-solving issue, I really don't think the solution is that complicated. As LB says, there are many ways to talk about women without being problematically sexist. For instance, I don't think that most decent guys talk about their girlfriends/wives/friends in a way that is sexist. Sometimes I think they even overcompensate. I had one boyfriend who asked me something like "do you talk to your friends about our sex life?" and I said "um, yeah, all the time." I shot the question back at him, and his response was that he didn't, because didn't want to be disrespectful. This was a guy who was, all in all, pretty sexist (and it's one of the reasons I broke up with him). But he still didn't say sexist shit about me to his friends (he could have been lying, but based on my knowledge of him, I think he wasn't).
I considered that to be an overcompensation; I mean, shit, everyone needs to talk about sex! But the problem seems to be that the space that men have for talking about women consists, for a lot of men, largely of talk feminists find objectionable.
It seems to be hard for men to find out what the non-sexist space is. I don't have any magical solution. Saying, as mentioned above, "I'd fuck celebrity X, but she'd be more truly fuckable if her tits were perkier or lost 15 pounds or whatever" is sexist. Saying "I wish my girlfriend would blow me more, but she doesn't seem to like it that much" is, in my opinion, not. It's all about the degree to which you regard the person you're talking about, and consider them, as a full human being.
I just reject the idea that men are really bonding over "Jessica Biel's ass is better than Scarlett Johansson's ass" as a type of talk. They may feel like they're bonding over it insofar as they bond over discussions of women, and this is the main type of women-related discussions men have. But I don't think that eliminating the problematic sexist content of this talk would reduce its bonding effect in any appreciable way. On the contrary, I think changing the modes of talk to one that recognizes more of women's humanity would actually help the bonding along. A lot.
134: hurtful intent is not necessary to make this kind of negative evaluation of beauty hurtful.
Well, the meaning of statements isn't purely fixed by intent. On the other hand, isn't it pretty hard to have a conversation with someone who insists that your intent, or probable intent, is completely irrelevant to how they interpret your remarks?
135: I guess I'm not quite sure about the whole idea that all (or even most) men bond happily around sustained meanness and competition.
No, the point is that "meanness and competition" is not an accurate descriptor for what's going on in the faux "meanness" and piss-taking of (a lot of) "male" discourse. It's a mistake to assume that the men who are comfortable with it are necessarily being comfortable with "meanness." When it crosses the line from teasing into genuine meanness, or where there's a difference between how an in-group are interacting with each other vs. that group's picking on an outsider -- it's often quite easy to tell despite the apparent similarity of content. (But harder, obviously, for those less familiar.)
I would not say that this is the "default" male setting, but then I would not say there is a "default" male setting. (Much of what I'd be comfortable saying to a relative stranger in a bar in Calgary would by most accounts get me shot in a similar setting in, say, Belize.) On the other hand, I'm not convinced that an alternative to faux "meanness" and piss-taking is strictly necessary or desirable. Obviously not all men are equally comfortable with it, but then not all people are equally comfortable with any norm of social interaction.
I'm not denying that you are being truthful. I'm not denying that you are harmed. I'm saying I might do it just the same because you're asking me to give up something I value a lot
Heh. Tim's taking us to 1000 baby.
134: I don't mean by that last comment to deny that there is a certain threshold beyond which reasonable people could agree that no amount of good intention can rehabilitate the sheer ass-holishness of a certain comment or other. It's just the difficulties of setting that threshold, is all...
Prior, myself, to shutting up: 139, Guys do this, I suspect, because it is done in the groups in which they congregate. was sort of what I was getting at but a little more so. When gender behavior gets talked about, especially male-group-bonding behavior, there's this tendancy to fall back on "that's just the way men are"...with an unspecified but implicit allusion to genes, natural law, neurology, etc. I think you're misunderstanding something about the way many men talk seems to me to be like this, taking "how men talk" as natural, as a given. (In 95) Whereas I'm kind of interested in why men talk as they do, whether what women believe about how men talk is accurate , and whether mainstream/pop/at-the-level-of-Time-magazine understanding of how men talk bears any ressemblance to how men understand how they talk...er, so to speak. But that's enough from me now. I am putting away my internet for the night.
I guess I'm not quite sure about the whole idea that all (or even most) men bond happily around sustained meanness and competition.
Don't forget injuries. If one of my friends had done this, we (my circle of friends) would tell that story and laugh for the rest of our lives.
I just reject the idea that men are really bonding over "Jessica Biel's ass is better than Scarlett Johansson's ass" as a type of talk. They may feel like they're bonding over it insofar as they bond over discussions of women, and this is the main type of women-related discussions men have.
Yeah, except we do (or at least a lot of us do). Saying that we don't is exactly what others in the previous thread were complaining that men do. Which may be your point, in which case pardon me for missing the subtlety.
Chopper, are you saying that without the sexist content, the talk would have less of a bonding effect? I might have been unclear, but what I was was trying to say was that the sexism wasn't and isn't necessary for the bonding. Do you think that sexism is inherently necessary for male bonding? (Dear God, I hope not).
Also, as I meant to say earlier, Tia, this post is truly fantastic. I printed it out.
139: Actually, SCMT, I meant to respond to Dr. Slack's 127. We already know you're a bastard.
Okay, I'm not done yet. 145, why? No, seriously, what do you think when you think that it's really funny that a friend has been injured? I mean, sometimes I think it's mildly funny if someone I know does something silly and they've kind of been carrying on in a way that made injury inevitable, but I might think about it for a minute and laugh a little and then forget about the funny. It wouldn't be a big intra-group comedy routine. What makes that conversation fun to you? (And I am really, genuinely, asking out of curiousity and not sanctimoniousness. Think of me as you would a traveller from some strange, foreign land. )
139: Tim, you are such a liar. You insult me all the time.
140: I dunno if I can agree with the idea that the solution to this kind of thing isn't that complicated. If it were easy, we'd have figured it out by now. I think the reality is that sexism and misogyny *are* part of the culture, we *all* engage in them sometimes, and we *do* use them to help define ourselves, our peers, and our enemies. The women here bond (and argue) over shit like shoes and makeup and pedicures--all of which contain elements of sexism. It's just part of the world. The guys are gonna bond and argue over tits and ass from time to time. I, for one, would rather be able to be part of those discussions (including saying "dudes, this is so gross") than not hear 'em at all.
That said, as I pointed out in the now-infamous Biel thread, there's a lot to be gained from admiring "unconventional" beauty and/or talking about real feelings about real women from time to time, as well as the more usual hot or not threads.
That said, as I pointed out in the now-infamous Biel thread, there's a lot to be gained from admiring "unconventional" beauty and/or talking about real feelings about real women from time to time, as well as the more usual hot or not threads.
Did you say this in the Biel thread? I know you've said it from time to time, but I don't remember it there.
150: Can't speak for gswift, but I take the phenomenon to be pretty much akin to gallows humour. It seems to me this is the vein of humour that slapstick in general tends to tap into, hence Groucho Marx's famous "comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die" quote.
This:
Chopper, are you saying that without the sexist content, the talk would have less of a bonding effect?
Yes, I am.
This:
Do you think that sexism is inherently necessary for male bonding?
No, sometimes it involves injuries (gswift is exactly right).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that until an alternate method for men to do the emotional work accomplished by acting like sexist jerks amongst ourselves is in place and is appealing enough for men to feel like they can make the transition, all the appeals to fairness, better natures, etc., in the world will fall on at least partially deaf, defensive, or unrepentant ears.
151 is right in that of course we all engage in them sometimes. I guess the most important thing is that we at least realize when sexism is at play, even if we don't change our behavior all the time. I certainly say and do a lot of sexist shit, but I can hardly mentally criticize women's appearances (which I do all the time) without having this other little voice telling me "dude, you kinda suck" a lot of the time.
I think truly believing and internalizing the notion that overly harsh negative evaluation of the bodies of women in the public space is sexist, and believing that that's a bad thing, will likely naturally lead to engaging in less of it.
152: I said the first part, w/r/t Queen Latifah. The second didn't come up in that thread, no.
154: I think Chopper is making a really intelligent and honest point that we oughta give credit to. First, most of the women in here probably know that there are times when we ourselves bond over stuff like dissing ditzy femmy shit; defining ourselves against stereotypically negative female attributes is part of how we, as intelligent ambitious women, assert our own self-worth and group identity from time to time.
Second, I kind of suspect that with smart geeky-type guys in particular, this particular kind of t&a bonding probably plays an important role in defining *their* self-worth (as men) and group identity, and that this might be why such guys are often defensive about such things when women express shock! shock! that smart, lefty men play this kind of game. What the nuances of it are, I'm not entirely sure, but I'm sure/I suspect it's got a lot to do with asserting/defining sexual desire in the face of being "pussified" on the one hand (by being smart, bookish, lefty, liking women, etc.) and feminism on the other.
That said, maybe it's helpful to look at how the women's version of such sexist bonding can occur: e.g., the ways that Tia and I, or LB and I, can argue and get angry at one another over things like cheating or whether or not high heels are wholly evil while still being able to talk about these things on another level. Cala is especially great at that balancing act. I know we're all capable of having convos that operate on two levels, and I suspect that's probably part of the solution: to be able to say both "of course, high heels as a fashion accessory are entirely sexist and revolting" and "on the other hand, aren't these cute?"
139: Tim, you are such a liar. You insult me all the time.
But I mean those. (I'm sort of surprised, actually. I disagree with you all of the time, but I don't think I insult you all that much. (I'd probably have guessed Becks, then LB, then you, in frequency.) Certainly not as casually as, say, w-lfs-n; if I mention his name, the next word is almost certainly "pederast." OTOH, w-lfs-n is a pederast.)
That said, maybe it's helpful to look at how the women's version of such sexist bonding can occur: e.g., the ways that Tia and I, or LB and I, can argue and get angry at one another over things like cheating or whether or not high heels are wholly evil while still being able to talk about these things on another level.
Those conversations occur on the male side, too. All of the explication above should not be taken to mean that we aren't in possession of nuance.
w-lfs-n is a pederast.
A Furry, anime enthusiast pederast.
158: C'mon. Everyone knows men can't do nuance.
Did you say this in the Biel thread? I know you've said it from time to time, but I don't remember it there.
That's because you were too busy staring at her tits.
On a more serious note, I think very few guys really talk in depth about women as a gendered person, especially to other men. Sure, we can talk about the women in our life as people, we can describe their interests, their quirks, even the things we really like about them. But once you get into relationship stuff like leblanc's "I wish my girlfriend would blow me more, but she doesn't seem to like it that much", it almost never comes up. If I asked another guy about these sorts of things, there would be too possibly responses. Either he'd make fun of me or, if he was feeling especially honest and caring, he'd admit that he doesn't have a damn clue. You ask women about these sorts of things, just like a lot of women I know have asked me about what the hell their boyfriend could be thinking.
Then again, you shouldn't take my word for it. Most conversations about women that I actually have with guys run along the lines of "Still haven't got a girlfriend?" "Nope. You?" "Nah." "That sucks." "Yep."
I'll posit that the proportion of "guy talk" that involves typical sexist crap goes down as the guys in question mature and become more comfortable with each other.
