- The Roast Duck Bureaucracy – Open City Local governments are often much more harmful to free enterprise than the national government. There’s also some ugly racial implications of having mostly-white Americans certifying the healthiness of immigrant cuisines that they may not understand at all.
- Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions – NYTimes.com
- Guest post: The moment he realized how horribly wrong he had been
- Study: White people see “black” Americans as less competent than “African Americans” – Vox
- A Free-Market Argument for the Social Safety Net | Thing of Things
- A lot of people are discussing Scott Aaronson’s comment 171, in which he argues that the acute pain he suffered as a male nerd means he doesn’t have male privilege.
Here’s another post on the same subject, from a different blog: Compassion, Men, and Me
And here’s a third: Neither empathy nor trauma are zero sum | Inexorable Progress
- A cultural history of inflation in America – Lawyers, Guns & Money : Lawyers, Guns & Money “Overall prices in the American economy were about the same at the beginning of FDR’s presidency as they had been at the end of George Washington’s second term.”
- 6 Police Interactions That Were Different When They Were White | Scott Woods Makes Lists
- Ancient Trees: Beth Moon’s 14-Year Quest to Photograph the World’s Most Majestic Trees | Colossal
- Bizarro Back Issues: Batman’s Deadly New Year! (1972)
- The odds of Greece leaving the euro have never been higher – The Washington Post
- Want to reduce teen pregnancy and abortion? Start with long-term birth control. – The Washington Post
- “Trigger warnings are designed to help survivors avoid reminders of their trauma, thereby preventing emotional discomfort. Yet avoidance reinforces PTSD. Conversely, systematic exposure to triggers and the memories they provoke is the most effective means of overcoming the disorder.“
- Obama is unpopular. He’s also accomplished an incredible amount. – Vox
- Michael Ramirez’s Pro-Torture Cartoon – The Atlantic
- How an embryo turns into a baby, in one hypnotic GIF – Vox
- Tamara Loertscher: Wisconsin mother is thrown in jail for refusing drug treatment she says she didn’t need.
- Forbidden Topic in Health Policy Debate: Cost Effectiveness | The Incidental Economist
- “The complaint claims that administrators read books written by sex-differentiated teaching specialists who believe that boys are better at math because their bodies receive daily jolts of testosterone, while girls have equal skills only “a few days per month” when they experience “increased estrogen during the menstrual cycle.”“
- Rape apologists, in an attempt to silence victims, hurt an innocent man
- When Speaking to Men about False Accusations
- Rolling Stone didn’t just fail readers — it failed Jackie, too – Vox
- Rolling Stone and UVA: How sensationalism has betrayed survivors of sexual violence
- New Evidence Emerges of Wage-Fixing by DreamWorks, Pixar and Blue Sky | Cartoon Brew
- The Backlash Against Serial’s ‘White Privilege’—and Why It’s Wrong – The Atlantic
- Book Review: On The Road | Slate Star Codex “I too enjoy life. Yet somehow this has never led me to get my friend to marry a woman in order to take her life savings, then leave her stranded in a strange city five hundred miles from home after the money runs out.”
- Chris Rock is right: White Americans are a lot less racist than they used to be. – The Washington Post
“Afterwards, poking around the corpse, it was discovered that it was 185 years old, and that it had survived the Civil War — its hide contained 9 musket balls that had been shot at it by Confederate troops. And the hunters are smiling, without a hint of shame or guilt or even doubt that it was appropriate to butcher such a magnificent beast.” Update: Hoax, hoax, hoax. Thanks to Doug S. for the correction.- Why Orson Scott Card Should Keep His Job | Thing of Things A reprinted post on Ozy’s blog gives me and some other folks a chance to rehash some old arguments about free speech.
- “And if Rolling Stone was so eager to keep Jackie’s story in the piece that they were ready to run it against her will, that suggests their willingness to bend their fact-checking standards may have had less to do with some feminist “sensitivity” to a survivor’s request and more to do with not wanting to risk losing a particularly shocking tale of a gang rape that would help their article go viral in the way it ultimately did.”
- I love this wonderful 1904 comic strip by the immortal Windsor McCay. (Source)
As usual, feel free to post what you want, when you want, in whatever state of undress you want, and accompanied by whatever music you like. (That link is to a youtube mix I played while putting this post together).
Anyone got any plans for 2015? I plan to finish the third Hereville book in February, and it’ll be in stores in November. I’m thinking that maybe I’ll burn down my room and start anew, if I can figure out how to do that without catching the rest of the house on fire. Look for a LOT more political cartoons from me in 2015, as well, and also a new comic called “Superbutch,” which takes place in the 1940s and features a Lois-Lane-style reporter trying to uncover the secret identity of a lesbian superhero, to be drawn by Becky Hawkins. And more blogging, I hope.
I think there’s a general association of hairiness with poor hygiene, which isn’t baseless but overstated. I also think hairiness is associated with men, which is why pubic hair is seen as grosser on women than men.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a ‘hair=masculine=gross for women’ thing. I guess you could say the hygiene connection isn’t completely baseless but it’s pretty tenuous.
Actually, I’m not entirely sure which way to go with this. On the one hand, the best, fairest standard seems to be “repeated instances of a certain behavior after being asked to stop more than once constitutes harassment”. (The “repeated” requirement could be waived in cases of threatening behavior, defined legally.)
I think requiring asking to stop 2x or more followed by an additional 2x or more of the harassing behavior is an excessive amount to require in order to be considered harassment. I would support firing at that point, not mere warnings or counseling.
On the other hand, there needs to room to criticize institutions repeatedly making unreasonable demands. My position on this would depend on the particulars of the situation. I wouldn’t say that I want to “ban both sides” as a matter of course.
I was defining it when thinking of harassment among coworkers. Obviously substantive criticism is different, and while “substantive” is subjective, with coworkers who had substantive criticism of each other, there would at least be the option of bringing criticisms to a supervisor or higher-level manager. I don’t think the rules for “harassment” (if that’s even the best word) of organizations should be exactly the same.
As for the first bolded*, would you disagree with that assessment?
*most of the people who are against sexualizing jokes aren’t against desexualizing jokes
Well, you seem to believe the “desexualizing jokes” is in near-total overlap with the “(de)sexualizing jokes about men” category, and I’m not even convinced that men are more likely to be the targets than women of desexualizing jokes. (Or, for that matter, I’m not so sure that men are less likely to be the target of sexualizing jokes.) So no, I absolutely don’t agree. I think that most feminists/people in general who are against saying “nice tits” to your coworker are also against “look at X with her gross saggy tits”. If you were to change the wording to “most of the people who are against (de)sexualizing jokes about women aren’t against (de)sexualizing jokes about men,” I’d still disagree, but not as emphatically–my sense is that a significant minority, but not a majority, of people who are not okay with such jokes about women [often with the qualifier ‘at work’ or ‘about your coworkers’] are okay with such jokes about men. (And then there are probably a lot of people, of all opinions, who aren’t completely consistent with their opinions in practice because they’re human beings.)
However, to mirror my initial point to Harlequin, the bolded type of statement* is inherently unprovable. If you want people to take yours seriously, extending the same courtesy to others is a likely prerequisite.
*lately, in pop culture, there seems to be an understanding that obviously female pubic hair and any woman it’s attached to is repulsive
I don’t know why you’re being so cryptic. What statement of yours was I meant to take on faith at risk of being discourteous? Anyway, no, I don’t expect you to take stuff like that on faith. Either you will say, “Yeah I’ve noticed that, too” or “Now that I think about it, yeah, that does happen”, or you’ll say “Nope, haven’t seen any of that, and I consume enough pop culture that I’m pretty sure that’s not accurate” or “Well, I don’t consume enough pop culture to be sure, but I don’t think that’s accurate” or whatever. If I had agreed with whatever statement you wanted me to agree with, I wouldn’t consider that some kind of contract and therefore you had to agree even though you’ve just heard the newest Avengers movie, The Big Bang Theory, Men’s Health magazine, and Tosh.0 talk about how great and sexy and feminine pubic hair is. This quid pro quo thing, similar to “get a bad outcome for both sides; that way it will be ‘fair'”–it’s really strange to me and I don’t see the point of it. I don’t know if it’s because I look at discussions like this as more “understand other people and their positions better, and have them understand mine better” and less “fun debate game”, or if there’s some other reason for our different approaches.
Also, I don’t think it’s impossible to show that it’s true, theoretically. But it’s something that would require a great deal of research in order to show both that it’s significant and that it’s much more significant than recent pop culture treating female pubic hair as normal. I can think of a couple more examples off the top of my head, but I doubt that would help, and I mentioned it assuming that most people with passing familiarity with American pop culture would be able to see that it was true for themselves, on reflection.
g&w, that was an interesting read, and safe to say I won’t be referencing that paper again.
I had some trouble with the second of the linked posts, because I think there was a difference in what the paper meant by “false reports” and what the blog author means by “false reports”, and the blog author seems to be interpreting that difference as malice rather than a difference in purpose. The way I’d always seem the statistic used, and what I thought (having not read the paper) was being discussed, was the rate at which women lie about the things that happened to them; the blog post author wants to discuss the rate of things reported to the police that should not be prosecuted as a rape case (either because somebody’s lying or because it’s not a rape). So, in the first framework, it makes sense to exclude people other than the women lying about rape and also to exclude cases where the events were found to have occurred but not to have met the legal definition of rape, because neither of those situations address how common it is for women to lie about the things that happened to them. In the second framework, however, it seems bizarre to exclude them, because you’re trying to figure out the fraction of police cases which are founded.
There are some things I flat-out don’t agree with in those posts too–the main one being the assumptions the author makes about the women who recanted in the Kanin study [that they wouldn’t recant out of fear of the possible prosecution after one interaction with police; that they universally knew that fines or jail time were a possibility for recanting; etc]. But I don’t see any reason to doubt the main conclusion, which is that the false report rate hasn’t been reliably measured by anybody.
I had some trouble with the tone of both posts, because the tone can be sort of summed up as the ‘I’m right if you’re wrong” argument. And that is absolutely not true.
Then again, the author is at least up front about the limitations of the conclusion, though the tone doesn’t show it well.
It’s a tricky issue.
