Feminism

[itsamoose]

Great discussions! 

 

I agree with a lot of what Argobot's putting down, and if I can paint it with a broad brush, it often feels like "the left" is perpetually cannibalizing itself before it can reach some critical mass. It's a problem with no solution other than trying to be understanding, but sometimes it seems like the fragmentation is endless, and the right rarely has this problem. 

 

This is probably a personal bias though it seems to me that most liberal discussion tends to want to go deeper into a topic (he replied on a 233 page thread about feminism), which requires each of the participants have a certain minimum knowledge to be able to contribute that most people don't without a concerted effort.  I feel as though in liberal/left circles there tends to be a larger emphasis on semantics, probably out of a desire to not offend anyone or specificity of discussion, but it seems to have the effect of pushing new people away.  Then there can be a tendency to chastise people for having a certain opinion, usually a conservative/right leaning one that is offensive for one reason or another.  Personally I can't see it as anything other than getting mad at someone because they haven't dedicated as much of their time to thinking about the issue, and as such I've seen a number of people become anti-feminist who could have just as easily been allies.  I like the fire behind this, in that people see an injustice and rightfully get worked up about it, but too often this gets out of hand.  Mostly what I'm speaking about here has been my experience on social media, so I don't know if this is a left problem or just another type of social media grandstanding though I would guess it's a little of both.  I suppose everyone has a kind of gut "fuck you" reaction to being told what is OK to think or do, but it seems as though particularly in liberal circles does this become the focus of the discussion.

[Deadpan]

That tendency certainly exists, although as you say, people are getting rightfully worked up and I think it's important not to entirely deny people that anger.

 

However, I think where it becomes a problem isn't that people don't know much about the subject, but that they approach it without any desire to learn or even the concession that it may be something they aren't an expert in. I mean, this is an area in which, particularly of late, every dudebro game reviewer felt like going "Allow me to add my uninformed opinion to the discussion!" And that's great, in a sense, because it's something that does affect each and every one of us! But also a lot of it is about personal experience that privileged folk may simply have no analogous reference material for. Also also, besides everything else, it's also an area with a long history of debates, work done in feminist studies, gender studies, etc.

 

You certainly shouldn't have to know all of that to participate, but it's kind of weird that people very rarely acknowledge the expertise of folk like feminist scholars, critical gender theorists, etc. instead of pretending that they're arguing on equal footing. As the passage Chris quoted says, experience with something doesn't automatically cause critical reflection and consideration of the same thing, but when you have neither of those to show maybe you should acknowledge that in your approach.

[itsamoose]

Sure it's great to for people to be angry about things like that, but expressing that anger, usually towards an individual, tends to derail the discussion.  For me the solution is simple--just ask why.  I've found that when someone goes on an anti-feminist, anti-gay or whatever rant, simply questioning the foundation of their reasoning will soften their position.  I'll use my room mate as an example because... well... he's pretty bullheaded and isn't a vicious person but fundamentally believes his way is the best way.  Whenever he says something mysoginistic, I just question why he is making that claim.  Then he usually gets fired up, goes on a rant about how right he is, we go back and forth a bit and he ends the discussion believing he's won.  Now move the clock forward a few days and we're having a similar discussion, except this time he is taking the position I laid out in our previous discussion.  By doing this I've figured out that I can basically implant ideas in his head to the point where he believes the ideas are his own.  In the time I've lived with him he's gone from someone who would see an auto insurance commercial starring a woman and couldn't resist the urge to say something sexist about female drivers, to someone who won't even use gendered slurs any more.

 

From my experience, as a pretty standard white guy talking mostly to others of the same, liberals tend to focus on the negative which is certainly appropriate since it is usually a problem that is being discussed.  Though even if personal insults aren't made, references to institutional racism/sexism/whatever tend to make people get defensive as if they, personally, are being blamed for the failure based on their position in the larger structure.  As much as I wish it weren't the case, having people throw their uninformed opinions into the discussion in my experience is the only way to really get people to examine their perspective.  In other words, you must let them make the mistake and not chastise them for doing so.  When this happens you can either take the bait and get angry, or dissect what they are saying and get them to elaborate.  I'll admit, I certainly give in to the anger every now and then but I always regret it.  To bring it back to your original point, I think the tendency to cannibalize a movement is the result of no one really attempting to inspire the desire to learn in those who otherwise wouldn't on their own.

