PhysioProf, guest blogging at Isis the Scientist has a post up called the Handy-Dandy Guide for D00dly Commenters which struck both me and Ampersand as being similar to his How Not to Be Insane When Accused of Racism: A Guide for White People (Amp notes that he would use different wording were he writing the post today).
Here’s an excerpt:
(1) If you are leaving the first comment to a post, you are almost certainly fucking up.
(2) If you are using the words “men”, “boys”, “fathers”, or “sons”, you are almost certainly fucking up.
(3) If you are using the words “should” or “useful”, you are almost certainly fucking up.
(4) If you are telling people that talking about this, that, or the other issue is fine, but also asking them what they are doing about this issue, you are almost certainly fucking up.
(5) If you are complaining that by being “mean”, people that might be allies are being turned off, you are almost certainly fucking up.
Seems worth reading through.
I Blame the Patriarchy has a discussion of the piece (with worthwhile comment thread, I thought). Twisty wrote:
While it is always hi-larious to read what expert dudely readers of heartwarming nature crap blogs have to tell their less-enlightened brethren, it’s also maddening and, if you like, ironical, since such a post can only be written from the patronizing position of male privilege. It’s a kind of double-privilege, too: “Unlike you, Grasshoppah, the feminists have accepted me, for I have been to their savage death island and live to tell the tale.”
These guys are veteran ethnographers doing a field study, warning the new grad students: “The natives have curious, unpredictable ways. Approach them with caution or they will prong you sure as shit with curare-dipped spears. Oh, and we’re meeting for beers later at Chip’s tent.”
Hardy har, because implicit in these man-to-man, how-to-walk-on-eggshells-around-a-feminist tracts is an ingrained sense of the inconsequential status of women in the feminist heartwarming nature crappism blog community. It’s comical somehow, that feminist women — women who are widely considered to be the hairy minority, the kill-joy joke-butts of the internet whose blogs are often described by dudes as “lame” or “parodies” — are so aggressively protective of their trivial little sectarian colonies on the web that men need special training and travel visas to avoid blogular deportation.
As well as other things.
Twisty, as far as I can tell, respects PhysioProf as a feminist. She’s just calling him out on this particular dynamic.
This is one of those many areas where I don’t agree with Twisty exactly, but I think she’s saying something interesting. I think that PhysioProf’s post is interesting, and has some potential to be practically useful (although I disagree with some of his points; for instance, here at Alas, a male commenter probably isn’t fucking up by commenting first on any given thread. We’re also a little bit more comfortable with personal life sharing, I think, than the blogular culture at IBTP. But nevertheless, there are a lot of good points, and I think the way PhysioProf is analyzing his own privilege could be usefully generalized to other areas — for instance, white commenters who are trying to be genuine allies to poc, or cis commenters trying to be genuine allies to trans people, etc.).
However, Twisty is correct — in order to make a post like that, written in the language of the privileged, you have to be *exercising* your privilege.
It’s a good thing for privilege to be exercised in this way, I think. Certainly, I think on the whole, Barry’s post about how not to be insane when accused of racism (a guide for white people) has on the whole been useful, and it seems to be useful to POC activists as well. I note that ABW links to it periodically when she wants white commenters to be able to go read something that they’ll understand, and stop bugging her.
I think that one of the more important things allies can do is to help express things in terms of their privilege, specifically so that they can help preserve the valuable time of people like ABW who do not need to be dealing with that 101 shit when they’ve got better things to do. Allies who are privileged can do this without committing the same emotional reserves (it hurts — in my experience — to have to defend your basic rights against privileged people, and is not so personally painful when you’re defending others), and to some extent without committing the same amount of time, because the privileged language will click with the other privileged language in a way that the privilege-poisoned party can hear and acknowledge.
But it’s still kind of icky that these things are necessary. And the use of privilege, even for good purpose, still involves othering, as Twisty points out with her savage island metaphor. Thus even though the privilege is being used to ease one problem, it adds wrinkles to another by reinforcing the voice of privilege as the voice of authority, in contrast to the othered voice of the oppressed group.
Now that I think about othering: interesting that Twisty’s metaphor for feminism as understood by the privileged dialogue was a “savage island.” Interesting that we get back to colonialism and to race. I wonder what that speaks to. (I don’t think it’s just white privilege, although that’s probably part any metaphor like this; there’s a long history of using “savage island” imagery to refer to feminist-only groups, such as amazons, and even the ways in which female only groups are described in old SF and fantasy, both female-positive and female-negative. Is it easiest for us to imagine women’s liberation in terms of geographic separation? And do we culturally have a tendency to map the ‘primitive’ nature of white women with the ‘primitive’ nature of all people of color, as Victorian scientists did, when postulating the white male brain as the only civilized one?)