Someone could certainly elect to define (for the purposes of a paper) “false” to mean any report which didn’t end in a finding of guilt. But a subsequent report that “80% of rape reports are false” would obviously (to me) be an abuse of the common interpretation that “false = wrong = incorrect.” It would probably be correct to categorize that as deliberately deceptive. It would probably be accurate to categorize the word choice (why use “false” in such a strange way when there are an infinite set of possible terms, such as “not provable beyond a reasonable doubt?”) as deliberately poor.
In that case I would then look to other evidence to try to decide whether the authors seemed tricky/malicious or accidentally clueless.
Similarly, someone could elect to define (for the purposes of a paper) “false” to mean “only those cases in which an antirape-group-selected, antirape-group-trained police department found, after having sat through training designed to discourage investigating or testing falsity, that there was sufficient evidence to conclude falsity (as opposed to absence of proof.)” That is also strange, given the infinite universe of less confusing terminology. So I would also to try to decide whether the authors seemed tricky/malicious or accidentally clueless.
The definition itself isn’t really proof, but IMO it combines with some of the other stuff to suggest some serious bias. I don’t personally think it’s malicious lying but I’m not actually reading enough papers these days to know how different this is from the norm. It may be normal (in which case my conclusion may be overly harsh) or way outside the norm (in which case my conclusion may be too mild.)
Has this been in an open thread yet? Because it’s awesome.
Three Dudes In High Heels Channel Their Inner Beyoncé
God Damn that’s amazing. I’m forwarding to all kinds of people.
—Myca
Pretty great! Weirdly I just saw this ad featuring a similar (though not nearly as well-executed) theme. Although my heart in the “men dancing in ways typically associated with women” sweepstakes may always lie with the Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. (Saw them live, probably the hardest I ever laughed in a theatre until I saw A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder last summer.)
Pubic hair is overall not a very important issue at all for most people, I’d gather. What I was getting at, other than that it’s not a very important issue at all for most people, is that there’s all sorts of attitudes surrounding it and they’re not all be-muffed = bad, landing strip = good. But the first part is the gist of it.
I don’t believe the bolded, but perhaps I should have made that more clear.
I will say that you seem to be taking “desexualizing” exclusively to mean “negative comments about someone’s physical appearance” or “talked about as unfuckable due to a specific named flaw in a secondary sexual characteristic”, which given gendered differences in how boys and girls are brought up to talk and think, sounds a bit gerrymandered. Considering someone undateable for non-physical or “ineffable”* reasons, or just general “can’t get laid”-type stuff intended as a pejorative or a taunt, aren’t any better; completely inappropriate in a professional setting, and can still be so outside of it as well, especially when intended as part of a power play. Other people’s sex lives are really not anyone else’s business.
*Put in quotations because people who find themselves on the receiving end of such attitudes seem to share a whole lot of traits in common, suggesting that it’s really not so “ineffable” after all.
It’s not that I want to be cryptic. It’s that people are rarely consistent when it comes to general approaches. Pragmatism vs. idealism. An essentialist vs. non-essentialist view of human nature. Whether nitpicking on the minutiae of everyday social dynamics is somehow counter to freedom, or whether it’s necessary for justice. Whether it’s okay to speculate on the motives of your opponents, or that’s a complete argumentative faux pas regardless of how many disclaimers and hedges you put up. Whether a linked quote is necessary to establish whether a mode of thinking is prevalent or not. (A full list would take up several internets.) People adopt whichever position on such “process issues” that will benefit their side on any given argument, with little heed to overall consistency. I make such mistakes too, I bet, though I really try to be consistent and fair, and I do think my efforts to do so make me better at it than the average person.
If my sticklering sticks with one person, who’s read this thread and cheered on the side that said, “asserting that a harmful mindset exists even though no one’s admitted to it and there’s no hard evidence that it exists in the first place, is okay, if the victims feel it that way; in fact, that many people are making the exact same complaint almost certainly means that it does exist”, and makes them feel an additional pang of self-consciousness, self-doubt, or shame when they find themselves at one point taking the exact opposite tack because they don’t like the complaint being made, then I’d declare this a rousing success.
I suppose that in the end there’s always the nuclear option of simply declaring that the two complaints may look similar, but mine is valid and theirs are not, because my side are real victims and they are not, so there! And there’s no way around that. But there’s a reason people almost always make the “process” argument first, and only resort to this when forced to. Process arguments are much more morally persuasive to neutral people than outcome-based ones, so maintaining their integrity is a worthwhile effort.
Oooh, oooh, can I start my own philosophical argument over here to compete with the Stephen Fry thread? :D
Over there, Ben Lehman said:
I’ve always found this POV puzzling. The fact that 2+2=4 is not some kind of divinely revealed wisdom; 2+2=4 because we take two things, put them next to two other things, and then we can count that we have four things. Similarly, calculus was developed because of a need to describe physical phenomena. Of course physics and math align–they’re both observed qualities of the real world. There are still a couple of things to be surprised about there–that there are underlying rules period, whether we call them physics or math, and that both systems are simple enough that we’re able to describe and understand them–but “math can be used to describe physics!” has never struck me as a particularly surprising property.
Harlequin: It looks to me like you’re taking both possibilities in two adjacent sentences, so, yes, it’s quite possible these are the same thing to you. But let me elaborate.
Possibility one is that math is a function of the observed world, just like physics or any other science. The thing is, math doesn’t seem to be a function of the observed world. Lots of math has no application to the observed world, and it somewhat hard to see even how it would have a connection to the observed world at all.
Possibility two is that math is something we made up, in our minds. This certainly resolves the above problems. The thing is, a startling amount of novel physical observations of the real world map to pre-existing mathematical theories. Differential geometry and tensor calculus, for example, pre-exist general relativity.
So is math something we made up? Is it a natural phenomenon? Is it some sort of complicated mix? How does that work?
This isn’t something that we could ever “prove,” although if we met another species that had a developed mathematics it would be interesting to see if it mapped to ours. But it would be exactly the sort of thing an omniscient being would be able to tell me. And I’d like to know.
(I’d like to know a lot of other things as well: whether the black hole genesis theory is correct, for example, or whether P = NP. But we have to start with something.)
pocketjacks: OK then, so you’re talking about something I’ve said about your, or other people’s, motives? That narrows it down quite a bit. I wondered if you were talking about my not accepting the idea (which you’ve now disavowed) that men are typically subject to desexualizing comments and women typically subject to sexualizing comments.
If you’re talking about me saying that you seemed to be advocating for a bad outcome for everyone, from my perspective, I’m just trying to figure out what position you’re taking–because that honestly sounded like what you were saying–not trying to insult your motives. It’s a communication failure, not “closetpuritan has bad motives by trying to say that pocketjacks has bad motives…” Beyond that, I’m not sure how the end of your comment applies to anything I’ve said to you here. Except, I guess, that I don’t particularly care how well-intentioned someone making fat jokes or small penis jokes or whatever is, or even, that much, about how bothered by it the target is; if they won’t stop the harassment when asked to stop, action should be taken against them. But that isn’t really process vs. outcome, it’s motives vs. outcome.
Actually, maybe I’ve finally decoded your comment. It seems like you’re still latched on to Harlequin’s comment about how SOMETIMES men will make sexualizing/desexualizing comments to put women in their place, and even if that’s not the intent it can create a bad workplace environment because it can be hard to determine intent, so it’s a shadow hanging over even most well-intentioned comments, so it has the effect of creating a bad workplace environment, even though you agreed that “sometimes” is, in fact, the proper way to describe the frequency of bad motivation. And even though both Harlequin and I agreed that similar comments towards men should also be taken seriously. So despite appearances, when you say
Perhaps you’re simply not talking to anyone here. Perhaps YOU think you’re talking to someone here. Perhaps you are mistaken about that.
Gerrymandered? Not from my perspective. The type of comment that always comes to first to my mind is some variation of fat comment. While there’s probably a lower cutoff weight before people start making such comments about women, I don’t think that’s particularly gendered. The main reason that pubic hair came up was that someone else brought it up. I don’t think that is nearly as common, partly because it’s more explicitly sexual and therefore people have more of a sense that they’re doing something wrong if they mention it at work.
However, I will admit that no “he just has a really bad personality, so he’s gross and undateable” examples come to mind” and I was not thinking of non-physical insults–partly because the examples you listed included “short” and “probably has a small penis”. Though if you’d like an example, there is one that I’ve personally witnessed recently:
[Female coworker is on the radio, not in the room. She has a harsh voice, is often kind of shouty, and is currently impatiently asking someone to do something.]
I wince a little at hearing a harsh, shouty voice impatiently asking someone to do something.
Male coworker who is in the room with me: “She’ll never get married!”
Amp, on Twitter you said
Do you mean to imply that she is suggesting that all three accusers were in what you’ve called the likely using the same definition of “false” here which you might use 2-8% range of false accusations?
I ask because Young’s article seems pretty clearly to be aiming at a different definition of false, which is akin to “wrong, inaccurate, or unsupported legally to constitute an offense,” a/k/a “not true as claimed.” (Which matters, because “proven to be false after a full investigation” is a tiny subset of “not true as claimed.”) And unsurprisingly the targets she’s aiming at aren’t the reports to the school in the first place–nobody who argues for due process can argue against reports–but the subsequent (mis) reporting by others.
If you think she’s accusing all three of them of doing what you generally call “false,” I’d be curious to see where you’re getting that, quote-wise.
If you think she’s saying the accusations were wrong, inaccurate, or unsupported legally to constitute an offense, and if you use “false” in that way now, do you still say “2-8%?”
Reading the responses to Young article continues to confuse me about feminist position on dichotomy of accuracy.
You can portray someone as potentially traumatized, inaccurate, and/or unpredictable. “Rape victims experience varying degrees of trauma which manifests differently in everyone; therefore they run the spectrum of reactions from hate to apparent friendship and love, and it may affect their recall.” Or, to use the hashtag, there is no perfect victim.
This approach explains most of the apparent contradictions with respect to exculpatory evidence. And it makes perfect sense: people are complicated and confusing, and inaccurate, and have all sorts of responses. That’s even more true if there is any sort of non-stranger relationship between them (and the complex nature only increases as the relationship gets more intimate.)
However, there’s a corollary: if you think someone is potentially traumatized, inaccurate, and unpredictable, therefore explaining away what is claimed to be exculpatory evidence, then it should also affect your views of the accusatory evidence. Right? Because people are complicated and confusing, and inaccurate, and have all sorts of responses.
