Richard Dawkins, is that you?
Oh come now, donât be so hard on yourself (and everyone else). Just because there is nothing new under the Sun, it doesnât mean that it isnât worth basking under. Iâm simply pointing out that youâre not making a point that anyone disagrees with.
In as far as youâre accusing her of engaging in the practice of âtrumping,â sheâs pointing out that for every experience Aaronson points out, he is not exceptionally oppressed. That is the crux of his statement that people are taking issue with. He is denying the idea of privilege based on his limited individual experience. In reality, it is the plurality of individual experiences that define privilege. The article is providing a counterpoint and counterexamples. This is not the same as saying, âYour suffering doesnât count because itâs less.â In fact, she fucking says as much.
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Iâm tired of reading this kind of idea repeated over and over. You are essentially saying, âI donât disagree with you but you arenât going to convince people by expressing yourself in that manner.â
If you know how to convince people of things then convince us. Show us your data. Where are your examples where you convinced people of things - not won arguments by having people walked away but had people on online message boards say, âHey, you are right.â
Look at the history of big social changes and separate them into two categories: Ones that went forward because everyone was on board and ones that went forward despite the kicking and screaming of the establishment (or the killing of established powers). Is your idea that we need to communicate nicely to get people on board actually related to making any kind of change?
If the article discussed here doesnât have enough empathy for someone then I donât think empathy is going to work on that person. I just read it again. Itâs extremely nice.
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Where does she claim in her article that she understands that?
Sheâs arguing that privileged men are the ones who donât understand something that they havenât actually gone through.
Iâm sorry for your loss, but if Iâm reading the whole of your apparently heartfelt comment correctly, youâre saying that Laurie Penny should not have written her article in the first place? That itâs just more âsolidarity breakingâ?
Itâs an article about how some with gendered privilege donât understand how those without it suffer from that lack. How is that a breaking of solidarity, when most of those in the privileged gender arenât expressing solidarity in the first place, and sheâs explaining that failure?
How else do you recommend getting across that failure to those who are doing the failing?
And speaking of solidarity, whatâs wrong with expressing it, as she does, with those who are suffering the effects of being objectifed, dismissed, marginalized, held back, and so on, by men who wonât treat them like full-fledged human beings simply because theyâre women?
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The thing that needs to be kept in mind here, I think, is:
Itâs not about you.
Too many times when discussions of patriarchy or privilege people seem to take the concepts personally. âI donât have privilege because of x and/or yâ is missing the point. Apologising for your privilege is missing the point.
All of us, especially here, is privileged. Laurie Penny is privileged. Perhaps you donât tick all the boxes, but that does not diminish your advantage over many others. Across gender, sexuality, socioeconomics, education, access to tech, age, health, disability, where you were born, hell even looks. All of us have an easier time of it based on some (sometimes many) of those categories. The lottery ticket idea, but more than just economics.
And itâs not your fault. You are lucky, thatâs all. But what conversations about this topic should be about, what Pennyâs article is about, is being aware of your privilege. Being aware that there is a shit-ton of people who donât get it as easy as you and, especially, diminishing someoneâs lived experience with âoh, I donât see how that could be a problemâ.
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Imagine a country populated by half Dorians and half Ionians with formally equal rights, but where the vast majority of property and businesses are owned by Dorians, a majority of politicians are Dorians, and so far every single leader had been a Dorian.
Is there really anyone who would object to saying that country is governed by Dorians, as the suffix -archy implies?
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Iâm more interested in supporting the viewpoint that Steven Brust is defending over here than I am in casting stones at Laurie Penny. I wish Ms. Penny and Mr. Aaronson all the best, and I hope they will in time come to agree with Mr. Brustâs thesis as much as I do.
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And this is where I think thereâs a inherent problem. You canât say that sheâs saying heâs ânot exceptionally oppressedâ and then at the same time say sheâs not saying his suffering doesnât count because itâs less. âNot exceptionally oppressedâ is in fact a comparative value. And while you may think (and she may think) that sheâs not saying his suffering doesnât count because itâs less, it seems to me that it very much reads that way - that sheâs saying that it doesnât count because heâs not female. And she managed to make his piece all about her, which if it were done the other way would be criticized as changing the subject, misdirection, or worse, mansplaining.
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Thatâs not what she did at all. She is saying he suffered as a youth, but he wasnât (and isnât) structurally oppressed.
After all, he was still able to enter STEM with little trouble. Thatâs her point. His history blinds him to the way others are blocked from STEM.
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That sounds about right. As I recall, one of the themes of the bullying I experienced was resentment at how I was a teacherâs pet, and otherwise singled out and granted privileges.
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So, women need to use language that men think we should use in order to be taken seriously.
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And yet, he never said he was âstructurally oppressedâ So again, sheâs (or youâve) managed to turn the conversation to her definition of oppression, which is not only diffent in quantity but kind, again denying him the opportunity to talk about what he describes as a very personal experience.
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Iâm more interested in supporting the viewpoint that Steven Brust is defending over here than I am in casting stones at Laurie Penny.
Sigh. That argument is shot through with problems that Iâve encountered many times before.
He argues, mainly, that when people fight for recognition and amelioration of abuse in terms of race and gender (problems he actually doesnât seem even willing to admit ARE problems), they ignore what he sees as the bigger problem, that of social class; since race and gender have been used to divide most of us in terms of social class, when we fight in terms of the first two, weâre supposedly falling for a ruse set up for us by our economic puppet-string pullers.