That's because you were too busy staring at her tits.
Damn! Do you think she noticed?
I also think that 155 is right on, and should apply to men as well as to women.
Also, I would just like to applaud SCMT for 157's use of the ambitious parentheses-within-parentheses gambit that has so often tempted me. Typically I just chicken out and instead torture the poor sentence's syntax to its very limits.
to be able to say both "of course, high heels as a fashion accessory are entirely sexist and revolting" and "on the other hand, aren't these cute?"
So you are just suggesting guys say both "of course, ogling women's bodies as pure sex objects is entirely sexist and revolting" and "on the other hand, aren't those cute thighs"? Because that seems to be what has been suggested repeatedly as a nice medium, but few people seem very happy with it. I think that's because it doesn't really make any sense. I don't really see how you can both believe high heels as a fashion accessory are entirely sexist and revolting and then continue to spend a significant amount of time discussing "aren't these cute?", unless we mean very different things by "entirely", or unless you think yourself basically a despicable person. If you really think it's actually okay to spend a lot of time discussing "aren't these cute?", you must think they're actually *okay* (as in harmless), at least in some circumstances, at least for some people, at least when they're really cute, even if you think that a lot of their prominence is sexist and revolting. And I think a lot of the guys are basically thinking the same thing about Biel's ass.
I think this at one time had a point that I lost somewhere along the way. I would go back and just delete it all, but since I've already typed it I'm going to go ahead and click "post". In other news, baby Landers was officially diagnosed with colic today. (Which our sleepless nights had long made obvious, but it was still nice to hear the doctor say it, so we don't just feel like the problem is our complete incompetence.)
156- I was thinking of the feminist response to the J. Biel discussion, or other similar discussions, as analoguous to some obviously good practice that is somewhat annoying to follow. For instance, recycling. You (and when I say you I mostly mean men, but as Tia was saying, everybody engages in this sort of talk sometimes) know you should recycle, but it's kind of a pain in the ass, and it's even more annoying to have some other person remind you to do it. I tend to understand Ogged or SCMT's or maybe apo's reactions to these discussions in that light. My own contribution to the Biel thread, not that wildly outraged. But where I start to have a real problem is where it becomes clear that we're having a discussion about whether anyone should care about the environment at all—as if I'm suddenly at a convention of global warming deniers.
It's this sudden lurch into the abyss that makes me queasy. The sense that some people just have no clue about how important this stuff about women's bodies can be, how depressing, how damaging. I sometimes get surprised at the lack of underlying agreement about that, about the importance of women's issues in general. And I think those were the sort of comments Tia was picking up on. The ones that make you go: whoa.
as the guys in question mature and become more comfortable with each other
When does this happen? I'm 33, a husband, a father, a homeowner, I've dealt with the the death of a parent as an adult...really, if I was going to mature in that way, don't you think it would have happened by now?
I've been staying out of this thread, but this I cannot let pass in silence.
153: Groucho Marx's famous "comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die" quote.
It was Mel Brooks! The 2000-dollar man!
166: No, your point was clear enough, and it's basically correct.
167: Maybe part of the problem is that many people think their particular take on the beauty myth and the culture of fashion is, in fact, as relatively solid a basis of debate as are the facts about global warming (or evolution) -- and are disoriented to find that this is not necessarily so. In fact it's in the areas of sex and fashion where there tends to be the least consensus between feminisms, let alone within and outside the bounds of feminism, and that therefore this really shouldn't be very surprising.
169- When does this happen?
Well, I'm not yet there so I can't speak from personal experience, but I've known an awful lot of guys who have undergone something like such a transformation as their daughters begin to approach sexual maturity. Suddenly, this sort of guy talk seems a lot less appropriate, and is often found downright offensive.
170: Fuck. You're right.
Seems a lot less authoritative now that it's just a Mel Brooks quote. Funny that.
I've known an awful lot of guys who have undergone something like such a transformation as their daughters begin to approach sexual maturity. Suddenly, this sort of guy talk seems a lot less appropriate, and is often found downright offensive.
So guys, don't have daughters, or else you'll lose the woman-demeaning capabilities which are so very precious to our gender.
173 - I can, to an extent, see that. I guess I'm only in part discussing the "Did you see the tits on that blonde" kind of chatter, which I can see declining as I get older (and I might just kill someone I overheard making remarks like that about my daughter), but general sexist shit? I dunno.
169,173: Well, speaking only personally, I'd say it happened soon after college as combination of two factors. One, most of my male friends ended up paired off, and so the bulk of our time spent "hanging out" was as couples, rather than as a bunch of dudes, so perhaps we just broke out of the habit. Second, I've somehow found myself in a position where most of my non-work friends are women, and having a "check out that hot chick" conversation with my co-workers seems distastefully inappropriate.
I'm only 31 and have no children, and I may not be representative. Your mileage may vary. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Consult a doctor if you experience an erection lasting longer than four hours.
When does this happen?
I think it's a tautology. When it happens, you will be mature.
I don't really see how you can both believe high heels as a fashion accessory are entirely sexist and revolting and then continue to spend a significant amount of time discussing "aren't these cute?"
It's called cognitive dissonance, no? Or, less strongly, I know that I shouldn't eat half a container of marshmallow fluff with a spoon, but that doesn't mean I'm not tempted, or that I won't occasionally sneak a mouthful.
I think ac's recycling analogy is apt -- something that you know you should (or shouldn't do) but that requires effort and which is irritating to have pointed out to you. I really like 167. (The comment, not the integer.)
Consult a doctor if you experience an erection lasting longer than four hours.
But not ATM.
179 makes it sound like an issue of self-control, which I don't think is right. It's not that guys really *want* to stop discussing Biel's ass and just can't quite make themselves do it (any more than women really *want* to stop discussing those cute high heels). I don't know that cognitive dissonance is the answer.
166: I think you're setting up a false and unnecessarily extreme dichotomy. My point is that it's entirely possible to recognize that yeah, I've got some sexism going on, but that doesn't make me a despicable person--it makes me just like every other person on the planet, pretty much. It's possible to be self-aware while being neither self-flagellating nor letting yourself entirely off the hook.
And I don't know what you mean by "a lot of time." Maybe that's part of it, too, but I don't actually think so. I mean, if I spent a lot of time nattering on about shoes, and telling people that Shoes Really Matter, and being defensive when people point out that Shoe-Obsession is a Recognized Disorder of Sexism (or, alternately, saying, "yeah, I know" and then moving right along to business as usual), then that's destructive, in my book. If, on the other hand, I natter about shoes a fair bit (as, in fact, I do), and argue lightheartedly that they matter in a fun way and also as a marker of social class and relationship to the status quo, which is all really quite interesting, and when people say "basically you're a sellout" I'm willing to cop to that being one of my particular compromises with the world as it is and discuss *that* issue (compromising with the world as it is) for a while instead of or before returning to shoe nattering at some other time--well, my personal opinion is that doing it that way strikes a good balance.
But I reiterate what I said upthread: it isn't easy. I, of course, can do it because I am superhuman--but I certainly don't expect the rest of you to accomplish such feats without a great deal of practice.
All that said, condolences on the colic. Take good notes of how horrible it is so that in years to come you can use it to browbeat him into wiping your incontinent aged ass without undue complaint.
I really, really like 167.
It's especially bad when it comes from people close to you, because it feels (rightly or wrongly) like more of a betrayal.
No, seriously, what do you think when you think that it's really funny that a friend has been injured?
Probably as has been said, a version of gallows humor. Admittedly, I and the guys I grew up with are probably on the extreme end of the curve. Imagine my friend climbing out the window of my parent's van while we're driving up a canyon to an outdoor shooting range (the van has a roof rack and running boards) So now he's hanging out there as we drive, singing the theme song from the A-Team. And I start swerving the van close to the willowy trees on the side of the road so the branches will whip him. And the only thing louder than his screams of "Aaaargh, knock it off fucker!" is the laughter of my other friends.
I realize it must seem insane. In my experience most guys are are like this, but perhaps to a lesser extent. Women rarely seem to do it. Not sure why, and again this is based on the highly scientific sample of "people I know."
"The sense that some people just have no clue about how important this stuff about women's bodies can be, how depressing, how damaging."
I think we do. I can no longer keep track of all the points and all the comments, so I may be repeating. There are two tones and two types of of women discussion, and the fact that men will not engage in one of them when people they care about should be a clue.
Saying "Scarlett Johansson is pretty and a good actress" is one type. (Just saw Pearl Earring again)Sunday Night)
But "Scarlett Johansson has a great ass" is another type, and I am sorry, but I suddenly believe the second is attractive and "bonding" precisely because it is transgressive, offensive, patriarchal. It involves shared sin, guilt, permissions. Like speeding or drinking til you puke.
Guys know they are doing wrong, and that is why they do it. And to do it in front of women...the worst sin is intentional cruelty.
184 sounds very familiar, and not in my experience "the extreme end of the curve". Guys just tend to be like that, especially when young.
I don't think it's cognitive dissonance as much as it is recognition that we are not just brains on sticks. That and the ability to deal with ambiguity and paradox.
I might just kill someone I overheard making remarks like that about my daughter
Seriously, why? I don't get this. Is it because you recognize on some male level that's not accessible to us women that such a remark is inherently predatory or threatening? Is it some screwed-up patriarchal possessive thing, a more benign version of promise rings and chastity contracts with daddy? Because those are the only two reasons I can think of why one would have that reaction, especially if one were comfortable with making such remarks oneself.
I imagine that if I had a daughter and overheard something like that, I might give someone the scolding mama look, but I don't quite get the anger reaction. I'm willing to concede that this *might* just be a women vs. men's aggression thing, though it's more likely that it's an internalized tolerance of sexism thing; but neither explanation seems fully satisfactory somehow, so I'm wondering what it is I'm not getting.
171: You be Carl Reiner, and I'll be Police Chief Wiggum.
On a serious note, Dr. Slack, I think that denying or minimizing the impact of male privilege is about as crazy as denying or minimizing global warming or white privilege. If you pay attention to what other people say it should at least strike you that it exists. And IIRC the women's position on the other thread was not that the guys should stop talking about the hotness or notness of celebrities, but that they should at least acknowledge the way that it had a bad impact on the women (that is, it made them feel awful); and many guys refused to acknowledge that it possibly could have a bad impact, which seemed like blindness to male privilege.
181: I meant the opposite. Guys want to discuss Biel's ass (since that's the closest we'll ever come to, you know, touching it) but we know we shouldn't (for some value of "shouldn't").
185- Wait, "Scarlett Johansson has a great ass" is transgressive, offensive, and patriarchal?? I thought this was the type of comment that everyone agreed was okay (unless deliberately used in some context meant to objectify or otherwise convey offense). I think it's "Scarlett Johansson has a great ass, but could really stand to do a few more situps" that was upsetting. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. (In which case I will argue with you. If "SJ has a great ass" is bad, what about "SJ has beautiful eyes"? And where's the line between the two?)
191: Brock, we covered that stuff in the other thread, no? And isn't the answer obvious, anyway?