[And finally, as someone else who likes to mix high-falutin’ language with teh crassness, I offer this tribute to PhysioProf: Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckity fuckpants.]
I see many points of view and believe that othering is much more widespread than currently acknowledged.
I acknowledge that anything outside my own cranium will be othered to a degree. Beyond that I don’t other more or less but it is a lot and I will not apoligize because I expect as part of the human condition to be othered by :-) others.
I see humans as an othering species and it is more offensive when we pretend we are not. Politics is an art of creative fluidly dynamic othering as a bloodsport with no clean hands on any side anywhere at anytime. And yes strange as it may seem I live with this concept of humanity constantly in my head. And I do see it in play consatntly.
I decided to be the Jerk who made the first post.
You’re not a jerk for posting, but I’m not sure you’re having the same conversation I was having. I mean, you’re pretty much erased all the social dynamics from the conversation, and left us with some kind of solipsism. Which is fine, but not really the type of analysis this blog tends to be interested in.
I liked PhysioProf’s list, I agree about the good use of privilege thing, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have thought twice about it without Twisty’s post. But reading the way so many of the male commenters at Isis reacted causes me to give more credence to the, uh, ethnographic complaint. Because PhysioProf’s list doesn’t really explain why those behaviors are bad. Perhaps he thought it self-evident. It certainly was self-evident to me, but it was self-evident to me before he wrote the list.
I’m not sure, though, how you get out of that dynamic because the list is a lot punchier than some long explanation of why you shouldn’t do those things. And some men aren’t going to get it no matter how you put it, because they actually don’t want to get it.
That’s some catch, that catch-22. I hope no one minds my trying to elaborate that just a tick.
Can someone repudiate his/her own privilege? It seems not – the privilege isn’t (solely) a matter of individual will. The privilege is socially constructed, but moreover a matter of recognition and/or misrecognition. If someone falls ass-backward into a position of privilege, that privilege will be misrecognized, perhaps also by the one whose privilege it is.
(I’m thinking of something Geraldine Finn wrote years ago: male violence is a constant; the woman walking on the sidewalk near me doesn’t know I’m not a rapist. That looks like misrecognition to me.)
I think what follows from this is that no one (mis-)recognized as embodying male/white/straight privilege is able to say anything whatsoever without privilege, and without apparent/recognized/misrecognized “othering.” Does that seem to follow logically? Cuz it sure as heck describes my everyday experience.
Yeah, you can’t repudiate your own privilege. You don’t get to be able to walk around with white skin, or a penis, or birth-genital-and-gender-presentation-congruence, or whatever, and NOT have it. No kidding?
You come across as hostile with your addition of the “mis” to the “recognition.” If you’re hostile, I’m probably going to blow you off, cuz I don’t really give a fuck about you if the concern you’re bringing to the feminist space is really that you’re oppressed because women walking alone at night don’t automatically know that you’re not a rapist.
However, assuming you’re not being hostile, I’ll engage by sort of turning around your analogy. You as a man can try to repudiate your male privilege, but you will still never be blamed for “asking for it” if you are sexually assaulted at night while walking alone (assuming we don’t end up bringing orientation into the mix; you might well get blamed if you are homosexual, bisexual, or have a sufficiently non-traditional gender presentation). Again with those caveats, you will never be rebuked for walking alone at night because you should know better than to put yourself at risk like that, you fragile thing you.
You can’t repudiate that privilege. It’s part of you. (Or at least part of a cis, straight man.) And yeah, it’s true that one’s social positioning as part of a privileged group will always — always — always — affect the context of how one’s read when one is writing about social issues. That’s because identity affects lived experience.
I don’t mean anything hostile at all.
By misrecognition, I was alluding to the potential slippage in every relation of recognition, where either or both (all) of us recognize one another per an ascription that is incomplete, somewhat inaccurate, etc. I was trying to call attention to the way privilege is ascribed, by oneself or by others, or repudiated, by oneself or by others. The issue is that one recognized as a penis-bearing-straight-white-masculine-male is unable to repudiate that privilege by force of will, action, statement, or form of address – even if that person does not understand that person’s subjectivity or identity as penis-bearing-straight-white-masculine-male. The congruence of penis-straight-masculine-male is recognized, or misrecognized, as an ascription of someone, to whom is ascribed privilege.