Alternatively, you can portray someone as cogent, grounded, objective, and accurate. This lends extra support to their claims and accusations.
But as before, there’s a corollary: If you think that someone is cogent, grounded, objective, and accurate, therefore giving greater weight to the accusatory evidence, then you should apply that same standard when looking at exculpatory evidence. Right?
The thing that confuses me about feminist rhetoric (especially from feminists who claim to generally support due process) is that they seem to ignore the corollaries.
Often I get the sense they’re basically supporting the “people are inaccurate” standard when it comes to talking about exculpatory evidence, and the “people are accurate” standard when it comes to the accusatory evidence, even for the same person. Or on a similar note, it seems like they are very focused on the rights of defendants for crimes other than rape, but don’t even come close to a focus for the rights of defendants for rape.
Do you think I am misreading this? Do you think it’s not a dichotomy at all?
If not, how do you explain it?
FWIW, this obviously isn’t a “feminist problem” alone. In other fora, I routinely identify this same problem in the “women are never raped” crowd. (Of course, those folks make the opposite choices, using internal conflicts which are biased against the accuser.)
So it’s not that shocking that there are some folks on the other side. But it’s surprising to me that the apparent dichotomy appears to be getting aligned with feminism in general, and even more surprising that it isn’t getting flagged by more of the purported due process fans.
pocketjacks:
Pubic hair is overall not a very important issue at all for most people, I’d gather. What I was getting at, other than that it’s not a very important issue at all for most people, is that there’s all sorts of attitudes surrounding it and they’re not all be-muffed = bad, landing strip = good. But the first part is the gist of it.
OK. And you know that this is agreeing with, not contradicting, my earlier comments, right? That I claimed neither that a preference for no pubic hair was universal, nor that such a preference was typically as strong as the media portrayed it? That I in fact said the opposite?
To quote the comment where I first mentioned it:
Whether a linked quote is necessary to establish whether a mode of thinking is prevalent or not.
I’m not sure if this is referring to me or not, but I already said in my last comment that it wasn’t–that is was merely a particularly good encapsulation of this mode of thinking, that the fact that it used “obviously” so well encapsulated what was wrong with this mode of thinking. [And because it was funny, because the writer was so very un-self-aware, so very much a victim of the Typical Mind Fallacy.] My argument was made with the assumption that to people familiar with American pop culture, this would be obvious based on their own experience, and therefore a list of examples was unnecessary.
Since you ask, I have a few answers:
First, no, I don’t think this is a real problem. I think you’ve convinced yourself it’s a real problem because you’re unable to deal rationally with this issue. See your weird contortions around the fifth amendment and positive consent, in which you, an attorney who ought to know better, literally invented nonexistent problems to obsess over and then had to retreat to more and more vague positions as it became clear that your earlier ones were untenable.
Second, I think that in discussions of this, and in light of the above, it might be useful if you cited specific contradictory statements that you’d like to have reconciled. This is for three reasons.
1) It’s entirely possible that there are meaningful differences between the specific statements that the person making them would be happy to clarify.
For example: “Experiencing severe trauma messes up your time sense, so when she said that the attack ended at 9:45 in one interview, and at 10:00 in another, that’s not indicative that she was making things up,” is not actually something that conflicts with “she has been consistent in identifying Mr. Pierce as the man who assaulted her.”
2) I think it’s important to be careful that you’re not asking a third party to justify statements made by two other people. Citations and specifics can help with this. Ampersand may well disagree with something Melissa McEwan says that’s in conflict with something Jessica Valenti says.
3) Working with ‘your sense of things,’ just doesn’t work, because other people don’t share it. We can discuss, “what Ampersand said,” and whether it conflicts with “what Ampersand said this other time.” When you say, “Well, I think that this is how Feminists are,” and Mythago, me, Ampersand, et al., say, “Nope. That’s not how we are,” and you say, “Yes you are,” and we say, “No we’re not,” we get nowhere.
—Myca
Off that topic, and apropos of the open thread and Ampersand’s music request, everyone who’s a fan of They Might Be Giants (which ought to be all of you), should check out the full Flood cover album Metafilter produced for the Flood 25th anniversary.
I’m particularly fond of Birdhouse, but their cover of Particle Man, borrowing a verse from Night of the Hunter’s Rev. Harry Powell, is excellent as well.
—Myca
Related only to the fact that this is an open thread: I recently discovered Myths Retold. I particularly liked his version of The Call of Cthulhu. (The site is all text-based, but it is pretty crude at times so possibly NSFW (possibly triggering, but less often than just NSFW), alternately due to the bro-y telling style and due to the un-bowdlerized myths themselves.)
Fuck the (Albuquerque, NM) police.
http://www.abqjournal.com/apd-under-fire
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/02/son-deceased
Responses to the New Yorker article from the mayor (also: fuck the mayor) and the father of one of the people killed by police:
http://www.koat.com/news/father-of-shooting-victim-responds-to-new-yorker-article/30980248
A few unrelated things:
Wow, the latest xkcd is on point.
Only sort of related, I have been watching the tv show Arrow recently (almost done Season 2!), and I’ve been really struck on how respectful and compassionate it is to the emotional experiences of its male characters, especially in its second season. On multiple occasions male characters, including the protagonist, have been depicted crying due to various emotional stresses, and it has been shown in such a humane manner. That is, the show has been sensitive to the distress of the character, and matter-of-fact about the reality that sometimes people cry when they are upset or otherwise are experiencing strong emotions. The rest of the show is pretty great too – I would definitely recommend it!
Thank you all for the links to the Cracked article about being a male victim of rape, the McSweeny’s article about reasons you were not promoted that have nothing to do with gender, and to Ben for the link to his ‘serious tumblr’.
In thanks, allow me to share this incredible (well, my experience of it at least was so) piece on the matter of women apologizing for themselves: Apologia (at The Hairpin).
Lastly, here are two books that I very much look forward to owning and reading, and which I thought may be of interest to some readers here. Firstly, Women in Clothes; to quote the blurb on the Amazon page:
Secondly, the anthology “Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History.”
Have a lovely Wednesday (new comic day!) everyone :)
I loved today’s xkcd too, dragon_snap. I laughed out loud when I figured out what it was (before I’d scrolled down to the caption). The hover text is pretty great, too.
I thought some here might enjoy this article on psychological biases and their interplay with vaccination decisions.
Well, outside the mundane world of employment, the current nature of which has me seriously considering attempting to find new employment (which at my age is non-trivial) –
The chamber choir I sing in has imploded, so I’m not going to be singing nearly as much as I had hoped this spring. Fortunately, the opportunity has arisen to sing in <a href=a production of Carmina Burana, hopefully two dates and not just the one, so that should help. And there’s a production of Les Miserables that some of my friends are encouraging me to try out for. If I’m crazy enough to think I actually have a shot at a part. We’ll see. But I need to find a choir in the S/W/SW Chicago suburbs that’s looking for a tenor.
It’s getting to the point that the stress (i.e., level of bull$h!t) at work is affecting not just my mental but my physical state as well. Hard to make a change at my age, but we’ll see. As a wise man once said, “… all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
And I’m determined to see more live theater and music. I went to see “The Addams Family – The Musical” last night with my wife – because tonight, St. Valentine’s day, I have to work, vide supra, so we decided to celebrate it early – and just loved it. More importantly, so did she. So more of this, I think, will be coming in 2015.
Hm. There’s supposed to be a link for the Carmina Burana production:
http://www.vox3.org/event/carmina-burana/
I haven’t seen The Addams Family musical, but I’ve listened to the cast album and really enjoyed it. Although I think I read somewhere that they rewrote the musical a great deal since they recorded the cast album. Anyway, I’m glad you enjoyed it, and good luck auditioning for Les Mis (if you decide to go for it).
This is ridiculous, but I can’t remember what it is you do for a living. If it’s not private, let us know. :-) I hope things improve for you there, either by the work improving or by finding a better job.
The review in the Trib said that there have been some changes. I particularly remember something about an octopus that had been gotten rid of.
My formal title is “Senior Network Analyst”. I don’t get called when the network breaks – when a circuit is down or a switch blows a card the 1st level folks in the Network Operations Center deal with that. I get called when someone’s application or system is running, but running way too slow, or if there’s some kind of weird phenomena going on (e.g., a pair of firewalls keep switching back forth, or 3 servers are supposed to be sharing a load but it’s all actually on one server).
I do this by capturing the actual data packets that go across the network and analyzing them. Sometimes it’s just what protocols are present and who’s talking to who. Sometimes I will examine the data packet by packet. Sometimes I’ll examine packets byte by byte. Sometimes I’m doing this having been woken up at 0200 to find that it has. to. be. done. right. now. with 12 people on a conference call waiting to hear what I see – or I’m doing it at 0200 having been on the phone since 0800.
It’s getting a bit old. Not the analysis. I enjoy that, actually. But the 0200 bit? The occasional 18-hour day – followed by a 12-hour day, followed by God knows what? That’s getting REAL old. One reason why I take vacations in remote areas is so that I cannot be reached. Or they’d happily bow to customers’ demands that I be put on the phone immediately, regardless of where I am or what I’m doing.
BTW, this tends to explain my worldview in general. Before I do an analysis I have to do a lot of fact-finding about what happened when, who is having problems and who isn’t, and what it is that people are seeing. I find very often that people exaggerate the breadth or duration of an issue, are mistaken, are misinformed, don’t get their facts right, confuse cause and effect, make presumptions about what the issue is and let that color their description of what happens, etc., etc. So before I plunge in I ask a lot of questions and end up sorting out a lot of misinformation and far too often find out that what people first reported is, in fact, a load of $h!t and that the actual situation is quite different than what what I was originally told. And then, and only then, after the users finally agree on what actually happened (and that agreement being reached only after having the actual facts and how they were derived presented to them in detail) can we solve the problem.
A process which they are often resist. Blaming their issues on “the network” simplifies the whole issue for them as they can then claim it’s all our fault, they’re off the hook, and we have to fix it at our expense. Accepting that this is NOT the case and that the solution cannot be reached until they take responsibility for the parts of the system that they or a third party have control over will cost them money and time and they often don’t want to hear it. At all.
Sound familiar?
Perhaps this will explain my approach to some of the postings I see on here, or the issues of the day in general. I have been trained by both instruction and experience to be … skeptical.
Ha! They got rid of the squid?