[jennegatron]

...Now move the clock forward a few days and we're having a similar discussion, except this time he is taking the position I laid out in our previous discussion.  By doing this I've figured out that I can basically implant ideas in his head to the point where he believes the ideas are his own...

 

This is pretty much exactly what Björk said she had to do to get dudes to listen to her.( http://pitchfork.com/features/interviews/9582-the-invisible-woman-a-conversation-with-bjork/ )

 

"I’ve been guilty of one thing: After being the only girl in bands for 10 years, I learned—the hard way—that if I was going to get my ideas through, I was going to have to pretend that they—men—had the ideas. "

[sclpls]

That Slate piece is really strong, and provides the right amount of ironic distance in considering these types of intra-political squabbles. I still don't think this is unique to "PC" culture, but is just a common feature of human society (in Europe for much of its history there are questions about whether someone is sufficiently Christian enough, the question of whether someone was sufficiently communist under Stalin or Mao was a life or death question, McCarthyism in the 1950s, how much blackness exists within a person was a question of extraordinary legal importance in the pre-Civil War era American South, etc. I always find it frustrating that Americans frequently like to complain about this stuff as if we are impervious to the forces of history).

 

I do think, barring any actual involvement in a particular political struggle, it is a mistake to cast one's lot with the radical or the moderate wing of a party. Both are needed to effect political change in a good cop/bad cop sort of dynamic.

 

I also like that the Slate piece really interrogated what counts as being reasonable. Because of my legal background I'm keenly aware of how "reasonableness" as a way to evaluate things is a bit of a weasel word to avoid the tricky task of thinking through thorny problems (admittedly at times for very reasonable purposes).

[Deadpan]

There's value for sure in nudging somebody along like that and walking them through the entire argument by allowing them to go through the same progression you once did, but that's also something that's only really feasible for friends and other people in your life, not exactly how it can or will work out in the wider public debate or stuff like social media interaction.

 

It's already pretty strange how frequently people expect to be offered their own personal Feminism 101 when they approach somebody who, realistically, has better things to do than rehash stuff they already said at the schedule of a stranger. A customized, didactically sound, multi-week introduction is a bit unrealistic, although it is a nice goal for how to approach bringing up these subjects in personal relationships.

[sclpls]

I think this Matt Yglesias post gets at the point I was trying to get at much better than I think I was able to do about the ways in which "identity politics" and the rhetoric of "PC discourse" is not a unique thing: http://www.vox.com/2015/1/29/7945119/all-politics-is-identity-politics

[Henroid]

Jonathan Blow said something really peculiar.

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/560698934700408832

 

@vihartvihart I am in theory pro-feminism but I really, really do not like the platform of Internet Feminism 2015.

 

Which was in response to this question:

How is it so many men that I know and love find a way to blame feminism and women for problems we all have?

[Twig]

Oh no don't say that. He's like my favorite person. ): Ohhh.

[Bjorn]

It's a bit more complex than that. It starts with this article, which is a response to this comment, which is part of a discussion (that I didn't read all of), which has apparently spawned a bunch of responses.

Blow's tweets look real bad, even in context. If you can read that first article and arrive at the conclusion that you're "being dismissed" well...I don't know what to say to that.

[Henroid]

It feels like Blow is trying to be non-conformist feminist. Which is... weird. This isn't the arena for that sorta behavior.

[Bjorn]

Oh, this whole thing has been going on for weeks, I think this Laurie Penny piece got posted here back in December, but I'm not sure I realized the full context of it at the time. 

 

And damn Twitter is the worst for trying to follow a conversation.

[Apple Cider]

Oh no don't say that. He's like my favorite person. ): Ohhh.

 

*pulls you up by the collar* EVERY MAN WILL DISAPPOINT YOU, TWIG

[Twig]

Hahaha

 

It's true. D:

[Reyturner]

When someone posted that Jonathan Blow article in the "Question about Braid" thread, I was thinking "Ha, remember when Jon Blow was the worlds most dangerous gamer?". 

 

D: 

[Problem Machine]

I respect Jon Blow a heck of a lot but he is not the person I look to for informed opinions on feminism.

[Merus]

I respect Jon Blow a heck of a lot but he is not the person I look to for informed opinions on people who are not Jonathan Blow.

 

 

The problem I have with this argument:

 

The truth is, identity grants experience (and experience should be valued to a point); but it does not automatically grant wisdom, critical distance, or indeed, unassailable righteousness.