Is it “part of” that one-recognized? That’s part of what the question of recognition and misrecognition raises for me. It looks to me like a spot where a little resistance to that privilege could happen, and it seemed to me the gist of the discussion was that no one recognized as having privilege can resist. That’s all, just wondering genuinely about little margins for resistance.
(By the way, point well taken regarding gender/orientation presentation. In a way, I think my question is whether those who present gender in ways that that person understands as troubling gender can actually resist, or if that person is utterly subject to another’s recognition of gender.)
Great post Mandolin.
I agree with you on the both good and aspects of calling out shit as a privileged ally, and how you can’t really seperate the 2 from each other. But of course I never would have been able to articulate it half as well as you have :)
and fuckity fuckpants,
giggle
Am I missing something, or did ComradePhysioProf not at any point claim to have conquered or disclaimed or whatever his own privilege? I was under the impression that it’s better that dudes explain to other dudes what they’re doing wrong, because it’s a form of taking responsibility for their comrades’ failures. (I’m aware of the ever-present danger that it’ll degenerate into men patting each other on the back and riding off into the sunset convinced that they’re feminism on wheels.)
Or is Twisty disappointed that this sort of thing needs to be written in the first place? It’s unrealistic to expect otherwise, because what’s obvious to women is not obvious to men simply because power makes you stupid… but I don’t think Twisty actually expects men to Get It; she’s just uninterested in making it her problem. Which I suppose makes sense, and I’m sure I’m now just paraphrasing something she said over there with more verve.
That trope is “Sophisticated As Hell“, by the way.
Aw, it quotes the turkey city lexicon (the sophisticated as hell link, I mean).
More than using it for disjunction — though I do that when I’m creating a piece meant for a broad audience — I also just speak that way. I know big words. I know crass words. They are both part of my vocabulary. It is fluid for me to mix the dictions.
I know a lot of people my age who feel that way, and who got/get really weird reactions about it from older people. I don’t know if it’s generational, or just my group of friends & the older people we hung out with.
Curious, Physioprof’s Guide sounds a lot like Prufrock’s Song: “And I have known the eyes already, known them all–/The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,/And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,/When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,/Then How should I begin /To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?” (T.S. Eliot, remember him?) Obviously irony in Physioprof’s 14th guide: “If someone calls you out on an assertion of privilege, your dick will not fall off.” But it surely will, and it will emasculate the doodle doods very being, so much so that like Prufrock, doods will for ever experience the exotic other as an unfulfilled desire that they can never fully embrace because it is simply an illusion!! Like Prufrock those doodle dicks out there do and will experience a few slices here and there; the guide provides a hoped for entry into this illusive world, but its all a deconstructive playground–one full of irony, parody, pastiche–what better way to cope with the feminist mystique they’ve been raised to believe is real!!
Oh jeez, this seems to be another one of those impenetrable riddles of the feminist blog-o-sphere. This one goes like this: 1) You have privilege. 2) Don’t make the non-privileged person “educate” you and other privileged people. It’s your job to educate yourselve and others. 3) But if you do try to educate others, then DAMN YOU for exerting your privilege.
malathion: I think the deal is just recognizing that nothing is ever perfect, including one’s best intended actions.
malathion: Listen to the insights of the mandolin. The point is that there is no mystique, no feminine riddle, nothing out there dude, but a playground whereby one’s oppositional logic is disrupted. The doodle doods and everyone else for that matter can no longer feel secure in opposing the masculine to feminine –alas, the horror of indeterminacy.
alas, the horror of indeterminacy.
Look, I am as feminist (and as female) as the next radical feminist woman. But you simple cannot, with a straight face, claim that this particular flap is about men not being comfortable with indeterminancy. The feminist blogosphere has developed some really extraordinarily elaborate speech/manner codes, the utter opposite of indeterminacy.
Exactly, feminist discourse is unwilling to take a leap of faith.
The feminist mystique is simply the discourse shaping a determinate reality. Language doesn’t mirror or reflect reality, it shapes it. At the risk of embracing the role of the ostensibly privileged who seeks to educate, I allude to Camille Paglia who dynamically refers to our desire to escape the chaos ,the dionysian flux –what better way to avoid this indeterminacy than to embrace the sadomasochistic playground since it allows for some form of oppostional logic.