So I saw the Addams Family musical in tryouts in Chicago, and at the time it was…seriously not good. An ageist joke every thirty seconds and tons of absurdist humor that didn’t land at all–including that damn squid. (Although I did get to see Terrence Mann singing, metaphorically, about his sexual awakening at the hands, er, tentacles of the squid. So…that was something to remember. Mainly I was wishing the rest of the show had laid the right kind of groundwork for that number, though. Or wishing the musical had in any way lived up to a cast anchored by Nathan Lane, Bebe Neuwirth, Terrence Mann, and Carolee Carmello–four actors I’d been drooling to see live for years.) The only genuinely funny bit was done by two robotic stage props out in front of a closed curtain.
So I’m glad to hear they made some updates! :) Last report I heard was from previews on Broadway and they hadn’t finished making the necessary fixes then. …Oh, okay, some research reveals they made some changes post-Broadway as well. The synopsis looks better now.
(That was not the worst experience I had seeing a tryout in Chicago. That honor belongs to the Pirate Queen. Which had a couple of good numbers, and again a great cast–including Hadley Fraser, who weirdly enough was one of the office workers in Canary Wharf turned into a Cyberman in Army of Ghosts, and who is an incredible singer–but my experience was dominated by the mundane book, awful lyrics, and surprisingly clunky songs.
And, sorry, it’s late and I’m free-associating: Pirate Queen is the clunkiest of the Boublil & Schonberg musicals, but Martin Guerre is also reasonably clunky. And was originally led by Iain Glen, aka Jorah Mormont from Game of Thrones.)
This may be my bias talking but I don’t see how getting rid of the squid can possibly be a good thing.
An interesting Atlantic article on ISIS.
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/
Yes, very, if you replace data with “interpersonal communications.” Story of my life.
But in my case I don’t get 2:00 AM calls so that is actually what keeps my job fun and interesting, albeit occasionally frustrating.
Well, they exchanged the squid (which was funny, but kind of absurd and outside the tone of the rest of the show, and which was a moment of character growth for a secondary character) for actual character conflict involving one of the main characters, which is a much better climax to the show. But I can see that you have some (slimy) skin in this game. :D
An interesting article in the Harvard Law Review calling for a change in perspective as feminists advance from disempowered advocates to participatory rulemakers.
http://harvardlawreview.org/2015/02/trading-the-megaphone-for-the-gavel-in-title-ix-enforcement-2/
Both gin-and-whiskey’s links are to astoundingly good articles.
In fact a very good article on the topic, g-i-w. I think these 4 paragraphs are worth quoting in full:
Back when I was first introduced to feminism in the 70’s it seemed to me that the objective of feminism was to bring women to equality of opportunity, agency and accomplishments in the world. My impression now is that the central dogma of feminism is that men as a group have a crippled and corrupt worldview intent on dominating women and that power needs to be seized from them through punishment and defeat, even if individual men in individual cases are done an injustice thereby (i.e., the ends justifies the means). Now, I’m quite sure that this is not what Feminism 101 says. But it’s the impression I’ve gotten of what some of it’s most vociferous proponents believe and mean to do.
It is the concept that if both sexual partners are voluntary intoxicated then only the man involved bears responsibility for what happens next that has, in fact, delegitimatized these sexual conduct codes. Many people seem quite convinced that “… the idea that women should not and do not bear any responsibility for the bad things that happen to them when they are voluntarily drunk, stoned, or both.” is a) the ideal and b) can actually be achieved or at least closely approached through legal and cultural changes – and that anyone who thinks different is a “rape apologist” and is “blaming the victim”. Whereas if a man has something bad happen to him or does something that someone else participated in at the time but then decides after the fact was objectionable, he has all the responsibility, and the woman has none at all.
Hm. Normally I put something up, read it, and then edit it. But I can’t get that to work right now. So after “dominating women and that” I’d put “men either need to be controlled by adopting a culture defined by feminists that seems to ignore any essential differences between men and women (and denies that they exist) or that”
That Atlantic article on ISIS has been making the rounds. It ties in with a question I’ve been asking a lot lately.
President Obama, Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Kerry and all manner of other folks in the Administration, as well as numerous people who publicly worry about “Islamophobia” keep saying “ISIS is not true Islam”.
Really? On what basis do you make that claim?
Note carefully that I don’t claim that ISIS is or is not “true Islam”. I have no authority to do so. What I want to know is on what basis Obama, Biden, Kerry or anyone else can make the claim one way or the other. ISIS certainly isn’t running out of Qur’an quotes to justify their actions any time soon. Who am I – or anyone else I’ve named above – to debate the matter with them? On what basis can I or Obama or the rest of these folks purport to judge that their interpretation of the Qur’an, the Hadiths and Islam in general is more valid than someone else’s? The Atlantic article makes it quite clear that other Muslims have a very hard time disputing on anything other than a purely emotional basis that ISIS’ interpretation is inconsistent with the Qur’an.
I would LIKE it if ISIS was clearly wrong. But just remember:
Flakey Foont: “What do I want? What do I need? What am I gonna get?”
Mr. Natural: “Three different things.”
Has Obama ever heard of “no true Scotsman”? He needs to get out of the theology business. Right now, this very day, savages are committing atrocities in the name of religion, and 99+% (by headcount – literally) of it is in the name of one particular religion. Instead of not naming it because he’s worried about “Islamophobia” and trying to defend Islam he needs to worry a lot more about defending America overall and it’s interests in the Middle East specifically. Whether or not ISIS’ interpretation of Islam is “true Islam” is immaterial to his job, and he and the rest of his Administration and their apologists need to shut up about that and get on with the job they took an oath to do.
RobertRonF, I agree that it is a “no true Scotsman” fallacy, but it is quite easy to find examples of George W. Bush using the exact same fallacy to defend the exact same religion. It is only slightly harder to find the reasons former President Bush did this, which had less to do with theology and political correctness and more to do with diplomacy and delegitimization of terrorists. The terrorists WANT to be recognized as Islamic jihadists. The Bush administration decided that giving them what they wanted in that case was only helping them recruit. The Obama administration is continuing that policy. Yes, their arguments are theologically weak, but I don’t turn to presidents for good theology, I turn to the president for good military strategies. And experts under both Bush and Obama have argued that calling the terrorists by their stated religious affiliation undermines their efforts to fight terror. Are they right? I don’t know. But I get really tired of the “It’s only lefties refusing to name the enemy for political correctness” argument that always gets trotted out as an objection to this bipartisan policy.Sure, and the Westboro Baptist Church quotes the Bible. So did Jim Jones.
The question of what can and can’t be considered part of the “true” religion (any religion) is fascinating, but unless you’re willing to accept the theology of David Koresh/Jim Jones/Charles Manson as “true” Christian theology, you’re accepting that there are some limits.
More to the point, Obama wasn’t really making a theological judgment. He was signalling that he understands that the vast majority of Muslims are as shocked and appalled by ISIS as we are. Doing that is how you avoid alienating potential allies.
It’s desperately sad that you think those two things are mutually exclusive.
Inchoate rage, belligerent chest thumping, and insulting your allies, despite what you’ve been told by your party’s leaders, actually isn’t a fantastic diplomatic strategy.
—Myca
You have a source for that?
Actually, it’s not. The President and his Administration have a choice whether to accept ISIS’ framing of their activities as “Islam versus Christianity” or to (I think more accurately) frame it as “radical Islam versus everyone else.” The second framing has lots of advantages, not just the obvious Myca noted about not alienating allies. If we make Islam the enemy, that has consequences for Muslim citizens of the US (not to mention Sikhs, Arab Christians, and anybody who looks vaguely Middle Eastern).
We wouldn’t be insulting anyone. In the Middle East they all call the Islamic State ad-Dawlah al-Islāmīyah fī al-‘Irāq wash-Shām. Hiding the Islam behind the Arabic acronym Da‘ish or DAESH is a PR trick which only gets past the western public. Middle Easterns all know al-Islāmīyah is in there.
As for belligerence and diplomacy. Iraq begged us to intervene and bomb IS in mid-2014, and we refused. Why? Because this wasn’t on message for the view on Islam Obama was trying to sell: ‘the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam’. What happened next? ISIS storms though Eastern Iraq… that’s the diplomatic failure, letting civilians be slaughtered and teenage girls be gang-raped and sold into slavery. It wouldn’t have been going on TV and saying “I’m going to bomb the Islamic State”, they’d have rejoiced.
No. That’s entirely a ridiculous western pov. ISIS are totally clear they’re opposed to anyone who’s not a Salafist. Muslims know this because ISIS are right next door and spend 99% of their time visibly persecuting other Muslims for apostacy.
You know, it’s like if a bunch of Catholics were going around crucifying, beheading, immolating etc Baptists in the South. Would you guys seriously think it was “Christianity vs Islam” just because that’s what a bunch of Iraqis were worried about?
Ron:
I posted this information once before. Here is a link to an article about an open letter to ISIS’s leader signed by over 120 Muslim scholars. They call ISIS un-Islamic, and they give very detailed reasons which I’m sure most of us reading this blog–including me–will at best only half understand, since the arguments are very technical and legalistic and clearly depend on a great deal of prior knowledge.
I am not interested in starting the debate over whether there can ever be anything as a “real and true” version of a religion separate from how people practice it. I am posting about what is essentially an internal argument within Islam merely to point out that there are indeed grounds, pretty well publicized grounds, for declaring that ISIS’ version of Islam is not in keeping with the mainstream of that tradition not only on the grounds that its practices are barbaric on their face, but also because its religious justifications of those practices are not generally accepted as valid.
I also want to be clear that I am not posting this to “defend” Islam in any way or to suggest that the versions of Islam put forward by the signatories to this letter are therefore by definition somehow progressive as we would understand that term. Ron asked a specific question about where he might find a specific kind of information. It is a question that an awful lot of (in my experience mostly conservative) people ask, as if it were not readily available. This link will allow them to at least begin to find an answer for themselves if they choose to follow it.
No. They don’t.
There’s a shit load of western propaganda which says they do, and I don’t blame you for being taken in. But here’s the link, please control-f and see for yourself, they never say ISIS is un-Islamic.
http://www.lettertobaghdadi.com/pdf/Booklet-English.pdf
In fact, they specifically accept that Baghdadi is a Muslim and working inside the Islamic tradition, and rule out the idea of excommunicating him and calling him an apostate.