"The sense that some people just have no clue about how important this stuff about women's bodies can be, how depressing, how damaging."
I think we do.
Actually, I think we generally don't. One of the reasons I think that huge thread was really good is that it brought this issue to the attention of a bunch of well-meaning guys who were truly unaware that this is how women see these conversations. I can speak with accuracy only for myself, but I certainly always assumed that "X would be better looking if she did Y" statements were less problematic than "X is soooo hott!!!" statements, because the modifications suggested are usually in the direction of making X more like most women the speaker knows (e.g., X should gain weight rather than lose it).
As I said in that thread, I don't actually talk like this or participate in these conversations myself, but I think a lot of the guys who do, particularly those who hang out at places like this, say stuff like this in part to indicate that they're not buying in to the patriarchal ideal or whatever ("I like real women"). This is clearly not the case, however; how women see this is an empirical question that we as men can't know the answer to without talking to actual women, and as that thread showed, actual women don't react the way we think they will (or the way we think we would in a similar situation).
So if we're saying hurtful sexist shit, by all means call us on it; we may not even be realizing it.
140: I just reject the idea that men are really bonding over "Jessica Biel's ass is better than Scarlett Johansson's ass" as a type of talk.
In my experience, "A is better than B" talk is exactly how I bond with the more stereotypically masculine friends that I have. My conversations with my father and brother closest to me in age almost entirely consist of "Are the Beatles better than Elvis," "What are your top 5 movies this year," and "Does Tom Brady suck or is he any good?"
Now, we don't have these discussions about Biel vs. Johansson, because they're christians and would consider such conversations inappropriately lustful, and because I would consider such conversations anti-feminist.
But saying that having these sorts of conversations about women's bodies is bad is a completely different thing from saying that these sorts of conversations don't promote bonding. In my experience they're exactly how a lot of "male bonding" happens.
184 sounds very familiar, and not in my experience "the extreme end of the curve". Guys just tend to be like that, especially when young.
Heh, you yourself might be further along that corve than you think.
193: That's an excellent point. I'd also always assumed that "Yeah, but she's way too thin" would be read as a positive comment about healthy body image, not as sexist and degrading. It's definitely eye-opening to see that we were wrong.
194: Exactly. The conversations about women are a subset of the totality of "guy" conversations, which are nearly exclusively about connoisseurship, whether the subject is women, music, cars, sports, or anything else.
Personally I don't participate much in any of this kind of thing, which is probably a large part of why I don't have many close male friends (because it really is a huge part of male friendship). It's not that I object to it, more just that it tends to bore me. Who cares?
193: i've made statements like 'whoah, look at celebrity-X's weird knees' thinking that would imply 'even hot celebrities have problems and aren't perfect, so don't flip out over your own imperfections.' which i'd like to hear from girls in the converse situation. i only realized later this wasn't taken as well.
189: Fair enough. What I'm getting at is just that the devil is in the details. Disagreements about how and when male privilege manifests can be profound enough, just between feminisms, that one party actually (mistakenly) thinks the other is denying the mere existence of male privilege. I don't know how much this happened on the Biel thread (maybe not at all), but I do know that this sort of thing happens in the feminist blogosphere almost constantly and sometimes quite virulently. And it makes the baby Jesus cry.
192- dammit B, don't make me go back and read a 900 comment thread (I mostly skimmed before) just to find out the answer to an "obvious" question. I think the answer is obvious. 185 also suggested the answer was obvious, but picked the other answer.
Oh, for fuck's sake, on second thought nevermind, I don't want to reopen a hornet's nest here on such a nice, friendly thread.
I'd also always assumed that "Yeah, but she's way too thin" would be read as a positive comment about healthy body image, not as sexist and degrading.
The point is it's still imposing a male standard of women should look like. It doesn't have to be predominant rail-thin standard; saying "X needs to eat more" to fit the standard you've decided to call "Real Women" ends up sending the same message: that women need to reshape themselves to conform to male desire.
So I think what has baffled me about all this is that people sound to me to be saying "It's ok to discuss celebrities looks, just not in the ways that you discuss everything else." Whereas, to me the simple solution is just "Don't discuss celebrities looks." What bothered me about point 3, is that it seems to me that most people here don't think that's how a lot of men discuss everything else. And that seems to me to imply that people don't understand a common male perspective on this, not that they have understood it and disagreed with it.
200: Hey, what else do you have to do when you're sitting up all night with a colicky baby?
I think the honest answer is that the answer to whether "hot ass" is sexist in and of itself depends on the person answering, in part, but depends more on at what point in the conversation it's being asked. I'd concede that it's not sexist in one mood, or at one stage of an argument, and then say it is at another stage. Ogged says this is me arguing unfairly; I think it's more about acknowledging that such things aren't necessarily absolutes and depend a great deal on context. Plus you have to build understanding one step at a time.
"So and so has a hot ass" is sexist, yeah, b/c it's part of the larger way that women are objectified and treated as, well, pieces of ass. Whereas "so and so is really beautiful" isn't, because it's a way less loaded phrase and just sounds a lot less crass.
201: The point is it's still imposing a male standard of women should look like.
Isn't that basically the equivalent of saying "don't have aesthetic preferences of any kind lest you offend someone's self-image"? If that really was "the point" of the other thread, that's completely lame. (In any case I'm beginning to I suspect the Thread hath as many Points as readers.)
I'd like to agree with 194, 197 too, especially teo's "nearly exclusively about connoisseurship" formulation, and his tendency to be bored by it. I'll go further and say not just idle chat about connoisseurship, but the thing itself is something for which I have small tolerance. I admit distinctions, and will sometimes work hard on why I like something more than something else, but the bonding that occurs because of sharing some essentially personal preference is very tedious.
201: Right, AWB made that point repeatedly in one of the previous threads on this issue. What this recent thread really hammered home (for me at least) was the practical results of this sort of talk; how women react to hearing it. I don't think that had really been covered before, or if it was I missed it.
191: Brock, your confusion stems from it being Jessica Biel who has a great ass. Scarlett Johanssen has a great rack. Everything make sense now?
200: The answer is not obvious to me, either, and I also am reluctant to read all of the relevant 900 comment unfogged threads. I haven't even read most of this one.
My current theory about these sorts of remarks is that it is almost all context that makes the difference between oppressive and ok, and that the content of the statement is basically irrelevant. Given the right time, place, and manner, we can all note that Scarlett Johansson has a great ass. The problem is identifying the right time, place and manner. Guys talking trash is never the right time, precisely because this is the judging, consumerist, connoisseurship situation that drives women insane.
I have no idea what the right time, place, and manner is, though. I think there ought to be one, because it would be strange if a true statement were never appropriate to utter. I recently tried what I thought would be an innocent conversational move. I said to my wife: "Kristin Bell is actually prettier than Sarah Michelle Gellar, but you don't notice because SMG is always given more clever dialogue." Molly totally gave me the "if you think I'm going to talk with you about who is hotter, Buffy or Veronica, you are so delusional" response. I guess I goofed, again.
it seems to me that most people here don't think that's how a lot of men discuss everything else. And that seems to me to imply that people don't understand a common male perspective on this, not that they have understood it and disagreed with it.
So what is the common male perspective on this? All I'm hearing so far is that desperately men need to critique Jessica Biel's ass in order to bond with one another, and that without this critical element of intra-gender culture we would wordlessly drift apart into shattered and meaningless lives.
"So and so has a hot ass" is sexist, yeah, b/c it's part of the larger way that women are objectified and treated
209: desperately men need to critique Jessica Biel's ass in order to bond with one another
A totally fair and accurate summary as always, but I'd really like to make this point clear: not just anyone's ass, mind you, but Jessica Biel's specifically. Not even J-Lo or Beyonce make the cut as the Necessary Glue of Our Society.
209: A (not the) common male perspective is what Teo said very well in 197. The reason that the comments about Jessica Biel are made in the way that they are, is because many men talk that way about every "connoisseurship" topic. Although treating women as a topic of such a conversation may be (and I would say is) sexist, the cause of discussing it in this fashion is not a sexist one.
"Best body" when straight men are talking about male athletes does NOT have the same lascivious/possessive/aggressive undertone as "hot ass." And if you fail to acknowledge that, you are either tone deaf or lying your hot ass off.
210: It is part of the larger way women are objectified and treated. It isn't part of the larger way men are objectified and treated, even when it happens.
I mean, there's one or two posts about hot male bodies on this site. There's lots and lots more about hot women. And all the male posters here are gay.
Although treating women as a topic of such a conversation may be (and I would say is) sexist, the cause of discussing it in this fashion is not a sexist one.
Sure it is. "Connoisseurship" implies taste in things (especially things to be consumed)--inasmuch as such talk treats women as objects equivalent to cars, music, or a good meal, such equivalence stems from sexism.
It's "great ass," B. Don't put words in my exquisite cocksucking lips.
Although treating women as a topic of such a conversation may be (and I would say is) sexist, the cause of discussing it in this fashion is not a sexist one
But if the problem is the objectification of women, and everything else in the "connoisseurship" category are objects, then this in fact reduces to treating women as objects. So yes, "discussing women in this fashion" is sexist.
Okay, I know everyone finds my anecdotal evidence worthless and tedious, but I'm going to indulge myself because SomeCallMeTim was snide about my penis.
First anecdote: The last time I remember having one of those conversations was when a con man was trying to trick me into something (I never figured out exactly what -- I think he started out wanting to trick me into doing construction work for him without pay, and then switched gears mid-con to try to get me to embezzle money from my employer) a few years ago at the bar. The young, slim, attractive bartender had served us our drinks, and as she turned away, the con man stuck his hands out, palms down, with his index, ring and middle fingers tucked to his palm and each hand's thumb and forefinger sticking out perpendicular to each other. He brought the tips of his thumbs together and said something along the lines of "You see that? You should be able to do that around a girl's waist and not have your pinkies touching her sides." I was pretty grossed out, and did not bond with him even one little bit.
Anecdote #2: Along the lines of 170 and 173 above, a friend, whose wife had just given birth to a daughter, said something like that, i.e. "Now that I have a daughter, I think ahead about 14 or 15 years and I know I'm going to be totally overprotective, I'd even like to put her in a convent when I think about what guys are like." Umm, so yeah, like BPhD said, isn't this the dictionary definition of "patriarchy"? And not in some fun, transgressive, drink-till-you-puke bohemian way, either. This is about men controlling women's bodies, because they would rather deny women freedom to move around in the world uncloistered than call other men on their shit.
Frankly, the second conversation saddened and creeped me out far more than the first. What's the point of going on if someone who considers himself left-liberal, if not radical, and who, in most respects is a pretty good guy, is going to fall back on the most archetypal forms of patriarchal behavior once he finds himself in a convenient position to do so?
214: Am I the only one here that understands that "Oh, come on" signifies a joke? Try to keep up, people. I'll cut B some extra slack because she's a girl, but really, Weiner, you disappoint me.
210 used the phrase "hot ass." But the point remains the same.
really, Weiner, you disappoint me.
If I had a dollar for every time I've said this...
210 used the phrase "hot ass."
210 was quoting you.
minneapolitan, I like your anecdotes (in that they horrify me).
