Did you even read the OP? The part where he talks about how he knows how privileged he is?
I can see where this thread is going - I could see it from the beginning. There are mansplainers and feminazis. There are gold-star brown nosers and there are privilege-blind Cisnits. And none of them can talk to each other. I don’t know why I even bother to try.
Sorry, what? Did you? The part where he says:
Alas, as much as I try to understand other people’s perspectives, the first reference to my “male privilege”—my privilege!—is approximately where I get off the train, because it’s so alien to my actual lived experience.
He expicitly states that he had none in high school.
Well, let’s count the ways:
So … all of that privilege can be thrown away because because he feels he was oppressed by feminist viewpoints in his environment during his teens?
Just. No.
Which am I? Which are you? You appear to be hell-bent on taking this stuff personally. Don’t.
We are talking to each other right now. It’s just that you don’t appear to get that privilege is not a checklist where if you can’t check all the boxes you don’t have it. >.<
Hey, I appreciate I’m jumping into this whole debate pretty late - but I thought I’d share a brief anecdote from my own traumatic educational past. When I was at secondary (high) school, I was bullied a lot. It made me utterly miserable. And I found escape in a lot of typically geeky things. It always seemed to me at the time that (outside of one or two of my close geeky friends) everyone else was fine and got on with the world ok - and my fiends and I were just oppressed for no good reason.
And then years later, on a school reunion site, I saw a comment from a girl I knew who I’d always thought of as attractive and therefore presumably popular, saying about how badly she was bullied at school. Mind blown. Turns out, other people went through shit at school as well, and some of them were girls.
Maybe she was a geek too. Maybe she would have been if people like me had reached out to her. I guess I’ll never know, because it never really occurred to me at the time that girls were even people.
There was a quote from a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode (which was knocked out of it’s original broadcast date because it dealt with a potential school shooting right after one). “Every single person down there is ignoring your pain because they’re too busy with their own. The beautiful ones. The popular ones. The guys that pick on you. Everyone.” And I think that’s somewhat of the problem of life, it’s hard to think much about, to even see, other people’s potential problems when yours are right there standing in your view all the time. That’s why empathy’s so important, as a choice, it doesn’t mean necessarily setting aside your own pain, but it does mean acknowledging other people’s is just as valid, whether you think it’s better or worse (and, being impossible to fit inside someone else’s head, you’ll never know for sure). And I think that, I like about this particular article more than others, because it does acknowledge, with compassion, the pain men often go through, rather than dismissing it as it sometimes feels articles do. We’re in together, even if our struggles are apart, often solo.
This part I don’t get, though… growing up I always thought of girls as people (as much as anybody was, when I grew out of my solipsistic tendencies), just… people I couldn’t seem to connect with on the level that others do. I had friends, some fairly good ones, that were girls, without much sexual tension (that I was aware of, anyway), and a few that there was some, but I couldn’t get particularly close… largely because of my own problems. But I wanted to, not just for sex… not EVEN for sex… but for a level of emotional closeness (even among my male friends, there wasn’t much of that, our friendships were mostly superficial out of shared interests, even though I’d call them better friends than any girl I knew). Except, sexual matters tended to get tied up in that in ways both expected and not. I think one of the things the article does particularly well is highlight how messed up the messages both genders get are, and how they’re hurting all of us to a degree that. If you were trying to DESIGN a system to make both sides unsatisfied, you’d be hard-pressed to beat what we already have (even though girls have it worse).
“Privilege,” “patriarchy,” “racism,” and many other terms have somewhat nonstandard meanings in social justice usage. That’s not ideal, as discussions using those terms become a bit inaccessible to people who don’t have practice at picking up on specialized usages. Writers could have made better choices earlier on in the development of the vocabulary; it’s probably a bit late to change now. Still, if you’re an educated person with a background in an area that has specialized vocabulary (tech, law, and so on), it shouldn’t be to hard to catch on to how the words are being used. It just takes a little attention.
Yeah, after recognizing that injustice is personal and that a lack of universality doesn’t de-legitimize, it is an important step to go beyond bemoaning and listing the injustices. But labeling privilege isn’t about putting the blame on the privileged any more than it is about a suffering pissing contest.