The letter say they think he’s wrong and tries to persuade him that some (not all, control-f for homosexuality) of his interpretations are mistaken. That’s it. It doesn’t say he’s not a Muslim, or ISIS is un-Islamic, or excommunicate him, or call him an apostate. It’s an intra-faith interpretive disagreement.
Yes, and Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army is a Christian organization, has “Lord” in the name, and claims that it’s fighting to enforce the 10 Commandments across Africa.
Should we be properly referring to the Lord’s Resistance Army as “true Christians?” You don’t think that the rank and file Christians would find that insulting?
Hell, Rush Limbaugh took it as an attack on Christianity that we sent 100 troops over to fight the LRA. And when Limbaugh did that, Senator James Inhofe got up the next day to say “Some people have mistakenly said this guy Kony is a Christian, and I want to make sure everyone knows he officially was disavowed by the Catholic Church in Uganda.”
So yeah. Peaceful members of a religion like to have it pointed out that their faith isn’t the same as the faith of mass murderers. That’s not unreasonable.
—Myca
Don’t follow, I’ve never heard anyone try and censor the Lord out or rename it as is done with ISIS?
Pete,
You’re right. I was typing fast. I read the actual letter and should have been more careful. My original point does stand, however:
I don’t think it’s you. Pretty much all the press reported it as ISIS denounced for being un-Islamic when that’s just not true.
People call it the LRA as opposed to the “Lord’s Resistance Army” all the time, but you seem to have missed my (incredibly clear) point. Here, I’ll paste it in again for you:
Your argument above was:
and
My point is that the word “Lord” can be in the name of the LRA, and they can claim to be Christian, and still a prominent Christian senator still feels the need to clarify that “no, they’re not ‘true’ Christians.”
Obama’s caveat was a perfectly reasonable one, designed to distance ISIS from main stream Islam. That’s a goal that everyone, left or right, ought to support … unless, of course, disingenuous partisan point-scoring is more important.
—Myca
Yes that’s the point.
The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is abbreviated to ISIS, unfortunately westerners know this abbreviation means Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. So Obama, who has PR issues with the Islam reference, uses Daesh instead – so this will pass over the heads of non Arabic speakers.
Lord’s Resistance Army get’s called the Lord’s Resistance Army and the LRA all the time. Nobody has ever tried to use the Swahili abbreviation to avoid reminding people of the Christianity reference.
Ahh, okay. I see what you’re talking about.
I don’t care. I don’t think anyone else really cares either, and if they do, they shouldn’t. This is a deeply stupid non-issue. I mean: Did you think Kony2012 was an effort to mask that the LRA claims to be Christian?
The issue, which you are trying your damnedest to dodge, is that nobody complains when a Republican says that the LRA isn’t ‘really’ Christian, because, since we live in a country with a lot of Christians, lots of people recognize how far outside the Christian mainstream their ‘theology’ is.
The same thing is true here, except that since Muslims are a minority, it’s way easier for bigots with an axe to grind to slimily imply that ISIS is within the mainstream of Islamic theology. One of the ways they do this is by complaining when President Obama says that ISIS isn’t “true” Islam.
I don’t think that ‘true’ Islam is a thing any more than ‘true’ Christianity is a thing. They’re all fairy tales, and it’s entirely possible to find justification in just about any holy text for whatever bad behavior you feel like engaging in. But it’s clear that ISIS isn’t ‘true’ Islam in the same way that the LRA isn’t ‘true’ Christianity: Their interpretations and actions fall well outside the mainstream of thought and action for their religious communities.
—Myca
That’s just how I think the religions work.
Christianity is fractious. Catholics think they’re the true church, some protestants go so far as to think the popes the antichrist, etc. Westboro hates everyone outside their cult. Etc. It’s got a history of excommunication and declaring people as outside the true church.
Much of Islam has a problem with calling other Muslims apostates. See 240, where they specifically accept that Baghdadi is a Muslim, working inside the Islamic tradition, and rule out the idea of excommunicating him and calling him an apostate. It’s just wrong to says he’s outside the tradition given mainstream Muslims don’t apostasize him.
I also had read that letter in its entirety. While it obviously takes clear theological disagreement with many positions of ISIS, there’s a hell of lot of wiggle room.
Example,
That leads to a followup:
1) Are the signatories to the letter actually of the belief that this type of thing is actually just like a real statement wholly in opposition? (I can’t believe this is true; they’re obviously learned scholars who know full well what opposition is.)
2) If not, why don’t they actually write a statement wholly in opposition? (My bets: because (a) they don’t actually oppose everything on that list, other than at some fairly limited extremes; and/or (b) they are attempting to placate the many more-moderate-but-still-severe Islamic-focused governments that would be angered by a more stringent and detailed opposition.)
3) There’s a lot of these folks and they clearly have a public persona. They presumably know how their letter is being presented. To what degree are they complicit in allowing the letter to be reported and taken as something other than it really is (i.e. completely opposed to ISIS), or is this really out of their control?
It is the concept that if both sexual partners are voluntary intoxicated then only the man involved bears responsibility for what happens next that has, in fact, delegitimatized these sexual conduct codes.
I think that feminists, like everyone else, can fall into the trap of acting as though all rapists are male and all victims are female. It requires vigilance to avoid it. I think there are plenty of feminists who try to be vigilant about it, but there are some feminists who believe that there’s nothing wrong with doing that.
I think that most feminists believe something like this:
That’s a quote from Harvard University, from this article by Amanda Hess. Hess spends a good deal of the article discussing a difficult case where both people did some initiating actions, though. To be honest, I wouldn’t have thought that when both people are drunk enough not to be able to consent, they would be capable of initiating much of anything, but I’ve never been drunk, let alone that drunk. It does sound like it’s a rare situation.
closetpuritan- It depends on what you mean by “too drunk to consent.” According to most actual, uh, “laws,” two people who are too drunk to consent aren’t going to be accomplishing much sex, or much anything at all. According to… not all, but a fair percentage of anti rape activists, you can be too drunk to consent yet still standing up, walking around, and talking to people. In which case you absolutely could be having sex with someone in a similar condition.
Accepting your words at face value, it does not therefore follow that ISIS is operating within mainstream Muslim theology. In fact, if, “much of Islam has a problem with calling other Muslims apostates,” it seems likely that even many Muslims operating explicitly outside mainstream theology wouldn’t be called apostates.
Or, the TL/DR: Yes, Christianity and Islam are different.
More to the point, there is a specific set of criteria within Islam for declaring someone non-Muslim.
From 9a:
This is not to say that therefore anything they do and any theological interpretation is within the mainstream of Islam, of course. They’re two separate things.
—Myca
Respectfully, RonF, that is not an accurate representation of all feminist thought–or even a substantial minority of feminist thought–on the topic. closetpuritan is closer when quoting Amanda Hess:
That article is definitely worth reading, by the way.
Anyway, I went on a bit of a Google search (going into private mode so my previous search history wouldn’t bias me towards feminist sites I regularly visit), searching for “alcohol rape” and “drunk rape” (sans quotes). Here’s a tour of the first few sites I found that addressed this issue: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. I definitely don’t endorse or agree with all those sites–the point was just to show that a bunch of them, including official policies and advocacy groups as well as news articles, and including some very smart writers and some…not, all talk about “too drunk to consent”, and not just “drunk.” Some, but not all, do this in a gender-neutral way.
Similarly, I’ve been in conversations in feminist spaces before where we take that as a given–that we’re talking about a level of drunkenness that impacts the ability to consent, not just having a couple of drinks–and had to step back and explain that when somebody wandered in from another space, feminist or not. So I understand that these conversations aren’t always as clear to people who are just watching. (But I don’t think they should have to be–just like I don’t think every feminist thread is required to stop for Feminism 101 when a new person comes in.)
Now, that is not to say that all people in these policy discussions agree with that position–Amanda Hess’s article is a good example of what happens because some don’t. And of course there are many arguments even among people who agree–as Patrick points out, exactly what counts as “too drunk to be unable to consent” is a frequent topic of disagreement. But I think if you say the policy idea’s been delegitimized because of the prevalence of the opinion “if two people are drunk and have heterosexual sex, then the woman was raped”, that says more about who you’re listening to than about who’s talking.
***
I also admit that it’s hard to even respond to you on this point–and I waited a while to do it–because you started out with this:
which is, to be frank, incredibly fucking insulting.
Actually: one more thing to say on that topic. Inspired by RonF’s little rant up there, but not necessarily applicable to him; it just reminded me of a rant that’s been building for a while.
I’ve noticed a thing that happens, sometimes, which is that people who don’t like feminism assume that anyone who agrees with a point of feminism must be a feminist, or, sometimes, that all women are feminists except the ones who loudly disclaim it. The classic (extreme) example would be an MRA who says, “Women want equal pay in the workplace, BUT THEY ALSO WANT ME TO KEEP PAYING FOR THEIR DRINKS! FEMINISM IS TERRIBLE!” Like, the women who want you to pay for their drinks may or may not be feminists. The people who want equal pay for women in the workplace may or may not be feminists. Not all women are feminists; some men are feminists. It’s not hypocritical for two different women to believe things that are mutually exclusive. It’s also not unreasonable to think some people might agree with some tenets of feminism, while not agreeing with others or wanting to identify with the movement as a whole.
Of course, there are also feminists who do believe both those things. Because sometimes people believe silly or hypocritical things. Human brains, y’know.
Saying that because sometimes policies to help women are implemented in ways that are shitty for men, or because sometimes discourse involves ideas that originate from feminism but are taken to stupid places, therefore feminism is at fault for those things, does an incredible disservice both to feminism and to the range of political ideas held by the people around you. Despite what some feminists and some anti-feminists think, ideology is not a mutually-exclusive Venn diagram of feminism against the rest of the world.
(Also applicable: replacing “feminists” with “SJWs”.)
Wha? This seems to ignore everyone’s mutual obligation to understand and be accountable for the consequences of our intent.
To use the example of sexual assault:
Feminists argued for a change in law to a preponderance standard; for an increased role in school (non-legal) judgment; for increased protections for accusers; and for quick (pre-judgment) punishments and restrictions on accuseds. They also, IMO, used a lot of bad statistics to do so, but whatever you think about the statistics and the outcome you can probably agree that the huge recent changes in how college rape is handled are an outcome of feminist work.