Wait, are you now trying to say that treating women as objects to be consumed is sexist?!? Jeebus, why don't you just go ahead and cut off my balls, okay?
219 s/b "thumb and pinkie sticking out perpendicular to each other"
223: You don't really expect me to remember everything I say, do you? That's for my acolytes.
215 and 217:
I seem to have failed to make the subtle distinction that I was trying to make. (You know, real clown vs. fake clown...) My point was that although it is sexist to have such a conversation (for precisely the reason that you explain), the reason that it happens isn't because of sexism.
Besides, celebrities are objects! That's the whole point. And it's why it's ok to talk in a "connoisseurship" way about musicians or athletes. Objectifying celebrities is not inherently sexist. Objectifying female celebrities bodies is contingently sexist because we live in a society where it reinforces a lot of other sexist things already in society. What I'm trying to argue is that if it weren't for male priveledge, then "connoisseurship" conversations about celebrities bodies would not be any more problematic than such conversations about athletes.
All I'm hearing so far is that desperately men need to critique Jessica Biel's ass in order to bond with one another, and that without this critical element of intra-gender culture we would wordlessly drift apart into shattered and meaningless lives.
Yes, that's exactly what I've been saying.
231: Thanks. Sigh. I would be so much better at crosswords if only I could spell.
Is this complicated?
The difference between "great ass" and "great eyes" is whether you would say it to Scarlet Johansson. You can play with shyness or whatever, and I might blush and stammer, but I could go up to Scarlett and say:"I think you are pretty and a great actress." Saying she had "neat eyes" is possible, barely possible, but probably inappropriate.
I could not, would not tell her to her face that she had a great ass. Why not?
PS:I actually have a constant problem as to where to look encountering a pretty woman at say the grocery. The only answer that seems to work for me is to change how I look, how I think.
219: Anecdote 1--horrifying. Anecdote 2--I'd read his statement as you described (obviously, you were there, so...) as hyperbole in the attempt to describe a real emotion.
Actually I'd support a ban on the word privilege for, say, a year, while everyone figures out new and fresh ways to convey the same idea.
236, anecdote 2: Well, yeah, Chopper, but you've already copped to your neanderthal instincts, so following your lead on this would clearly not be the way forward.
But there are contexts where you can tell someone, to their face, that they have a great ass. You can say it to your lover*, for instance.
* I have decided to totally embrace the word "lover"
217:"then this in fact reduces to treating women as objects."
Actually I think saying "Scarlett Johannson is pretty and a great actress" is an equal but different objectification. A more acceptable one. That may be a different thread.
Yeah, but you wouldn't say it to their *face*. Because that would be either incomprehensible or *really* insulting.
219: The real emotion is the worry that your child can be hurt combined with the realization that there are ways women can be hurt that don't happen much to men. The problem with the response to this emotion is thinking that shutting someone up in a convent is a better way to keep them from being hurt than showing them the world as it is and giving them the skills to navigate it.
showing them the world as it is and giving them the skills to navigate it
*and* doing what you can to change the parts of it that are likely to fuck up your kids.
Was 241 for me? "To their person?" "In person" or "in conversation"? Did I misuse an idiom?
What you say to Sco-Jo is "Did anyone ever tell you you have very sensual lips?" Didn't anyone see Match Point?
246: No, I'm sorry! 241 was to 239.
Well, really what I was reacting to was this:
This is about men controlling women's bodies, because they would rather deny women freedom to move around in the world uncloistered than call other men on their shit.
I think I could make the comments Minneapolitan describes (we don't know each other, do we?), but, as I said, as hyperbole using traditional tropes, simply to indicate the depths of my protective feelings.
Look, personally, I hope to raise my daughter in a way that she never loses her sense of fearlessness and belief that she can do anything she sets her mind to. I also intend to enroll her in martial arts classes as soon as she understands English well enough to obey instructions--cuz I know what assholes men can be.
245: Yeah, that too.
246: I thought it was to my 239, but maybe that's just ego.
Besides, celebrities are objects! That's the whole point.
But Jessica Biel isn't being discussed in her capacity as a celebrity. She isn't even being discussed in her capacity as an attractive woman. She's being discussed in her capacity as that woman-shaped thing that happens to be attached to a nice ass. How is this not sexist?
Sure it is. "Connoisseurship" implies taste in things (especially things to be consumed)--inasmuch as such talk treats women as objects equivalent to cars, music, or a good meal, such equivalence stems from sexism.
I think this is why it feels different to me when it's a celebrity rather than an aquaintance or even a regular stranger. A celebrity (at least in my mind) is just another consumer good , so discussing their appearance doesn't strike me as any different from discussing the lines of a car whereas discussing a woman I knew at work, or had just seen on the street in the same manner would seem creepy and wrong.
245: And coming up with new and creative ways to fuck up your kids in entirely original ways.
243: yes.
as a daughter, i've noticed it's hard for fathers when their daughters come of age and begin dating. (even though mine dealt with it very gracefully).
however, the patronizing "protect the fragile flower, shut her up rather than let her get in any danger ever, danger which is surely all over the place" cultural meme is incredibly, incredibly harmful to girls and daughters. it cripples their ability to be independent, autonomous, active.
You know, I never really thought about this, and obviously I know that Chopper's not actually going to kill or hurt anyone, but I think that protectiveness sometimes, instead of making one feel protected, can just make the supposed protectee scared of the protector. My older brother was kind of insanely protective of me. One day in fifth grade I came home upset because a boy had been bothering me. After dragging the info out of me, my brother marched me back up to school and made me point the boy out, so that he could give him a talking to. This happened a few more times before I learned to studiously hide anything boy-related and weird that was going on with me.
It didn't really make me feel safer, because I knew that all the talkings-to and threats of violence weren't going to keep me from being harrassed or grabbed or bothered, because there are basically infinitely many men out there willing to do those kinds of things to me. All it did was kind of make me afraid of my brother.
So, data point to consider.
Still reading through, but a quick emendation to 64: I realized, while waiting for some stupid official to announce that all U.S. Open matches for tonight were cancelled, that I hadn't mentioned Jackmormon in my list. I knew I'd forget someone and considered not doing the list for that reason, but I never suspected it'd be JM. I'm just glad I got back to an internet connection before I was censured for this exclusion. Also, I wrote "except" when I meant "accept."
65-67: Neither my comment in this thread, nor (I think, though could be wrong) anything I wrote in the actual Biel's ass thread, indicate that I disagree with Tia's points as applied to that (Biel's ass) thread. I was discussing problems with generalizing them, which is why I chose an arbitrary example. SEK seems to read me in the same strange way, but I don't see where the grounding is for this.
252:I don't really *feel* that sense of celebrity. Possibly a great loss, but watching "Girl with a Pearl Earring" the other night I was watching Colin Firth and Scarlett Johanson, not Vermeer & Griet.
I don't how celebrities can be at all interesting except as people. They are not rocks.
168 should be analogous. I'm turning into Yglesias.
255: And, in fact, that kind of protectiveness makes women *less* safe, because you become afraid to tell the "protector" the truth.
259: Yeah. It does. I was pretty lucky, because I at least had my dad, who I learned I could talk to about that stuff. His reponse was usually, "I'm really, really sorry that had to happen to you. I know that you should feel safe, e.g., walking alone at night, but sometimes it's better to play it safe. Is there anything I can do?"
And I would say "Yeah, when you see men leering or saying inappropriate shit to or about women, say something to them. Tell them it's not ok. Even if you don't see them doing it, tell them. Tell your employees, and your friends, and your nephews."
I can't find it now, because I'm too sleepy, but wherever bitch is talking about making fun of ditzy women—I don't think I do that very much. So my friendships or even casual bonding moments with other women are not about that.
Yeah. I honestly think that on a societal level, that kind of protective bullshit really is intended to keep women less safe, because women's peril is a big part of what defines good men as both good, and as men.
I don't really *feel* that sense of celebrity. Possibly a great loss, but watching "Girl with a Pearl Earring" the other night I was watching Colin Firth and Scarlett Johanson, not Vermeer & Griet.
I don't how celebrities can be at all interesting except as people. They are not rocks.
I think it's the realization that what I'm seeing is a product, and not their true persona. I really don't know anything about them as people, so the person and the product are very separate things for me. It's why I can't fathom the appeal of celebrity gossip. What they do outside of the job usually has no interest for me.
"Yeah. I honestly think that on a societal level, that kind of protective bullshit really is intended to keep women less safe, because women's peril is a big part of what defines good men as both good, and as men."
so older brothers who get upset and do unhelpful things when people harrass the sister are hoping for more harrassment in the future, and trying to get that harrassment through their actions?
Not knowing what else to do with these fears, nay, tormenting horrors that my daughter, turning 12 soon, will be the target of some lowlife's lower-level attentions, I often find myself resorting to red-faced oaths involving baseball bats and shotguns. Though not in her presence, much.
I don't think I'm afraid of my little girl growing into a mature woman, or how our relationship must certainly change as a result (I rather look forward to being more along-for-the-ride friend and less guiding-hand parent), but damn! how I pity the man who plays her for a toy.
There will come a day when it will no longer be my job to look over and out for her (though I'll be on 24-hour call nonetheless), but now, while it is (at least partially) my responsibility, I feel the weight of it in every muscle. I'm getting tense just trying to type out these feelings, which I simultaneously find myself embarrassed about, into a curse-free comment.
You can call me a pawn of a regressive patriarchal hegemony if you want, but the plain laidbare emotion of it is that I project I'll want to kill the fucker, if fucker he truly be. And now that I think about it, same for any future abuser of my son.
Post-preview: I was initially going to try to unpack how it is that I'm able to be a man who savours the sight of some beautiful woman without causing some kind of potentially harmful psychological effect upon my kids (never mind my wife), but I'm seeing it as an indefensible position I don't particularly want to rationalize to myself. Both kids and wife enjoy a great karate dojo, and we talk about growing-up stuff relatively easily. So far.
Not that this makes anything any clearer for anyone else here.
so the personified PATRIARCHY's intentions are bad? what does that even mean?
Tia,
I appreciate your advice, though your scolding language puts me off. You presume too much guilt in the reader.
You are attempting to set the rules of the game. That is fine. We all jostle for position as much about the rules as our position within them. I'm sure you understand that people will choose not to follow rules simply because someone states them forcefully.
So let me break a few of your rules and offer my perspective: I find that self-declared feminists often complain about the wrongness of other people's opinions and taste. And they identify these wrong opinions as the cause of their oppression. I don't find it very useful to gripe about other people's poor taste. One can't control other people's fantasies. This is where feminism begins to approach organized religion in my mind. I don't find obsessing over other people's wrongheaded beliefs to be useful to my life or to the improvement of our common culture. In my experience I have not found many people who are won over by personal attacks.
So while I agree with many of your points, I take exception to your charge that disagreement with a large group of women is simply "being a dick." I disagree because I interpret the situation differently. How much is due to being a man? How much is due to my personal experience? Who knows and what does it matter? As an individual with eyes open to the world the best I can do is articulate my opinion. I don't really care if it violates your rules or upsets you. I'm offering my opinion. You offer yours. You cannot impose the terms of the debate with someone interested in probing the issue. You can only do that with someone interested in stroking your ego.