What Brust is saying is a common thing for privileged white men to say. Theyâd be a lot less likely to say it if they werenât privileged white men.
In that case, it would be easier for them to see that while race and gender are indeed divide-and-conquer tools used by economic elites, they donât divide us equally. Women and people of color in general suffer additional burdens merely because theyâre in those categories, including economic hardships (that is, class-related ones). And so, getting white men to acknowledge that can be a way of asking for your vaunted solidarity; why seek solidarity with someone who wonât acknowledge that the members of his group generally have better chances in life than members of yours, and further, that members of his group often abuse members of yours?
On top of all that, calls for a focus on class-based inequity INSTEAD OF inequity also caused by perception of race and gender difference ask us to be simple minded. They fail to recognize the human capacity to think about more than one thing at a time (or to think âintersectionally,â as academics sometimes put it).
tl;dr â Brust is another typical concerned white guy, several steps behind others in thinking about how societal oppression works, and about what to do about it. Itâs really sad that you think heâs making better points than those made by Penny.
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Youâre saying that we need to focus on the ârealâ problem, which is what Brust is saying. But sexism and racism are as real as classism. They are all bound up together.
No, she is not. Sheâs explaining how he can both have been abused and bullied yet still enjoy some privilege that she did not. If you askd her, Iâd suspect sheâd heartily agree that she receives privilege for being white and cis-gendered. Bacially, what youâre saying is that pointing out how oneâs struggles are different from someone elseâs is not allowed.
I think, whether meaning to or not, you and (at least Brust) has. Brust at least was saying that sexism and racism are not real, but they indeed are real, at least in their effects on real people.
My heart goes out to you. Maybe race and gender did not play a role in your friendâs death. But guess what, sometimes how race and gender impact people in this world does lead to that place where they can think the only way out is death⌠wasnât there a story posted on here about a young transgendered woman who did just that this week, because her own parents couldnât love and accept her as she was.
Acknowledging that white, straight men are considered the default humanity does not mean that all white straight men have it easy. We can talk about that, no one is saying otherwise. But we have oceans of art, literature, and philosophy that we all read, hear, or talk about all the time, the canon of modern western civilization that speaks to that suffering. What POC, LGBQT people, and women want here is an acknowledgement that our struggles, which are distinct because of the structures of our society, are worth reading within that canon, that we shaped the world as much as men, that we worked as hard, and are just as sympathetic and human as white, straight men. While you might not be specifically doing that, and I do think you are full of good intentions and care, when issues of race, sexuality, and gender come up, and we start to speak on these topics, weâd very much like to be heard, understood, and acknowledged.
No one is saying âpay women moreâ, âlet me be sex objectsâ or âtreat young white men the same as young black menâ, we are saying pay us to the same, stop seeing us as receptacles for sex, and stop killing young black men. The only thing this has to do with white men is for them to support us in getting these things done politically. If you think paying a woman the same as a man is someone detrimental to you, thatâs your problem, Iâd think. If you think fixing the broken cirminal justice system is unfair⌠wellâŚ
You got to describe the problem before you fix them, Iâd argue. We need to have discussions about what is wrong before we can fix it. You wouldnât just start tearing down an engine before you diagnosed the problem, would you? No, right? Youâd do some diagnostics, and if you and your friend helping you would come to some sort of consensus on what the problem was before you start taking the engine out of your car, right? Same here. I think most Americans agree we have problems. but not everyone agrees on what the problem is. We canât move forward until we all understand what is making that stupid noise thatâs irritating us allâŚ
No one is suggesting that.
Not at all. I do think sometimes you miss otherâs point, but we all do that at timesâŚ
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Well, since thatâs not what he said, I can only image how much willpower was involved in so entirely missing his point. Maybe none.
You could accuse me of it, and it wouldnât make me defensive. But thatâs because I know I do not.
How can you even consider what such an accusation means to other people, when you yourself claim ignorance of what the terms even really mean?
How much will goes into such misunderstanding? Again, maybe none.
I think he agrees that they are problems, but he thinks that race and gender are constructs, and therefore not ârealâ in the way that class is real⌠ignoring that class is a construct too. Heâs pulling out the old hardline communist view, that since race and gender are only tools of the capitalist oppressor, you do away with the capitalist system, you do away with them. It was a big point of contention between Lenin and Alexandra Kollantai. Lenin argued that the communist system would naturally free women, while Kollantai argued that women were a class who had shared oppression across economic class.
Yes!
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So, I should sit down, shut up, and let a MAN tell me how to talk?
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For succinctness and clarity: no. 
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Itâs been a while since Iâve read Kollantai, but this doesnât right to me. A big shortcoming of Leninâs was that he treated a lot of issues of gender as frivolous, including issues of sexuality that Kollantai would raise; however, it seems out of character for him to argue that communism would ânaturallyâ free anyone. Kollantai was generally pretty merciless in her critiques of bourgeois feminism, and argued against cross-class organizing.
How does that follow? Being shown how you are blind to the privilege you have does in no way diminish your experience of bullying. If anything, it should help you to understand that privilege and how it affects others who do not have it.
Why must it be a zero-sum game?
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