Feminism should properly be assigned the expected benefits of feminist action. When Sally gets shitfaced drunk and two months later accuses Ron of rape; and when Sally immediately gets services which she wouldn’t have gotten previously; and when Sally is able to avoid being cross examined (or examined at all) during the school hearing; and when she is “believed;” and when her own decision to the eventual outcome is judged on a preponderance standard; Sally has benefited. Sally should thank feminism.
Feminism should also be assigned the expected costs of feminist action. When Ron gets falsely accused (which in this case I’ll mean as “didn’t rape Sally,” though both parties were too drunk to properly remember;) when he is promptly suspended prior to a hearing; when he doesn’t get a lawyer; when he doesn’t get to cross-examine Sally; when his drunkenness is considered “no excuse” but hers is a full excuse; when all of his protests are called “victim blaming” and his accuser is “believed” prior to the review of any evidence; and when he is eventually punished on a preponderance standard; Ron has costs. Ron should blame feminism.
Moreover, assuming that you credit the feminist leaders on this issue with high intelligence–it is pretty obvious that they’re smart, not only from their writings but because it takes a lot of smarts to run a successful campaign like this–then you would expect them to PREDICT that the benefits to Sally would also accrue costs to Ron. You would also reasonably congratulate (or blame) them for those outcomes even if they hadn’t happened yet.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear there, because I was pissed off. And I also mixed up fault/responsibility and motivation; my problem is more with the attribution of the latter than the former, although I think the attribution of the former is also sometimes incorrect.
What I’m not saying is: “Feminists push for a policy, it was implemented by nonfeminists, bad things happened to men, feminists shouldn’t be held accountable.”
What I am saying is: “Feminists push for a policy, it works its way through the national consciousness, some people agree with it, some don’t. It becomes a policy that enough people support that it’s implemented, but sometimes it’s implemented by nonfeminists in ways that (some) feminists would explicitly disavow. You know, because it’s gained traction with people who aren’t feminists, who have their own ideas about how it should be implemented that don’t agree with the feminists’ original idea. Bad things happen to men as a result of the policy that ignored some of the features feminists put forward. Then antifeminists show up and say this was all a plan of the Evil Feminists, even though lots of feminists are now pointing out that this policy wasn’t what they wanted, because it lacked some of the safeguards they proposed to protect against that kind of thing.”
To follow on your example: okay, let’s say you’ve got a group charged with adjudicating sexual assaults on campus. (Stating again, for the record, that I agree with you that the way this is handled on campus is very bad for a number of reasons, and the whole system needs an overhaul.) It’s a volunteer group, and it ends up a mix of feminists and people who have a mild patriarchal view that men must protect women; the latter group are there because they’ve heard and believed feminists that rape is a problem, and it mixed with their sense that women should be protected from things and they felt obliged to do something. A case comes before them where both parties had had a few drinks, and the feminists say that the level of intoxication wasn’t enough to remove the ability to consent, but the people who believe that women should be protected think they should punish the guy anyway. And they have just enough people that the decision is made to punish the man.
Is that feminists’ fault? Even though the feminists who suggested the policy and the ones who implemented it wouldn’t want the guy punished? I mean, perhaps: I could see arguments either way. But would you agree with me that, in this scenario, using this outcome to say that feminists intended all along to hurt men would be incorrect?
I’m willing to stipulate that that particular scenario has probably never happened. But lots of people who don’t like feminists seem to take outcomes of policies that feminists support at least part of, regardless of who is implementing them and why, and take those outcomes to be representative of feminists’ motives and desires, because they can’t imagine that anyone who wasn’t a feminist would have had anything to do with it. And that is just wrong.
Hmm, and I think even that last comment, while closer, doesn’t really get at what I was trying to say.
Basically: some people seem to think that anything that will change the status quo between men and women in favor of women must be a feminist idea, and will judge feminists (who are, as we have discussed previously, a specific subset of people who want to change the status quo, not just people who believe in “equality between the sexes”) by all of those ideas, in the least charitable manner, regardless of whether it’s a feminist thing or not. Again: this is a thing that MRAs do a lot, take anything that seems to benefit women and decide it was an Evil Plan By The Feminists.
Feminism is not cooties: it’s not transmissible just because you happen to have a single point of agreement. People can agree with feminists about some things and not be feminists themselves. You can’t look at an outcome of something that helped women and hurt men and decide that it was feminists who wanted that thing to happen, and then have everyone else agree that that’s a rational conclusion based on the evidence. Sure, if it was something that feminists loudly and commonly support (ie changes to campus rape procedures), then you can reasonably assign both the benefits and consequences to feminism; but not everything is as straightforward as that. And some of those assignments-to-feminism are flat-out stupid. (I just laugh when people seem to think that the “competent killjoy” female sitcom character, as contrasted against the “fun-loving slob” male sitcom character, is something that feminists think is great!)
I’m not trying to do a No True Scotsman thing here: many of those people would disavow feminism themselves, and lots of feminists DO believe bad things (that I will try to talk them out of when I run across them). But that doesn’t seem to matter to people who can’t imagine that anyone could agree with anything feminists say without being brainwashed.
Sigh, off to work through the cold…
There really isn’t a way to simultaneously use large group identifiers, and also avoid mischaracterizing some folks.
One might reasonably ask of those folks that say they’re feminists but who say this wasn’t what they wanted:
Where were they when this policy was being discussed? Did they consider and reject this option then? Why didn’t they join the opposition? How did they react when people started pointing out the problems? How did they react when this became reality? What are they doing now to make sure this doesn’t happen again?
A REALLY funny response to a Ferc (federal energy regulatory commission) issue. Actually, it does demonstrate a little-recognized issue, where people end up functionally being subject to very powerful commissions that act as judge and jury and regulator all at the same time. Fascinating read:
http://overlawyered.com/2015/02/powhatans-zingers-ferc-case/
It’s funny due to some amusing lead-ins to arguments which are not, normally, seen in a filing drafted by an attorney:
1) “Dr. Chen’s ‘Home Run’ Trading Strategy Is Not A ‘Post Hoc Invention’ Because, Among Other Things, 35 Is Less Than 50″
2) “Dr. Chen’s Trades Were Not ‘Wash-like’ Or ‘Wash-type’ – Whatever The Heck That Means”
3) “The Staff’s Stubborn Reliance On The Unpublished, NonPrecedential Amanat Case Is Just Lame” (this one is my favorite)
4) “Uttering the Phrase ‘Enron’ Or ‘Death Star’ Does Not Magically Transform The Staff’s Investigation”
gin-and-whiskey,
The FERC filing was really entertaining, thanks for the link! I take a perverse pleasure in seeing irreverent legal filings. I particularly liked the point where they called out the lead investigator for falling asleep during deposition.
I pretty much agree with Harlequin here.
Harlequin:
This seems like an arguement constructed to make it seem like it’s not feminists fault. To answer the question I think we need to look closer at how feminists push for their policies.
This gets to one of the major complaints I have with the political side of feminism. There is persistent use of hyperbolic and emotive language, as well as playing it fast and loose with statistics. This is justified on the basis it is necessary to motive and push for change. However, when these catch phrases and factoids become part of the zeitgeist they potentially motivate the establishment of a wide range of policies. Many of these policies may be of a type that would be ‘explicitly disavowed’ by the feminists that employed the emotive language and misused statistics. In cases where such disavowed policies eventuate, I don’t think that political short-sightedness excuses the feminists from being responisble.
In the specific case of ‘adjudicating sexual assaults on campus’, the way feminists use language such as ‘rape culture’, ‘rape epidemic’ and ‘misogyny’ as well as the way rape statistics are presented does not induce well thought out, balance policies. It induces desparation and an urge to do something, anything, regardless of merit or justification. This means I would hold feminists responsible for any poorly designed or implemented policy, even where it wasn’t done in the way feminists expected.
And that’s before we get to the issue of ignorance and arrogance towards the immense challenge of constructing a quasi-judicial system that isn’t primed to be misused for individual benefit or exploited to achieve political goals in conflict with justice.
g&w:
I understand that. I’m talking here about a spectrum where, at one extreme end, people judge a group (feminists) by the actions of people who are not feminists by either their own or feminists’ definitions–a complete categorization error–and at the more plausible end judge feminists based on the actions of a coalition which includes but is not limited to feminists. And it’s particularly problematic here because of how many people will assume the worst about feminists given half an opportunity: there’s a big difference between blaming feminists for not taking the care to design a policy that works well in practice, and assuming that the the failures in practice were the point of the policy all along, and lots of people, in my experience, do the latter. And yes–there are certainly regimes where the carelessness was so high, or the excuses so paper-thin, that it seems those failures were the point–but people seem happy to make that jump, with feminists, long before I would say it’s reasonable to do so.
(To be honest, I probably shouldn’t have tried to build on your example, because changes to campus rape procedures are one of the clearest cases of something that’s almost solely feminists working towards it. So in general, outside my very artificial example, people making inferences about feminists based on those procedures aren’t really doing the thing I’m complaining about. This has not been my clearest string of comments ever, alas.)
***
desipis:
I mean, that’s because it was designed to do that? I’m not trying to say “feminists don’t deserve the blame for the outcome of campus rape cases.” I’m trying to illustrate the incorrectness of “feminists wanted it or something like it, therefore any consequence, no matter how far removed from their original idea, must reflect their motives and desires” by counterexample, so of course I’m constructing a case where the feminists are not at fault.
“But I think if you say the policy idea’s been delegitimized because of the prevalence of the opinion “if two people are drunk and have heterosexual sex, then the woman was raped”, that says more about who you’re listening to than about who’s talking.”
It would be more accurate to interpret the popular feminist view as, “If two people are drunk and have sex, then if one person claims they were raped, they should be believed, and they should probably be supported by authority figures, even at cost to the accused.”
I’ve been around for a while. I’ve watched the popular mass of feminists deal with cases of rape via intoxication where the alleged rape victim was on tape walking around, talking to people, then leaving under their own power to go to a private room with the alleged rapist where the alleged rape by intoxication took place minutes later. This evidence of non-intoxication was attacked as illegitimate because, in the view of those advancing the rape allegation, being too drunk to consent was compatible with walking, speaking coherently, and appearing to engage in intentional action consistent with actively pursuing sex. I’ve seen cases where the alleged victim was on tape actively participating in the sex act with apparent intentionality. Again this was dismissed by popular feminist discourse.