Who said anything about bad intentions? B's point is that as much as men fear for the women they love, on a larger scale, the fact that women are in constant peril is something that men might not want to do away with altogether, because protecting women is part of the identity of being a good husband, boyfriend, brother, father.
I have decided to totally embrace the word "lover"
Properly pronounced as "lov-ah".
256: w/d, I think you were being too much of a philosopher there. Tia stated a principle that, as you pointed out, could be counterexampled in a bizarre counterfactual scenario. But the point was that the actual case was nothing like your counterexample, and anything that's likely to conform to it isn't either. That is, it seems very unlikely that a bunch of women who frequently disagree about feminism would latch onto an arbitrary issue and declare it of feminist concern.
So I'm not sure the counterexample was germane to any of the real issues here. And there's a natural attempt to interpret as germane, hence the feeling that you were expressing disagreement with Tia. That's how I read it, anyway.
Shorter Erik:
I'd "probe" her "issue".
So while I agree with many of your points, I take exception to your charge that disagreement with a large group of women is simply "being a dick." I disagree because I interpret the situation differently. How much is due to being a man? How much is due to my personal experience? Who knows and what does it matter? As an individual with eyes open to the world the best I can do is articulate my opinion.
Erik, as stated above, your "opinion" is that, in response to multiple women saying "this hurts me," you say "no, it doesn't" or "you're wrong or oversensitive or misguided in being hurt by it." In what world is that not being a dick?
As Tia says in the "I'll give you fucking congenial" thread on the main page right now, it's not supposed to be "rules of the debate." It's advice to men who care about feminism and about what women think and feel on how to respond to an engage in feminist discourse in a non-dick, non-sexist, non-silencing way. As you said, you don't care if you upset people. There are men here who do.
[Jimmy Fallon starts cracking up]
And it goes on like that.
270: "intended to keep women less safe" doesn't sound like "too busy trying to be helpful that they don't notice their actions are counterproductive". theres a mens rea of intention in the first, and negligence or recklessness in the second.
See, this is just what I'm talking about:
"you're wrong or oversensitive or misguided in being hurt by it." In what world is that not being a dick?
In what world is it impossible for people to be oversensitive or misguided in being hurt by something? In the world I'm familiar with, it happens all the time.
Look, I know Tia doesn't necessarily mean to pump electricity into the Frankenstein's Monster of emotional entitlement, but way too many people will try to take it there, just like that. That's why it puts me off.
270: "...that women are in constant peril is something that men might not want to do away with altogether, because protecting women is part of the identity of being a good husband, boyfriend, brother, father."
Though stated as fact, I think this is one of them logical fallacies I read about once - an appeal to the retardedness of males.
Jesus, yoyo, haven't we been over the "don't take this personally" stuff?
It is intended to keep women less safe, and that doesn't mean failing to notice the effects of their actions. Just as women internalize sexism, so do men. One of the sexist things men internalize is that "protecting women" = "good, manly." Defining "good" and "manly" as "protective of women" requires women to *need protecting*; those definitions cannot exist if women as a group are not dependent and endangered. Indeed, highly patriarchal subcultures and societies often (usually?) place a *very* high value on manly protectiveness of women, especially women relatives. It's really not that hard to recognize that, notwithstanding the no doubt innocent and admirable intentions of individual men who have learned this stuff, that the intent of it on a social level is to keep women down in order to help men feel strong.
When we offer to sew your pockets, however, that's just being polite.
281: Hey, now, don't you be insulting my man. Those are fighting words.
279: But there is a very real reason these norms exist even beyond the sexism. Until the advent and widespread availability of handguns, tasers, mace, and other long- to medium-range weapons with no manual force required, there was no such thing as a fair fight between a man and a woman. A guy in full fitness would defend a woman from violence for the same reason he would defend an older person or a child, because there's very little chance that any of them can stand up to a young male with the testosterone edge.
A woman can more than hold her own nowadays in the normal non-violent gender wars, and she hardly needs a male protector from harrassment or leers when her own wit or confidence will serve her far better. She's also just as screwed as anyone else in the case of a robbery at gunpoint. Still, I think it's a bit mean to deny there are still certain violent acts that would be far more difficult for a lone woman to stand up to than if a guy could help her out. Of course, that male protector is pretty useless for anything but moral support after the fact.
m. leblanc,
I didn't say that I have a right to tell a woman what does or doesn't hurt her. You attribute words to me that I did not write. I did not write "no, it doesn't" or "you're wrong or oversensitive or misguided in being hurt by it." You wrote those words.
I was simply defending my right to offer my interpretation of a situation. I was not claiming any right to tell a woman that her feelings of hurt are wrong. Only she knows what she feels. I cannot dispute another person's feelings. But I can dispute their interpretation of a situation if I see it differently. That does not make me a dick. Disputing someone's feelings does. Disputing their interpretation of other people's intent or interest or motive does not make me a dick. Otherwise one could very easily use emotion as a shield to prevent discourse. This is what I feel Tia does by charging that disagreeing with a feminist chorus makes one a dick.
way too many people will try to take it there, just like that
Well, it's been my experience that women tend to understate the degree to which sexism hurts them, not overstate it. Women have been being accused of being oversensitive for so long that we internalize it and second-guess almost every feeling of offense. Being hurt by sexism doesn't just happen in a vacuum.
Disputing their interpretation of other people's intent or interest or motive does not make me a dick. Otherwise one could very easily use emotion as a shield to prevent discourse. This is what I feel Tia does by charging that disagreeing with a feminist chorus makes one a dick.
The thing is, the female commenters here never really questioned the guys' intents. Oh, we thought they did, but then they made very explicit 900 comments that it wasn't the case. They only asserted that they were hurt by our conversation, mostly because of the grander sexist pattern that it's part and parcel of.
Even Dr. B said it was actually unfair, as women can really objectify men with impunity. Hell, some of us will even celebrate it. But them's the breaks for being a guy and caring about what women (at least these women) think.
I cannot dispute another person's feelings. But I can dispute their interpretation of a situation if I see it differently.
And if their interpretation is "this situation makes me feel bad"? That's the specific context we're talking about here.
Erik: Your rights stop where my nose begins. Let's start with that.
dispute their interpretation of a situation if I see it differently
When the "situation" is "this hurts me and is important," your "seeing it differently" has to negate or dispute one of those assertions. Either it doesn't hurt them, or it's not important, otherwise, what would you have to "see differently"?
And as for your comments about disputing "intent," I think this has been stated much more eloquently by others (I usually leave the defense to other, better, writers, but I'm bored and this thread has me riled up), it doesn't matter whether "Hey, Rachel Wacholder went and got fat" is intended to hurt the women who hear it or not. Your "dispute" which argued about "intent" is just a defense for behavior that women find hurtful. Since you grant that you can't dispute what people feel, and also that you are in no position to tell people their feelings are wrong, what is there to argue about?
279: hey, i didn't take it personally. i don't think disagree with any of the paragraph you wrote in 279. I just don't see whats going on with the concept of "societal intent."
288: BitchPhD has a great nose.
Defining "good" and "manly" as "protective of women" requires women to *need protecting*; those definitions cannot exist if women as a group are not dependent and endangered..
Exactly. Daughters need to be taught to shoot those fuckers themselves.
JAC: I dunno. Yes, young men can be very aggressive, very violent, and very dangerous. But I'm not sure that it follows that men, as a class, are dangerous to women, or that women, as a class, need to be protected from men. It certainly isn't a simple question of strength (which you aren't saying, but which a sloppy reader, like me the first time through, might infer from 283). It's really hard for me to imagine whether, in a society that didn't actively discourage women's aggression and encourage men's, men would still be as dangerous to women as they have historically been.
290: Is it clearer? I used "societal" specifically to preempt the intent problem.
291: In fact, I do, if you like 'em kinda big.
292: I'd really rather learn to knock someone out or break their nose, actually. Seems it would be so much more satisfying.
Erik, why, in your first-ever contribution to a blog that has no sense of your character except through what you might happen write here, would you choose to be a dick?
As it is, we have too much noise and too little signal. Please be signal.
Defining "good" and "manly" as "protective of women" requires women to *need protecting*; those definitions cannot exist if women as a group are not dependent and endangered.
The flip side of this is the guy who's internalized the whole "women are not helplessly passive" thing, and thus leaves a girl who actually does need protecting to deal with what comes on her own.
My point is just that the problem here is the sweeping generalization (in either direction--"burly, rugged individualist" is as inaccurate of a characterization as "ingenue tied to the railroad tracks"), not any particular assessment of relative (in)dependence.
But shooting really is way more reliable.
And I guess it's not so much about women as a class being protected from men as a class. Those scum who actually try to physically assault another person are exceptions rather than the rule. I just think that people who are strong and capable of helping in a physical fight (generally going to be males, if we are talking in an absolute sense) should be willing to step in and help. This is certainly the sense of protectiveness I feel for my female friends and relatives, and most likely for my own daughter if I have one. If there is a physical attack, you better believe I will be there to help her in any way I can. If it's more emotional or mental, that I can only help through being there for her as support afterward.
I guess I just don't want to see all gender differences tossed out the window in the interest of equality, as I think some are extremely valid (i.e. the presence of testosterone or estrogen and all their known effects). I think trying to fight some of those traits currently inherent in our biology will only lead to trouble all around.
296: Sure. But why does that have to be a gender thing? It's crappy to leave *anyone* who needs protecting to defend themselves.
ok, i guess i just see the words
"that the intent of it on a social level is to keep women down in order to help men feel strong"
and saw jibberish. 'intent' means 'functions' in this case? its just an affectation, like when i talk to my beer?
272: w/d, I think you were being too much of a philosopher there.
I seriously don't know whether or not I find that flattering. I can say, on philosophy professing topics near the front of my mind that, after two classes, Le/slie Gr/ee
seems great. I don't know if anyone else around here has interacted with him.
Back on topic, Tia didn't propose guidelines just to be applied to one thread, even if that thread inspired them. I recognize they're guidelines, not rules, so that noting they have exceptions doesn't take away their point. But they're phrased very broadly.
As I said, I think it's true that people, in general, can be mistaken about their own fundamental interests, and correspondingly about what is and isn't a serious problem for them or a group they closely identify with. Assuming I'm not a member of said group, it's far more likely that I'll be mistaken (if we disagree) about what their fundamental interests are and about things that follow from that disagreement, so I should be hesitant to suggest that they're wrong and respectful in doing so.
It may nevertheless be the case that I'll be irritating if and when I decide to disagree (this is, I think more likely to be an IRL problem for me, no one here can tell, I hope, that I'm making a funny face while reading their comment or that I'm using a harsher tone of voice than the message I wish to convey requires). Being irritating is to be avoided (unless you think a disputant merits irritation), but I don't accept that, and don't think anyone is arguing that, it's paramount. So I can imagine breaking this guideline, or thinking that someone else was correct to do so. That was the real issue I was trying to get at, which seems perfectly germane to the post.
On male needling, I sometimes, instead of saying goodbye to friends, say, "I hope you die badly."
