PhysioProf, guest blogging at Isis the Scientist has a post up called the Handy-Dandy Guide for D00dly Commenters which struck both me and Ampersand as being similar to his How Not to Be Insane When Accused of Racism: A Guide for White People (Amp notes that he would use different wording were he writing the post today).
Here’s an excerpt:
(1) If you are leaving the first comment to a post, you are almost certainly fucking up.
(2) If you are using the words “men”, “boys”, “fathers”, or “sons”, you are almost certainly fucking up.
(3) If you are using the words “should” or “useful”, you are almost certainly fucking up.
(4) If you are telling people that talking about this, that, or the other issue is fine, but also asking them what they are doing about this issue, you are almost certainly fucking up.
(5) If you are complaining that by being “mean”, people that might be allies are being turned off, you are almost certainly fucking up.
Seems worth reading through.
I Blame the Patriarchy has a discussion of the piece (with worthwhile comment thread, I thought). Twisty wrote:
While it is always hi-larious to read what expert dudely readers of heartwarming nature crap blogs have to tell their less-enlightened brethren, it’s also maddening and, if you like, ironical, since such a post can only be written from the patronizing position of male privilege. It’s a kind of double-privilege, too: “Unlike you, Grasshoppah, the feminists have accepted me, for I have been to their savage death island and live to tell the tale.”
These guys are veteran ethnographers doing a field study, warning the new grad students: “The natives have curious, unpredictable ways. Approach them with caution or they will prong you sure as shit with curare-dipped spears. Oh, and we’re meeting for beers later at Chip’s tent.”
Hardy har, because implicit in these man-to-man, how-to-walk-on-eggshells-around-a-feminist tracts is an ingrained sense of the inconsequential status of women in the feminist heartwarming nature crappism blog community. It’s comical somehow, that feminist women — women who are widely considered to be the hairy minority, the kill-joy joke-butts of the internet whose blogs are often described by dudes as “lame” or “parodies” — are so aggressively protective of their trivial little sectarian colonies on the web that men need special training and travel visas to avoid blogular deportation.
As well as other things.
Twisty, as far as I can tell, respects PhysioProf as a feminist. She’s just calling him out on this particular dynamic.
This is one of those many areas where I don’t agree with Twisty exactly, but I think she’s saying something interesting. I think that PhysioProf’s post is interesting, and has some potential to be practically useful (although I disagree with some of his points; for instance, here at Alas, a male commenter probably isn’t fucking up by commenting first on any given thread. We’re also a little bit more comfortable with personal life sharing, I think, than the blogular culture at IBTP. But nevertheless, there are a lot of good points, and I think the way PhysioProf is analyzing his own privilege could be usefully generalized to other areas — for instance, white commenters who are trying to be genuine allies to poc, or cis commenters trying to be genuine allies to trans people, etc.).
However, Twisty is correct — in order to make a post like that, written in the language of the privileged, you have to be *exercising* your privilege.
It’s a good thing for privilege to be exercised in this way, I think. Certainly, I think on the whole, Barry’s post about how not to be insane when accused of racism (a guide for white people) has on the whole been useful, and it seems to be useful to POC activists as well. I note that ABW links to it periodically when she wants white commenters to be able to go read something that they’ll understand, and stop bugging her.
I think that one of the more important things allies can do is to help express things in terms of their privilege, specifically so that they can help preserve the valuable time of people like ABW who do not need to be dealing with that 101 shit when they’ve got better things to do. Allies who are privileged can do this without committing the same emotional reserves (it hurts — in my experience — to have to defend your basic rights against privileged people, and is not so personally painful when you’re defending others), and to some extent without committing the same amount of time, because the privileged language will click with the other privileged language in a way that the privilege-poisoned party can hear and acknowledge.
But it’s still kind of icky that these things are necessary. And the use of privilege, even for good purpose, still involves othering, as Twisty points out with her savage island metaphor. Thus even though the privilege is being used to ease one problem, it adds wrinkles to another by reinforcing the voice of privilege as the voice of authority, in contrast to the othered voice of the oppressed group.
Now that I think about othering: interesting that Twisty’s metaphor for feminism as understood by the privileged dialogue was a “savage island.” Interesting that we get back to colonialism and to race. I wonder what that speaks to. (I don’t think it’s just white privilege, although that’s probably part any metaphor like this; there’s a long history of using “savage island” imagery to refer to feminist-only groups, such as amazons, and even the ways in which female only groups are described in old SF and fantasy, both female-positive and female-negative. Is it easiest for us to imagine women’s liberation in terms of geographic separation? And do we culturally have a tendency to map the ‘primitive’ nature of white women with the ‘primitive’ nature of all people of color, as Victorian scientists did, when postulating the white male brain as the only civilized one?)
[And finally, as someone else who likes to mix high-falutin’ language with teh crassness, I offer this tribute to PhysioProf: Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckity fuckpants.]
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