 

is: sure, that's fine in the abstract, but who's determining whether a complaint is wise or fair? Obviously the complainer can't, but the complainant isn't usually in a position to make that call either, particularly if they have the privilege of never having to consider a problem that their actions are contributing to. The existence of complaints on the wrong side of that line is exactly the kind of thing that 'social justice warrior' was originally intended to describe, but where that line's drawn is, in practice, dependent on your own personal understanding.

 

Tumblr, who probably invented this problem, has come up with the 'problematic fave' as a solution, where people are encouraged to not reach for a complaint if they feel the work is otherwise worthwhile.

[Deadpan]

I found this article in my timeline yesterday and perhaps the central idea of there not being any room to grow if people are expected to be perfect from the get go speaks to some of the issues that were brought up here. Although I did find it a little dismissive of the "200 people who write the entire Cool Kid Progressive Media" and I'm always a little wary of mentions of Weird Twitter because of the other contexts it tends to come up in. I always find something to gripe about, eh?

 

Although I have no particularly insightful remarks to make about this, I also wanted to note how foreign a lot of this debate feels to me, probably because a lot of the arguments about sides and driving people away seem to be informed by thinking in a two-party framework. I suppose I'm having trouble relating to the idea that if people feel alienated by "the left" then, even though they still share it's values, they'll end up swining all the way to the other side somehow.

 

Which doesn't even begin to cover the argument on whether or not there even is a coherent left. As tberton already talked about, a lot of this seems to be neo-liberalists telling other socially progressive folk to stop squibbling and think of "the cause," whatever that may be, even though a lot of these other people probably lean closer to socialist views. So it certainly looks a bit snide to be told to play nice in service of a shared goal that likely doesn't even exist.

[Apple Cider]

I have never, ever considered Weird Twitter to be that progressive. 

 

As far as Left? I definitely think there's the left we think of politically (liberals) and then Leftists (radicals that are usually socialist or Marxist, some flavor of that). The schisms happening there are usually camps that fall along those lines when it comes to talking about things like feminism/social justice.

[Deadpan]

To be honest I have yet to learn exactly how Weird Twitter is different from weird Twitter. The only times I have seen people elaborate on the idea was when they launched into weird conspiracy theories.

 

Yeah, I may not have expressed that very well, I just wanted to note that it seems cynical for Chait and others to go "We're all liberals here!" (in spite of these differences) as a way to potentially shield themselves from criticism.

[tberton]

Another way of expressing that issue in the piece is this: Chait is arguing that reasonable discussion is the basis for making a better society, while citing ideals that helped incite at least two violent revolutions. That's the definition of irony. Of course, reasonable discussion is still extremely valuable, but it is by no means the only historical driver of change, nor is the change that reasonable discussion drives always positive.

[Apple Cider]

To be honest I have yet to learn exactly how Weird Twitter is different from weird Twitter. The only times I have seen people elaborate on the idea was when they launched into weird conspiracy theories.

 

Yeah, I may not have expressed that very well, I just wanted to note that it seems cynical for Chait and others to go "We're all liberals here!" (in spite of these differences) as a way to potentially shield themselves from criticism.

 

Well "W/weird Twitter" reifies it somewhat, but much of the Weird Twitter whips are direct descendants of FYAD (which is a notorious forum of Something Awful for people who don't know) and despite being mostly liberal white dudes, some of their humor hasn't strayed far from their origins. It might not be calling people Nazis but they still react the same if you don't like their jokes. 

[Reyturner]

Chait responds to the responses

[Apple Cider]

http://inthesetimes.com/article/17584/jonathan_chait_pc

I am not Sady's biggest fan but I can't say she didn't go all the way in on this one.

[Bjorn]

Okay, so as I said earlier, I have zero familiarity with Chait's work, but wat da fuq?

 

McCarthyism supplied American communists with the romantic aura of unjust persecution, and it taught many liberals to treat any charge of communism with reflexive suspicion. Actual communists hid their noxious beliefs under the guise of anti-McCarthyism in exactly the same way that actual racists hide their beliefs in the guise of anti-political-correctness. Communism in the 1950s was a very real and very terrifying threat, and yet the most effective response to it was probably not indiscriminate accusations of communist sympathy.

 

Why are we paying any attention to this asshat? That's just the lazyist, most simplistic description and analogy I've ever seen. Which pretty much fits with Doyle's critiques of his first piece in the article Apple Cider linked.