297: Sure, we should all be willing to step in and help. Women included: men might, on average, be better at physically defending women, but women, on average, are better at defusing potentially physical conflicts simply by being present.
And that's a totally separate issue from tossing all gender sex difference out the window, which no one here is advocating. I'll merely note that the reality of sex difference doesn't really justify treating individuals as representatives of their sex.
(I also hold out that guns aren't more reliable, inasmuch as (since we're alluding to statistics) most people are more likely to be shot by their own gun than they are to use it to defend themselves.)
298 can be levelled at my own 297, as well. It's true, you should help anyone who needs protecting, and I'd like to think that I would. However, because of my smaller size and the sort of guys I hang out with, I'd probably be of much less help to any male friend of mine or even to my dad than to any woman I know.
teofilo,
"And if their interpretation is "this situation makes me feel bad"? That's the specific context we're talking about here."
You speak of examining a sense of hurt as if it's an end to itself. Sometimes it is. But would you agree that often an extensive examination of emotion or feelings is used to pad an argument about a social issue? That raising awareness of pain or hurt is used as a stepping stone to a discussion about social ills and then social policy? In my earlier comments I did not intend to take issue with the value of examining how women can be hurt. But if this examination leads to a discussion about social issues, which it often does, then I will not check my opinion. I may have seen an encounter differently than a woman did. If a woman uses her emotional response to justify an opinion about social ills, then disallows me to explain my interpretation of the encounter and my opinion of the social dynamics at play - then I will conclude she's not really interested in discussing the social issue. Once the line is crossed- discussing larger social issues and not personal emotions- then one must allow others to express their opinion and cannot insist on the selfish rules that Tia describes.
299: No, if I merely meant functions, I'd have said that. I think that there really is a sense of intentionality there, even if it's one that's largely unconscious, or at least, unconscious in the minds of most individuals. I say this because, as I pointed out upthread, the more patriarchal and misogynist the subculture (or indeed, often the individual), the more likely it/he is to explain his patriarchy/misogyny *in terms of* protecting women. I mean, quite literally, that the meme of protecting women intends to put women, as a class, in a dependent position *in order to* make men, as a class, feel strong/good in relation to women.
I'd really rather learn to knock someone out or break their nose, actually. Seems it would be so much more satisfying.
Probably. But on the other hand, this is very "old school Charlies Angels", and totally hot.
298: Just making sure "women don't always need protecting" isn't read as "women never need protecting". I also didn't mean it in reference to something like an immediate physical attack, rather a more long-term, vaguely threatening situation that isn't being dealt with by the person. It's the conflict between dragging them to the police station to get a restraining order, which is patroniing and paternalistic, and leaving them to their (dangerous) inaction.
304: i've read what you wrote like 5 times, and i can't understand what you're getting at, unless you're positing some level of intentionality to the meme itself. which is very medicinewitchdoctorish.
308: Well, I'm sorry I can't explain it in a way you get. I don't see why you're not getting it.
305: Also lethal and almost certainly useless.
ok, you're positing memes as thinking entities and i'm supposed to better explain myself? this is very surreal.
i'm baffled.
310: Well, you gotta practice. And it's hot! Get those priorities straight.
311: I didn't originally posit a meme as a thinking entity. In the second attempt to explain I ran into a sentence structure problem. I think the real difficulty is that you're conceiving of "intent" as solely a conscious individual act, whereas I see it as also being a collective thing.
Wouldn't a collective thing, borne of unconscious acts by individuals, have stopped being intent and started being result?
Not if it were a cause. And I don't think I said that it's borne of *exclusively* unconscious acts by individuals. After all, it's not that hard to see the connection between "protect woman" and "woman, stay in house!"
Was 303 that Erik guy? I haven't even read this goddamned thread, but "selfish"? RULE TEN, MOTHERFUCKER.
Sorry to blast you with caps lock. Oh wait, I'm not.
Did I mention how I was driving a nail into my hand to distract myself from the pain? I'll just go back to that now.
Wait, rule ten? Not agreeing with 303, but is "selfish" a sexist trope?
317: Look at 303 again:
If a woman uses her emotional response to justify an opinion about social ills, then disallows me to explain my interpretation of the encounter and my opinion of the social dynamics at play - then I will conclude she's not really interested in discussing the social issue.
Tia isn't being accused of being selfish, but of letting her hysterical emotions overwhelm her critical faculties.
If not "selfish" then surely "emotional", as in, If a woman uses her emotional response to justify an opinion about social ills…
He's never shown the slightest interest in the blog and the people who comment here until two minutes ago when he decided that he really, really needed to be a dick. Why is that?
Global reaction to this whole mess of a thread:
(A) as I said above, Tia's a goddess. The post is excellent.
(B) A rough summary of what Tia said is that if a whole bunch of women are telling you they're hurt by something, don't be a dick by denying that it's a problem or saying or implying that they're hysterical whiners for thinking it's a problem.
(C) (This is where I start saying something, I think, slightly new to the conversation) A reason for not being a dick like that is that there's a real, important, and interesting conversation to be had about what exactly the problem is and what men of good faith can do to help with it.
People have started, kind of, having that conversation in this thread -- men talking about how discussing women is really important to them for male bonding, women trying to distinguish between the sort of talking about Jessica Biel's ass that's harmful to us and the sort that isn't, people talking about whether it's all right to treat celebrities as consumer goods, and whether the way people talk about actresses is the same as the way people talk about athletes.
But it's really, really hard to have the conversation about what, exactly, the contours of the problem are and what to do about it, when you've got a bunch of people being dicks about whether there's any problem at all or we're just being hysterical about nothing. That shuts down the productive conversation -- you can't successfully have it until you've got all the nitwits who are denying the existence of the problem to shut up, so you can move on to the next stage.
(And that's why some feminist blogs, say, Alas A Blog, are inhospitable to non-feminists. Because you don't need very many people being dicks to make it excruciatingly difficult to have any conversation other then "Aren't you people being hysterical whiners"? Most people on the T&B thread, including most men, weren't doing that. But that was the question being discussed, because the few who were being dicks were disrupting anything productive.)
All Tia's guidelines are about (beyond not being annoying) is not blocking feminist conversation. You don't have to agree with us about the contours of the problem, you don't have to agree with us about the best solutions. You just have to not be an asshole about making every conversation about feminism turn into "Aren't you making too much out of this?"
What stras and SB said. It was, after all, like 3:30 when I responded, though I do think "selfish" is objectionable too. Women are called selfish when they talk about their own concerns. It's an anti-feminist trope rather than a strictly sexist one, because it's specifically about women who stand up for themselves.
He's never shown the slightest interest in the blog and the people who comment here until two minutes ago when he decided that he really, really needed to be a dick. Why is that?
It's his calling.
I remain consistently baffled at the amount of energy some men are willing to put into resisting any sort of feminist endeavor. What, I ask in all seriousness, are they so afraid of?
Ah. The "emotional" part was more obvious to me, but the "selfish" part is more so now.
What, I ask in all seriousness, are they so afraid of?
The pair of scissors in our back pocket? Snip, snip!
Some more randomized reactions:
1) Tia, this is a great post.
2) I would like to ban the word 'patriarchy', however, from all future proceedings, on the grounds that it doesn't allow me to blame people properly. There isn't a nebulous force out there being a sexist asshole; it's people and institutions. 'It's not you, it's the patriarchy.' Sorry, no, it is you. (This is pretty much the calabat talking.)
3) Also please to be banned: the word 'female' when you mean 'women.' Unless you are the Ferengi. And maybe I'm alone in this, but I don't think so, but when someone says 'Females do this when men do this', it seems to connote, "I address not you as a person, wench, but only thy ovaries and their influence on your behavior. Men, on the other hand, get to have personalities as they're not dominated by their male parts."
4) It's fine to talk about which celebrities' asses are hott, because I can't see that going away even in an egalitarian society. What's not so much fine is doing it when not paying attention to context. And no, since it came up somewhere, when you criticize celebrities as fat or ugly, women don't think, 'Ah, see, the man in my life even finds imperfections in flawless women, silly boy', but 'Christ, if you think Rose McGowan is a pig, what do you really think of me secretly?'
5) If you're not getting Tia on #6, change the situation to one of race, where a black person is explaining how a situation makes him feel and a white bubblebrain says 'Oh, I know exactly what racism feels like, because one time, I was on a bus in the city, and I was the only white person there!' The white bubblebrain may indeed be trying to draw on common experience and reaching out to make a human connection, but he's going to come across as a dickhead nonetheless. Same deal.
6) To piggyback on LB, this is just about treating women's concerns, even if you disagree with the cause or solutions, as not something we made up to get attention or because we are jealous of hott women.
7) Quit hating on SJP. This has nothing to do with the fact that my darling lil sis compared me to her. Honestly.
8) Fashion is fucking evil and skinny jeans can kiss my excellent, curvy ass. The reason women have body issues is because fashion is designed for 12 year old boys.
Also please to be banned: the word 'female' when you mean 'women.' Unless you are the Ferengi.
Christ, I googled that wondering if it was some obscure misogynist culture, and what do I get? Fucking Star Trek.
Also please to be banned: Ultra Dorky Star Trek references.
Sorry. It was honestly the first time I had encountered someone smarmily using 'females' to mean 'women', and it's the episode where the Ferengi show up with weird electrowhips. I was twelve. It stuck.
You know what annoys me about the 'females' thing? I have the impression that it comes from guys who have heard the feminist argument that 'girls' is objectionable as a way of describing adult women and think it's reasonable. But they can't stand using 'women', because that would sound like the way people who think feminists have a point talk. So they had to come up with something else to avoid either being in an indefensible position, or agreeing with feminists.
Feh. (This thought process obviously does not apply to all men who use 'females' when they mean 'women' -- some of them picked it up from other people without thinking about it. I do just wish they'd all quit it, though.)
(Got directed here by B's blog, and I did read the entire 800-comment thread that inspired the post.)
First, great post.
Second, what I often see in these conversations is men not realizing that women spend a lot of time thinking about these things. Think about the fact that most women tend to understand, or tend to want to understand, where men are coming from better than the reverse. And add in the fact that most the dominant ideas of what good, desirable women are formulated by men. What that means is that most women intimately understand men's feelings about what makes a good, desirable woman (I'm not just talking about sex appeal, but also about morality to some extent, as with the "needs protection" example). Many women spend their lifetimes trying to contort their own thinking -- usually unconsciously -- to fit in with the way men think.
I loved AWB's comment that feminism means stopping this. It's not that feminist women don't understand what men think, it's that we've decided that we get to have our own thoughts and reactions separate from men's.
What I saw in the earlier thread, and in many threads along these lines on other boards, is men being totally suprised by what women were saying, and thinking that the women's negative reaction must be because the women don't understand the male view. WE DO. There was not a single explanation from a guy on that thread that was new information, or something I hadn't already thought; the reaction of most of the other women there would seem to indicate the same for them. In these conversations, guys act like this is the first time these women have ever thought about this, that their reactions are a spontaneous emotional outburst.