I know it’s more complicated than that. But. Crooked Timber had a comment thread a little bit dedicated to being a “safe space” where lefties and feminists could post things that they were nervous would get them condemned by other lefties and feminists. One of the first, and most common, things to be posted was that the person in question was nervous about feminist discourse surrounding alcohol and rape by intoxication. I’m not going to name names, but suffice to say, at least a few people who I consider to be serious feminist attack dogs, people who have engaged in seriously dishonorable behavior over the years in the cause of pile-on callout culture style smear-everyone-you-can feminism, posted to say that this was something they weren’t on board with.
So there’s certainly dissent, including dissent among the angrier, crueler feminists. But… apparently they’re also a bit nervous about voicing that dissent, out of concern that it will alienate them from the movement.
Both of those facts say something important. BOTH of them.
Weird. That never happens to me. Ever.
When boiled down to their essence, Harlequin, your comments come across to me as simply, “Don’t vilify feminism.” I think that’s an eminently reasonable code of rhetorical conduct, and I fully support it.
Of course, it’s easy enough to advance such a guideline for the protection of one’s own ‘in-group’; the guideline only becomes truly persuasive when it is extended to those who are often in rhetorical opposition. Would you extend your code to other groups, i.e. would you also agree with the idea, “Don’t vilify MRAs”?
Hmm. No, that’s not what I’m saying (unless we have very different definitions of the word “vilify”). I’m talking about making judgments of feminism–whether that’s a mild “I don’t need to listen to them” or outright vilification or anything in between–because of things done or positions held by people who are not affiliated with feminism. And also how, because people do that often enough that I run into it, I’m sometimes skeptical of how people assign blame in coalitions involving feminism, since they don’t seem to understand what feminism is.
Basically, it’s a misattribution problem at its core, and the opinions based on that misattribution are then used to make judgments about the opinions and suggestions of self-identified feminists, who may not overlap much with the group that caused the initial formation of the opinion.
Hmm. A totally nonpolitical analogy: If you asked a bunch of science fiction/fantasy fans what defines their genre, you’d get a bunch of different answers, probably clustering around “stories about stuff that couldn’t or didn’t happen in the real world.” But if you asked a certain subset of people who are readers/writers of a specific brand of literature, you’d get an answer more like, “Robots and spaceships and bad writing.” Bad writing? you might ask. What about Ursula K. Le Guin? “No, that’s literature. It’s good.”
So you get a situation where people who like SFF are putting the boundaries somewhere, and people who don’t like SFF are putting the boundaries somewhere else. You get the classic Venn diagram that everyone uses as an example of Venn diagrams: there are some things that everybody agrees are SFF, but large regions of things that are only called SF by the people who actually create it or only called SF by the people who dismiss it (well, probably you’d have to include other kinds of genre fiction to get that, but anyway…). And if the groups never needed to talk to each other, fine: they’ve both got a categorization system that works for them, that allows them to talk within their own group and make meaningful progress in understanding the selection of books they’re discussing. But as soon as the groups have to interact with somebody outside their own group, weird shit happens, because they’re using the same terms to refer to different things.
And, what’s more, because the group who doesn’t like SFF has defined it in a way that allows them to access the bits they like without having to admit they like SFF, they’re able to say, “All science fiction writing is bad.” It’s tautological, because they’ve defined good stuff as being by construction not SFF, but again–not a problem as long as everybody’s using that definition. But if some random third party comes up, and trusts the literary folks to give them good recommendations–because they’ve done that in the past–and those people tell the third party that science fiction sucks, maybe that third party doesn’t read the Le Guin, even though it’s great. Because in their head, it’s in the science fiction section of the bookstore, so it must not be any good–not realizing that the group that gave them that opinion had a very specific definition of science fiction that was different from those bookstore categories.
And so the analogy here is that some folks who don’t like feminism seem to think feminism is “stuff that women do that I think is too assertive, or stuff that men do that seems overly solicitous of women,” or maybe “stuff that upsets what I think should be the societal gender balance.” And as long as they don’t have to talk to anybody else, fine–it’s a categorization scheme that works for them. But as soon as they’re talking to people who might have to deal with feminists, the conversation becomes a hash, because feminism is a fairly specific thing–not just “smash the current gender balance!” or “assertive women.” When a woman from the not-fond-of-feminists group starts saying “Why don’t you want me to stay home with my kids?” the response from feminists is usually something like “We don’t mind if you stay home with your kids, we just want to make sure that’s a free and not a coerced choice.” They’re two different groups of people, “feminists” and “people who think women shouldn’t stay home with their kids”–though they do overlap–and of course there are lots of people who think women shouldn’t stay home with their kids who AREN’T feminists, especially if we’re talking about nonwhite and/or nonrich women.
And then you start getting into policies, where some people will dismiss arguments made by self-identified feminists because they have opinions about feminist arguments, but those opinions were formed based on the behavior of people who were NOT self-identified feminists (or even people that feminists would agree with).
Or, alternately, they have an opinion that feminists want certain things out of policies–a common misperception is that feminists want women to be placed superior to men*–and so something that has that result must have been implemented by feminists, deliberately. This doesn’t allow for the fact that 1) that might have been accidental, 2) regardless of intent, the people who did it might not have been feminists. Again, in case 1) there, I’m not arguing that feminists shouldn’t be held accountable if involved–we should, if we support a policy that has bad effects. But I see people misattribute things to feminism so often that sometimes I wonder, when lots of people want to place the blame on feminism for something, exactly how much of that is what feminists did in the particular instance, and how much of it is some people just wanting to blame feminism for everything about gender politics they don’t like.
(On occasion, I’ve also seen feminists do this particular thing about MRAs–assuming that a guy making a specific kind of argument they’ve seen from MRAs before must be an MRA, so anything he says is representative of MRAs. I haven’t seen it as much, but–again–not something I pay much attention to.)
It occurs to me that this whole rant boils down to “Gosh, I wish people would figure out what feminists believe BEFORE they decide whether or not we’re terrible”, with a side order of “Feminists don’t have cooties, sometimes people agree with some of feminism without being feminists themselves,” which often follows on from the misattribution problem. And noting that both of those things may have a misogynistic root, in being unable to tell women’s opinions apart, and assuming that only Those Crazy Women would agree with anything feminists say.
*There are some policies that feminists support that are sometimes viewed this way, even though I’d disagree with that characterization. But I’m specifically talking here about, like, “Feminists just want men to do all the housework in addition to the work outside the home!” which is something that I’ve seen expressed by a few antifeminists as being representative of feminist beliefs, even though that’s not, shall we say, a common tenet of feminism.
In-group responses have a lot to do with that judgment, though.
For example, you can postulate that the MRA position is relatively anti-woman. To test that, might might start by acknowledging that of course there are MRAs which span a reasonable spectrum… but what happens when they disagree? If the answer is that “the movement attacks folks who deviate left, but ignores those who deviate right (even if they disavow them when convenient,)” that is a valuable datapoint.
That’s one of the reasons that a lot of people regard SJWs or feminists as they do: Sure, SJWs and feminists cover a wide spectrum of belief, but the movement as a whole commonly attacks those who deviate right, and ignores those who deviate left (even if they disavow them when convenient.)
ETA: I really can’t make an MRA comparison, because I don’t read MRA sites! But certainly for feminists, the major sites I follow are very rarely focusing any serious disagreement or anger at the in-group. I certainly expect the MRAs are the same way.
So to use your example:
Even if you agree that it’s not a common tenet of feminism, just as you might agree that “women should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen” is not a tenet of MRAs, the proper test would be “what is the in-group response when a feminist/MRA says it?”
It seems to me that most of the bitter divisions within feminism don’t fall easily on a left-right spectrum. Anti-porn feminists and sex-positive feminists both claim to be to the left of the other, for example. Ditto for TERFs and, well, those of us who aren’t TERFs.
(For the record, I don’t care if TERFs are left or right; I just wish they’d drop their views, which are loathsome.)
There’s an enormous amount of feminist criticism of Patricia Arquette going on right now, mainly from intersectional feminists against liberal feminists. So which one is left and which is right?
Sure, I suppose. Though most of the bitter divisions in most groups don’t fall easily within a left-right spectrum. Heck, the groups themselves don’t fall that way either (are libertarians left or right?) so I’m using that as shorthand to make the larger point: however you define left or right you can see a lot of information from in-group fighting (or the lack thereof.)
Anti-porn feminists and sex-positive feminists both claim to be to the left of the other, for example. Ditto for TERFs and, well, those of us who aren’t TERFs.
(For the record, I don’t care if TERFs are left or right; I just wish they’d drop their views, which are loathsome.)
I don’t know about which one is left and which is right. But it is reasonable evidence about where priorities lie and where the focus is.
Take the different interpretations of Arquette’s speech.
Option 1: Arquette is literally unaware that gay women and POC women are also “women.”
Here’s the often-idiotic Amanda Marcotte promoting that one:
Option 2: Arquette, not being a flaming idiot and working in one of the more gay-friendly industries on the planet, is well aware that those categories include women. That said, she mostly focused on the interests of women in her group. i.e. straight and white. (The first question, of course, is whether this is actually bad at all. Because it seems to me that there’s a huge, huge, difference between “I choose to focus my own efforts on Group A” versus “I think Group B should get the shaft.”)
Option 3: Arquette said something which should be charitably interpreted; it was well meaning and the controversial part was not, apparently, written in advance. There’s no reason to assume she is at fault merely because she failed to produce perfect semantics on demand.
Whether it’s left or right is not really the issue. My point is that you can learn a lot about folks by their reactions to the dispute.
**No fair covering for Marcotte based on the “that isn’t what she meant” argument. That is, unless you (and Marcotte) grant Arquette the same leeway–though she deserves much more leeway, since Arquette’s response was in an off-the-cuff interview on camera, and Marcotte’s was written ahead of time, edited, considered, and eventually published.
Let me try to put it more generally:
Some members of group ____ are more focused on protecting their group from attack, and on protecting _____’s image, than they are at ensuring ____ group maintains the right focus. Similarly, they are very rarely willing to attack bad behavior of ______’s leaders.
We should all oppose that type of behavior. As a general rule, the more that we allow people to claim the benefits of the ___ group while simultaneously allowing them to wiggle out of their responsibility for the bad shit, the more that we encourage people to act in ways which are socially detrimental. The more that we allow people to use definitions (“that isn’t what patriarchy means”) and limitations (“that was just an outlier, there’s no need to speak out against it”) to escape their obligations of consistency, the worse we all are for it.