They're not. We don't have the luxury of not thinking about this stuff. Being able to not think about this stuff until a woman brings it up is something that guys get to do.
So when guys spend the entire conversation acting like women simply don't know what's going on, that if we could just climb inside the male brain we wouldn't have any problems at all, it's annoying. Because we have crawled inside the male brain, we've spent most of our LIVES inside the male brain, and we're still calling these things problems.
Occhiblu, are you the same one from mefi?
Yes, I am. Didn't the subject matter give me away? :-)
326.3 gets it so exactly right it makes me want to jump up and down and yell SEE?! SEE?!
most the dominant ideas of what good, desirable women are formulated by men.
I'd edit this to say "are formulated by, or for, men." Because women do a *lot* of the heavy lifting in conveying ideas of "what men want." One of the truths of the world is that mothers are often more strict about policing their daughters than fathers are.
Second, what I often see in these conversations is men not realizing that women spend a lot of time thinking about these things. Think about the fact that most women tend to understand, or tend to want to understand, where men are coming from better than the reverse. And add in the fact that most the dominant ideas of what good, desirable women are formulated by men. What that means is that most women intimately understand men's feelings about what makes a good, desirable woman (I'm not just talking about sex appeal, but also about morality to some extent, as with the "needs protection" example). Many women spend their lifetimes trying to contort their own thinking -- usually unconsciously -- to fit in with the way men think.
I said exactly this in the long version of this post. It must be a Vulvan mind meld.
Hmm, typo. But a funny one!
I had absolutely no idea that "females" was objectionable/offensive -- I use it pretty synonymously with "women". When I'm looking for other synonyms I'll sometimes go with "girls" or "ladies", although I try to stay away from those as I understand the reasons they are usually objectionable.
"Females" is leaving me baffled. Really, and I'm not trying to be an asshole. What's wrong with it? Is "males" a bad way to describe men? (Something I also do relatively often.) In what way does "female" connote "thy overies" than "women"? I'm just missing something.
Also, sorry if I've given anyone offense with this term in the past. Totally unintended.
I'd edit this to say "are formulated by, or for, men."
Yes. That's clearer and more fair, and I agree.
I'm just missing something.
Like a "more than" in the preceding sentence.
336: I could be wrong, but I think my 329 gives the origin -- it's a way to avoid 'girls' without stumbling into the respect implied in 'women'. It's a pseudo-objective phony-analytical tone.
If you use 'males' for men as often as 'females' for women, you're unusual. Most people don't.
(It's not a giant offense, just something that makes you sound juvenile.)
"Females" always reminds me of my idiotic high-school good-ol'-boy gym teachers, who were the first ones I ever heard use it as a noun referring to human women. My boyfriend says it reminds him of nature documentaries. There is something weirdly biological about the term.
"Was 303 that Erik guy?"
Yes, it was me. I read this blog because the topic and the comments interested me. I realize that I have a very different perspective than many of you. And that I have not commented here before. I did not intend to provoke a lot of anger, though I fear that I have. I simply wanted to offer my perspective, precisely because it is different from that offered by most of the commentators here. I felt that I had something to contribute. You may feel otherwise.
I felt that Tia was laying down rules to ensure that she spoke only with like-minded people. That may or may not have been her intent. I objected to it and reminded people that one cannot control the parameters of a debate like this if one is to engage people of different perspectives.
Rule #10 is a way of demanding that a person not discuss an issue with you unless they already agree with you. It's a way of saying, "Your disagreement over a social issue means that you hate women. Otherwise you wouldn't disagree with me." Now, I could hate women and therefore disagree with Tia. Or, I could respect women but hold a different opinion on some social issue. Tia is declaring that disagreement necessitates hatred and is reading misogyny into the other party's language. She allows no possibility of respectful disagreement. That is what I meant earlier when I said she presumes too much guilt on the reader. Dropping an F-bomb while referring to rule #10 is not going to make a person obey the rule if they feel the rule is used to constrain discussion. I don't feel that I'm spouting "anti-feminist trope" and I resent the accusation.
"Females" is irritating because the connotation is that of a bulbous, rubber-headed Martian in a shiny cape crying "Quickly, my compubots! Capture the Earth-female at once!"
So what non-offensive synonyms are available for "women"? I can't just say that word over and over and over and over.
Ah, here it is:
First, most of the women in here probably know that there are times when we ourselves bond over stuff like dissing ditzy femmy shit; defining ourselves against stereotypically negative female attributes is part of how we, as intelligent ambitious women, assert our own self-worth and group identity from time to time.
As I mentioned, I was thinking about this as I went to sleep, and had the feeling that I may do this less other women here do.
I was thinking that what actually defined all of my female friendships, from the time I was very little, was loyalty, and that the bonding I have done with other girls and women was about lack of loyalty in other girls.
That is: typically, after a certain age, there's a potential fault line in female friendships about the preference for male company. The friend who drops you when she gets a boyfriend, &c. And if I think about it, this is a far, far more organizing principle for my relations with girls and women than bonding over bad femmy traits. In some ways, it may be the exact opposite.
AWB's first comment made me think of this too. The thing that insulates you from male judgment, or the thing that in my experience insulated me, was granting my friendships with girls more importance than any boy.
343: women women women women women women women women women
Try it, it's fun!
women...female...girls...women...girls...female...male...girls...women...femmy...
ac is objectively anti-feminist!
Erik, I really don't have time to respond in depth to your comments, but it seems to me that you really have missed the point that Tia was making. Your tone is defensive in the classic `oh, but *I'm* not like that' way --- which usually means you are, even if subconciously.
Her point, as I see it, isn't that you cannot discuss certain things or that there are hard and fast rules so much as pointing out that the *usual* way such discussions tend to happen is broken. She points out some ways to avoid the pitfalls.
First off, you have to come to an agreement that there is a problem. There really isn't much hope for anyone that actually believes, in the face of all evidence, that there is no problem with gender roles and interactions in our society. Given that you see the problem, and you are a member of the dominant class, it should immediately be clear that you (broadly speaking) can't expect to steer the discourse because that is part of the problem. Furthermore, you have to accept the possibility that you have been socialized in such a way that actions you find neutral are in fact, quite problematic. Particularly if you are being told this repeatedly.
It isn't as if you can't dispute the importance of an issue in the larger sense (rather than its importance to an individual, which you cannot dispute). However, when you do so, you really have to check *all* of your assumptions at the door, so to speak. It may well be best to assume she/they are correct and try and reason backward from there to see if it breaks, rather than start from a position that may well depend on a number of problematic assumptions you are not quite aware of in your own stance....
Brock --
Just in case you're confused, there's not a thing wrong with using 'female' as an adjective. It's annoying when used as a noun. "Female friendships"? Cool. "Those females over there"? Less cool.
"Female persons" uncool too. (Note use-mention distinction.)
"You know what annoys me about the 'females' thing? I have the impression that it comes from guys who have heard the feminist argument that 'girls' is objectionable as a way of describing adult women and think it's reasonable. But they can't stand using 'women', because that would sound like the way people who think feminists have a point talk. So they had to come up with something else to avoid either being in an indefensible position, or agreeing with feminists.
Feh. (This thought process obviously does not apply to all men who use 'females' when they mean 'women' -- some of them picked it up from other people without thinking about it. I do just wish they'd all quit it, though.)"
see, saying 'women' makes me think of females* that are older and abstractly mature and inhuman (like a libertarian idea of a person) than the ones i hang out with. i think calling males 'men' is kinda weird, but everyone has called males 'men' since they were 8yold, so its not quite so weird sounding. its still really abstract sounding. when i'm thinking about what people do, i think if people i know, and don't think of male friends as 'men.' i think use 'guys' most of the time for males, but any female equivalent is 10x more objectionable: 'ladies'? 'chicks'? 'broads'?
very interesting post... I'll try to keep these things in mind.
about the while hot-or-not thingamabob: I think it's importance to male bonding is much overstated in this thread. I know it is a rarety among my friends (and not because my friends are particularly enlightened, we just usually had better, though much, much nerdier things to do). So it may be an important factor in some male relationships, but is not a fundamental fact of our culture.
Also: I think an assumption of good faith would make many of these types of arguments less tiring, and I think that is what Tia's points 1,4,5,7 are fundamentally about: feminists aren't making claims of sexism for fun or out of a sense of oversensitivity, but because these things are really bothering them and need to be at least acknowleged.
Just in case you're confused, there's not a thing wrong with using 'female' as an adjective. It's annoying when used as a noun.
I think I would only use the term as a noun, when speaking of humans, if I wanted to make it clear that I was referring to both "girls" and "women." That is, it seems weird and misleading to use "women" when (it's important to be clear that) you're referring also to children.
What would be preferable? (Genuine question).
354: That's an awfully specialized problem, isn't it? But for when it comes up that you need to refer to a group of female adults and children in a manner that makes it clear that both are included, and saying "Women and girls" is for some reason unsatisfactory, sure, use 'females' if you want to.
I was looking for my fallingwater use-mention example just yesterday, but couldn't find it.
Brock, it's just the sort of thing that irks, and with posters I know, I overlook it. But when someone's first post on a topic is 'Females generally do such and such', it really feels like we're meant to be under a microscope. ('Their breasts are like.. bags of sand? Really? What odd creatures. Come, we must study them further.') The female in the classroom, boardroom, etc. Hello, ovaries. Want to do a spreadsheet?
Felix, if you're talking matters of biology or plumbing, 'females' is just fine. When you're talking about women in the workplace or schoolgirls, not so much.
I can't quite explain why it bugs me, and it's really not that important, but it's often a pretty reliable indicator of whether the guy writing turns out to be a tool.
That's an awfully specialized problem, isn't it?
Really? I generally assume that's why people are doing it in the first place.
E.g., I would never say something like, "aspects of business culture make it harder for females to get promoted to senior executive positions," but in the context of a discussion of body image issues I might be inclined to say, "television creates unhealthy body images for females," if I want to be clear that this starts with children's programming, and doesn't stop there.
That's how I read it when someone says "females" in this context; on the other hand, since I seem to be the only person who uses the term that way, maybe I'm wrong.
I should probably not get hung up on a relatively minor point deep in the comments of a post which I thought was more or less excellent. Just struck me as a bit surprising; I would have thought of "females" in this context as ugly prose style but not particularly offensive. It's easily avoided, I suppose.
Felix (358): No. Television creates unhealthy body images for girls. (By the time they're women, the damage has been done.)
And it is done by reducing girls (by reducing the images of the women-they-will-grow-up-to-be) to females -- i.e., to their biology.
"Females" is offensive when applied to women because it is an adjective that describes everything from an electrical outlet to a breeding sow. "Women" is what we call adult human beings; "female" is how we describe things. Women don't like being talked about as if we were things (and it's true, people usually seem to use "females" out of some weird sense that there's something indelicate about the word "women").
345/346: AC, I have a problem with the implications of this. It seems to me that you're asserting that the *reason* you don't do this kind of thing is *because* you value loyalty between women. It's hard not to take that personally: I value loyalty between women a great deal, actually, and yet I do the kind of thing described (in fact, you're quoting me).
Moreover, it seems to me that in a way, the comments in 345/346 are subtly doing *exactly* the thing you're saying you don't do, which is to say asserting your own self-worth as one who values women by implicitly putting down the other women here for not valuing women as much as you do.
On further reflection I think in fact I'd probably never use the word "females" in this context anyway, because it sounds so ugly, clumsy, scientistic, and pompous. Like a bad parody of a sociologist. If it's also offensive it's no great loss to let it go.
Hmm... any link between the idea (somewhere far above) that [1] some men leave their need (if such it be) for sexist talk behind them on reaching maturity -- toward which some posters profess doubt or reluctance; and [2] the idea that 'women' is too hard to say because it sounds too, well, *mature*? Just askin'...
362: I think the "offense" is mostly a response to the pomposity.
This is sufficiently far down and I'm sufficiently unknown in these parts -- and I'm male, which puts me on thin ice already -- that this will probably sink like a lead balloon, but I've been mulling things and I've finally figured out why Tia's #2 strikes me as badly wrong:
Always consider the distinction between a class and individual members of a class....Someone can be in a weaker position than a member of a class subordinate to him and use his dominant class membership against that person...Even when someone I know could only dream of a sexual chance with me says to me, "Wipe the butter off your face, you fat pig. It's dripping," it still hurts me and threatens me. He is speaking with all the power of his class behind him, and on some level, maybe explicit, maybe not, he knows it.
The problem I have with this is not the presumably obvious one -- IOW, I completely agree that people can use the power of dominant class membership (even while being of marginal power within that class) to inflict harm on members of subordinate classes -- but rather that the implied context assumes the existence of, in some sense, a completely disjoint, hierarchical partitioning into relevant classes, which strikes me as bogus. That is, we can carve people into a dominant class named "men" and a subordinate class named "women" and all men are members of the dominant class and all women are members of the subordinate class, and these are the only two classes relevant to the discussion of gender. IME, that simply isn't true: people get partitioned into myriad overlapping classes in ways that can't be laid out hierarchically; and that harm (in the way of which you're speaking) can come from any direction depending on which dominant/subordinate class "axis" you're traversing.
Less hi-falutin', were I -- as a member of the dominant class who hasn't got a prayer of sleeping with Tia -- to say "Wipe the butter off your face, you fat pig. It's dripping," I completely agree that this would be hurtful and possibly even threatening to her, but I disagree that it would attain that power simply by virtue of my masculinity. [And I want to be clear here: I'm not in any way disputing the validity of her feelings, I'm questioning whether their source is as simple as she's relayed it above.] I don't see the insult being in any way assuaged if, for example, a woman were to say that, or a child, or whoever; the crux being that I don't speak as the voice of all men -- or even a representative sample thereof -- so while there may be flashback effects (e.g. hearing in me the echoes of men who said that to her years ago) it's not really my membership in the dominant class that's at issue, it's a proxy membership to another class which happens to overlap in a shared gender.
IMO, looking at this another way -- and I'm completely aware of how risky this is in context -- the reason it would hurt is simply that it's a dick thing to say. A dick thing conforming to certain societal tropes, of course -- therein lies a sexist tale or, um, many -- but a dick thing nonetheless. The tropes don't really reverse, and maybe that's the issue here, but I can't imagine the insult would be much different were she (as a member of "the subordinate class" of greater power [I presume] than I) were to say something similar to me, precisely because there are other dominant/subordinate axes along which she is dominant over me, and it's along those axes I'd be most likely to hear her words and hence have them hurt me. That's the important point and one which I think got elided in the original post.
Well, this is too frackin' long and likely just incendiary enough to be annoying, but I thought I'd throw that out there.
A dick thing conforming to certain societal tropes, of course -- therein lies a sexist tale or, um, many -- but a dick thing nonetheless. The tropes don't really reverse, and maybe that's the issue here, but I can't imagine the insult would be much different were she (as a member of "the subordinate class" of greater power [I presume] than I) were to say something similar to me, precisely because there are other dominant/subordinate axes along which she is dominant over me, and it's along those axes I'd be most likely to hear her words and hence have them hurt me.
I think the bolded bits above make Tia's point. The sexist tropes have power due to the dominant/subordinate nature of the classes, regardless of the specific relationship between the actors. A relatively powerless member of the dominant class has access to sexist tropes, and through them can cause injury through the power of the class he belongs to, despite the fact that he may have little individual access to power.
On the other hand, you just said all that, so I'm not clear on what exactly you disagree with.
See, I think 365 works precisely because it puts pressure on the essentialism of pitting "men" against "women." Which I don't think Tia was trying to do, and I'm not claiming she in fact did that; but I think that feminist argument too often gets heard that way.
I'll add that part of my own personal impatience with the way (some) men and (some) women (sometimes) react to these discussions--i.e., "your anger isn't productive" or whatever--is that I see such reactions as oversimplifying the issue into a simple men v. women dichotomy rather than recognizing that "men" and "women," in feminist terms, are cultural constructs rather than absolute categories. Hence, when bitching about "men doing X," one doesn't mean "all men do X" and certainly not "you, over there, with the penis: you do X." One means that the cultural group "men" perform X, and the cultural group "women" is supposed to react with Y, and that this structure is frustrating and limiting.
367: so, whats the point of using a word that to most people, implies 'most if not all of the people with cocks' when the important thing is the 'being-done-to-women'-ness?
It's shorthand, and it's one that one presumes people who've read a decent amount of feminism are familiar with?
Also, it's just obvious. When Ogged bitches about Iranian guys, everyone here knows that he doesn't, in fact, mean that every single Iranian male drives a white BMW.
Of course not. They all drive black BMWs.
No, some really do drive Mercedes.
Moreover, it seems to me that in a way, the comments in 345/346 are subtly doing *exactly* the thing you're saying you don't do, which is to say asserting your own self-worth as one who values women by implicitly putting down the other women here for not valuing women as much as you do.
Many people here have admitted to intense dislike of other girls when they were younger, that this is still something they're overcoming. That's my sense of my milieu. You often talk about how we all need to deal with our massive legacy of personal misogyny. And I've always preferred the company of girls. So I find that a little puzzling, or as I've said before, self-reinforcing.
But more later. Someone's just made dinner.
I see. Well, in any case, I wasn't saying that bonding over anti-femmey things means preferring men to women.
345, 346, 361, and 372 raise an issue on which I'd like some clarification. If you see feminists disagreeing about various points of feminist thought, is it sexist to yell, "Catfight!" Or just sexy?
374- It's sexist unless they are in bikinis in a giant tub of pudding. Then it's just sexy.
Dude, one time I was sitting in astronomy class, and these two girls in front of me were talking about how on halloween they went to some party, and a dude had filled a kiddie pool with KY, and was like "hey, you guys should wrestle in it!" And they were like "hmm. Ok!" I nearly lost my shit.
376- well, in my defense, we're not talking about whether the bikini-pudding-wrestling is sexist or sexy, we're talking about whether yelling "Catfight!" is sexist or sexy. Honestly, can you think of a more sexy time to yell "Catfight!" than when you see feminists disagreeing about various points of feminist thought while wearing bikinis in a giant tub of pudding?
They at least said it was KY. Thinking about it now, well, let's see...
KY: $5.45/4 oz.
Kiddie Pool capacity: 214 gal (80%). We probably only need 25% capacity. So that's about 66 gallons.
66 gallons is 8448 fluid oz.
Total cost: $11,510.40
Okay, they were probably lying.
If "Hey, you guys should wrestle in it" actually got the response "OK," then there's a non-zero chance that guy has Jedi mind powers.
Or the women in question were drunk.
381: They probably bought it at Costco.
379: I totally can't correlate sitting in pudding with sexy at all. Ick.
So what food would be sexy to sit in, B?
384: geebus B, the sexy is not in the pudding, the sexy is in the irony. Although feel free to replace "pudding" with "whipped cream", or "jello", or "mud", or even "ky jelly" if that helps you visualize without feeling icky.
380: chocolate, of course. (Okay, I lied: some of the sexy is in the pudding.)
385 does not make any sense. Could you rephrase the question?
385 makes plenty of sense. You said you couldn't correlate sitting in pudding with sexy, so what food would you consider sexy to sit in?
Brock gives some possible choices in 386.
Yeah, b, it wasn't really meant as an attack, especially since you were bringing it up to be magnanimous to Chopper or whoever. It's just that I've got a lingering sense of puzzlement about this phenomenon, and was coming up with an explanation. It struck me that there were two routes to authenticity—two ways of breaking out of sexist conceptions of self, one involving this intense criticism of girls marred by attempts to meet male or patriarchal notions of what they should be, the other, which seems slightly more affirming (though not without its own element of girl-judging) involving the decision that your girl friends are the best thing ever, and defending that and concentrating on that.
It occurred to me that I sometimes see this quality in women who are otherwise very different from me—e.g., sorority sisters—and it makes me identify with them, and feel a connection to them, and I'd see that as much as I'd see the ravages of patriarchal inauthenticity.
382: unfortunately achewood lacks the sophisticated search technologies of Dinosaur Comics, but rest assured that Ray smuckles thinks that cakes are very sexy things for a woman to sit in. I used to think that this was a specific reference to some Usenet kook whose identity I've forgotten (Matt McIrvin, can you explain the joke?) but maybe it's actually a more widespread phenomenon.
In contrast, here's a pretty good example of where it might be considered inappropriate to yell "Catfight!", even if, under the circumstances, it would perhaps be funny.
394: I like how the Urban Dictionary entry has exactly one definition, which turns out to be exactly what it sounds like the phrase should mean.
392: I think you're setting up an unnecessary dualism; surely there are other ways to be feminist than either girl-bonding or girl-dissing. But yes, of course, the bonding between sorority sisters (as one example) is a very good thing. I'm not sure, though, if that kind of girl-bonding isn't sometimes tied up with the oft-lamented girl-cliquishness, though I suspect it often can be. But really, I never did either one: I've always tended to have a few very good friends of of both sexes.
395: Never mind. My attempt at geeky humor failed, once again.
Walked into the middle of a pool of KY there all unknowing, didn't I? That's what you get for not reading the comments leading up to where you came back.
I think I have mentioned that I know a group of lesbians who regularly go jello-wrestling.
399: I guess I'm just too cool for you.
Maybe lesbians are cooler than gay men.
They may not be the only two ways, but the one can cut across the other. The girl-bonding lens can be useful in looking at someone you might be tempted to diss in another way. Not so much that you would bond with her, but see how she may have strong, good relations with other women.
Surely we can agree that KY or Jello would be sexier than pudding for anyone for anyone to wrestle in (in which to wrestle?) if only because the former are translucent while the latter is opaque.
That said, 391 is my favorite answer.
Thanks for setting all this out so clearly and at length, Tia. It should be required reading for a whole heap of blokes I know.
Although they would probably respond by saying something like "The other women I know don't have a problem when I tell them their perceptions of sexism are just over-sensitivity."
Very late to this , because I've been and need to continue to be on hiatus, but I just want to add to the chorus and say great post, Tia.
Tia, thank you! That was wonderful. More anger at the end would have been just fine.
Thanks! You rock! And this is very very useful to have it all laid out clearly.