Honesty in ethics requires consistency in process, or specific explanations for the inconsistency. If you claim to support free speech, you need to demonstrate it by supporting free speech that you detest. If you claim to support due process, you need to demonstrate it by supporting due process for someone that you can’t stand. If you claim that everyone should be investigated by the police, you need to stick to that when the person being investigated is in the ___ group. If you claim ___ should be applied to your opponents, you should agree that ____ should be applied to you.
But if that makes sense–if you think that honesty in ethics requires consistency in process, or specific explanations for the inconsistency–then that rapidly causes another problem, and a big one: it rapidly becomes apparent that that a lot of movements (very much including feminism) are outcome focused, not process focused.
And once you make the decision to focus on outcomes the end justifies the means) you run into a difficult choice. You can spend a lot of time trying to figure out all of the details, like (a) which differing treatments are justified; (b) how much of a difference in treatment is justified; (c) why you would choose one competing tactic over the other; (c) what the end goal is, specifically; and so on. Or you can basically say “trust me” and just screw consistency.
Most movements go with the “trust me” tactic. And unsurprisingly, since powerful humans are not often wholly trustworthy, it doesn’t work too well.
Wow, really? (Not sarcasm–I’m honestly surprised.) I mean, we get an article like every six months on how call-out culture is hurting feminism, and major feminist figures (and, occasionally, whole publications) have gotten caught up in stuff like trans issues, and I have literally never seen a link to something Twisty Faster wrote that didn’t include some kind of disclaimer about her body of work in general–speaking of attacking people to the left, or at least the more extreme. And as for, like, my example of women saying bad things about other women who stay home with their children–both online and in person that’s been at the least gently corrected by somebody else right away; and I can’t imagine the same wouldn’t happen if somebody honestly suggested men should be forced to do all the housework (um, I’ve probably heard that as a joke and everyone just laughed, but not seriously).
It may not be objected to with the same virulence as, say, some MRA arguments are objected to. But that’s not surprising–I’m nicer to my friends than to strangers, after all. (I mean, I’m not *mean* to strangers, per se, but I don’t necessarily take extra steps to be nice.)
We’ve had the process vs outcome argument before, and I think I’ll restate my position from the last time, which is that those are two poles of a spectrum, and most people fall in the middle somewhere. Since the outcome is a diagnostic of the process, whether you seem outcome-focused or process-focused can depend on how much you trust yourself to design an unbiased process. You rightly point out the arrogance of “just trust us to implement it correctly”, but of course there is also arrogance in “just trust us to design it near-perfectly the first time.”
***
Anyway, just so’s I know: is this a tangential argument, like mine was to RonF’s point? Or are you saying, since feminists don’t attack feminists that are too extreme with the right level of forcefulness–whatever that is–then I have no basis to complain when a surprising number of people operate under the assumption that feminists just hate men? Or perhaps that the opinion that feminists hate men should be blamed on how feminists treat outliers, and has nothing to do with misogyny?
I meant to say earlier–I have also seen The Addams Family Musical. I saw the touring show, after they took out the squid, etc. I wouldn’t say it was great, but it was fun. And I got a “Define Normal” sweatshirt.
gin-and-whiskey:
the often-idiotic Amanda Marcotte
I’d get more specific: she is often uncharitable (I’d say extremely, overly uncharitable) in reading her opponents. I’m never sure if she just thinks so poorly of them that she believes this interpretation or if it’s disingenuous. She sometimes has some good points, so I keep reading her, but man does it get annoying.
The first Amanda Marcotte article I read involved her tearing apart some university newspaper’s article about a campus self defense course. She ranted and raved about victim blaming for a while, going through the article piece by piece, until she conceded that it “finally” mentioned that men were responsible for rape.
I checked the article she was trashing. The “finally” was the second paragraph. Out of eight.
That wasn’t even the only dishonorable bit of her article, and that article was just one piece of a dishonorable career. But it always stuck with me, because it was one of the first time I read something of hers and knew to recognize the byline, and it was just so unforgivably egregious.
That, and in my experience and based on my childhood, those campus self defense courses tend to be run by my mother’s friends- middle aged to elderly lesbian women who have been working to better women’s lives for decades, and who are each worth a thousand Amanda Marcottes on the best day of her life. But there was a brief period in the mid ’00s where the trendy thing for feminists to do was to take shots at campus self defense and safety programs, and Marcotte is nothing if not politically trendy.
Amanda isn’t a close friend of mine or anything, but I had lunch with her once, and I’ve communicated with her now and then over the years. She’s smart as hell, and she’s always been nice to me, even when a lot of people were trashing me.
Amanda takes far more abuse and harassment (much of it incredibly misogynistic) for speaking up for her beliefs than anyone this side of Anita Sarkeesian – and she’s been doing it for years longer than Sarkeesian has. I seriously doubt that anyone here, me included, would have what it takes to stick with it in the face of abuse the way Amanda has.
If people on an open thread at “Alas” want to criticize arguments Amanda has written – including links to particular articles – I’m totally fine with that. Even general criticisms of Amanda’s style are fine with me, as long as they don’t become name-calling or trashing (see Closetpuritan’s post for an example of how to criticize without trashing).
But don’t use this space to trash Amanda, or to call her an idiot. There are about ten thousand places on the internet where people trash Amanda Marcotte and I’m not interested in “Alas” being one of them.
Harlequin:
I agree that it’s not what happened in the case of college sexual conduct policies.
What I think happened is more like this: You have a group of people in authority, some of whom are feminists, some of whom have a mild “patriarchal” view that women (in particular) ought to be protected, and some of whom belong to both groups. Over a period of several decades, feminists demand of these people that they protect women. The vast majority of these feminists do not demand,. suggest, or even acknowledge the need for any safeguards to protect men. Some men and women try to join the conversation and argue that there should be such safeguards, and predict that bad things will happen if there aren’t. The men are slapped down, told to shut up, listen, and check their privilege, denounced as anti-feminists and rape apologists, and otherwise vilified. The women do not get told to check their privilege, but are otherwise treated similarly.
The feminist demand works its way through the national consciousness and is eventually implemented without the safeguards most feminists never asked in the first place. The predicted bad things happen, with no reaction from feminists, until non-feminists start to point them out, whereupon a small number of feminists do acknowledge that, “yes, there have been some bad outcomes, but hey, is that feminists’ fault?”
Is it any wonder that some people end up not liking feminism very much?
Chris @ 234:
An argument you’ll note I didn’t make. I’m talking about President Obama and his Administration because that’s who’s on point at the moment. But don’t mistake me for someone who thinks that Pres. Bush had the correct handle on this – or a lot of other issues (e.g., immigration). I don’t believe I’ve ever made that claim.
Myca:
I wish I had your confidence that the vast majority of Muslims worldwide feel that way. That’s not so clear to me. What would make it a lot more clear to me would be if the Egyptian army moved against Boko Haram while supported by the Saudi Air Force. Kudos to Jordan on that, certainly, but it took action against one of their own to inspire them. What’s interesting is that the articles on Jordan’s actions stated that the public was fairly ambivalent regarding Boko Haram until then.
I’m sure you can round up the usual spokespeople for various Islamic groups that will condemn the various terrorist groups and actions that claim inspiration from Islam. But I also look at the official response when, for example, mobs decide to destroy Christian churches in Egypt – they mostly stand and watch. I’m not at all clear that if some group decided to slaughter every Jew or Christian they can get their hands on that there’d be anything more than talk from other Islamic groups or nations.
I’ll be back on the rest – there’s a lot to read on that and I’ve got to get to work.
While there are valid criticisms to be made of Amanda Marcotte, “politically trendy” is not one that holds water. I’ve been reading her since the Mousewords days and her positions have been remarkably consistent for, lo! these 11 years. Unless, of course, you think the trendy thing in politics has been the same since 2004.
I will admit that I don’t follow this enough to have good numbers on how many people are involved in destroying churches, vs how many are involved in the next thing I describe. But I do know that at least sometimes, when this happens, a bunch of Muslims will show up and ring the church to protect it from further harm, or sometimes will show up during services to show their solidarity, and of course this year Egypt increased the security around Coptic churches at Christmas (although, as that shows, there are still the people on the other side: two of the policemen thus assigned were killed).
Daran:
I mean, I’m sure you know that I don’t agree with the way you characterized that sequence of events and that you won’t convince me feminism is terrible, just like I’m not going to convince you feminism is great. That’s fine. I’m explicitly NOT complaining about people disliking feminism because of things feminists have actually done–again, I disagree with that position, but at least those people know what they’re talking about.
(By the way, sorry I started a huge thread over here the night you started a new open thread!)
So?
[shrug] Amanda’s opinions and claims are a lot less defensible than Sarkeesian’s. She’s inaccurate, sloppy, accusatory, and generally unapologetic. And she has a lot of her status due to her following and claimed leadership role, which is to some degree a direct result of deliberately pissing people off.
I don’t see her avoiding what the recipients would call “trashing” so I’m not sure why she, with her bully pulpit, should be immune. Nobody (here) is using language to refer to her which isn’t routinely used by feminists and other posters to refer to opponents. I don’t defend the out of line stuff like the rape threats, but outside that, people hating on Amanda for her (often poor) writing or positions are often justified.
I won’t do it here whether or not I think it makes sense–your blog, your rules–but I hope you will consider that your limitations are poorly conceived.
Harlequin @ 280 – true to a certain extent, but if there wasn’t a lot of at least tacit support for tearing down Christian churches in the first place those people and the security wouldn’t be necessary in the first place.
While there have been far fewer instances of, say, Christians tearing down mosques.
I mean, yes? I was countering this general sentiment of yours:
which divides Muslims into “hates Jews and Christians” and “is indifferent to Jews and Christians”, so I was pointing out that that the third group “cares about Jews and Christians” is large enough to be worth considering as well. That doesn’t negate the existence of the first two groups.
O.K. Fair enough. Let me then say that so far I suspect that the “indifferent” group is by far the largest and has no particular intention of doing anything about the “hates Jews and Christians” crowd, even to the point of simply informing on them. I’d very much like to be proven wrong.
It seems to me that the norm is for the indifferent crowd to be the largest, no matter the topic.
Yeah, that basically makes Muslims normal human beings, saying the majority fall into the “indifferent” group. Shouldn’t be too surprising….