The main point of contention seems to be that some people with privilege don’t like to have that fact pointed out because they think that it somehow means they must have had a perfect and painless life. Those people aren’t listening. Telling others to stop talking about it is just trying to silence the issue. The people who are getting their feelings hurt need to stop trying to tell others how they can talk, and need to start listening to what is being said.
I’m not dismissing her discussion of sexism. I completely agree a majority of viewpoints, but the story/framework that she sets up seems very skewed. Which in some way I suppose it should since she is relating her experiences to me (which I find it hard to relate to).
It’s not crap to relate ones experiences, I can appreciate and sympathize with that. But to tell me, or men, how we feel and what we think as a woman is a bit naive.
Who? Where? Maybe I’m perceiving this wrong, but I’m taking it as she is telling me that society expects me, as a man, to demand sex from women. That society and other men will look down on me if I don’t.
Men are shamed for not having sex; women are shamed for having it. Men
are punished and made to feel bad for their desires
My problem is not her addressing these issues, it’s how she arrives at her conclusion. Which more or less boils down to it’s society’s fault that Silicon Valley is fucked up. And she arrives there with no mention of personal responsibility or parenting. Here it is in a nut shell:
-society pressures men to fulfill their sexual needs
-society pressures women to resist theirs
(I’ll agree on some level these are true, but personal responsibility should play a role in this)
-Men seek this fulfillment, women resist, men become bitter and jaded.
-Men pull away from women and either consciously or subconsciously use their position and power to deny and hurt women as vindication for their own pain.
I wasn’t raised to care about society (ie, having some feeling of self worth tied to the supposed validation of a larger group), I was raised to respect people and hope that they can respect me. Her solution seems to be to change society…why not change how we are taught to interact at a young age, how we validate ourselves, and the general concept of self respect - all of which involve parenting and personal responsibility.
Nicely put. I have had literal headbuts and boots on my neck. But I still have more opportunities than many due to my color and sex.
That also works both ways. Only a couple of people knew me well enough to have any idea what went on in my head. But none of that really mattered to how I viewed myself.
So there it is. You can take 200 hundred people and subject them to the same thing and end up with 200 different results. What is the solution then? Mitigate the experience to eliminate any potential bad affects? Or ask why do these event cause certain reactions in others? That’s where I have an issue with this line of reasoning, it always comes back to limiting everything because of what might happen. Instead we could be trying to raise well adjusted individuals and a lot of this shouldn’t happen.
Isn’t this all just semantics? I think it’s strange how much time SJWs take defining their jargon to one another.
Certainly not interested in hearing when you’re the one serving it!
In all seriousness, I would say by forgetting everything else and concentrating on the single goal of putting as many women into public office as humanly possible.
51 female senators would change the very nature of how congress operates. See how long “rape culture” lasts when the local school board isn’t made up of former football players. Hell, you want to see shit turn around in one step? Replace Alito and Scalia with two women.
And the best part is that you don’t have to start from square one of trying to convince people that their old way of doing things is wrong, the way you do when talking about privilege and patriarchy. There are only 4 states that haven’t sent women to congress, so outside of Iowa, people are already used to the idea of some female leadership. Hell- My own state has women in the governor’s chair and all 4 congressional offices. I voted for all but one of them. Another 24 states like NH and we won’t need to be having these conversations.
Fix the power imbalance first and the rest will sort itself out. Leave it in place and it will reinforce itself and leave you in a constant uphill battle.
I don’t think it’s about communicating nicely, so much as convincing effectively. It’s less avoiding hurt feelings and more Machiavellian psyops. Take a look at FOX “News”- Now, there are some people who know how to get people on board and make change.
They may be facist sociopathic assholes, but they know how to use language effectively. They tell people “Yes, you’re absolutely right, and what’s more…” and then lead into whatever they want them to believe. Feminists are essentially telling people “You’re part of the problem and too stupid to know it” and wondering why they don’t want to listen to what comes next.
There are still 4 that haven’t??
Googles : Iowa & Mississippi (4 representatives each), Vermont & Delaware (1 representative each - but they’ve both changed fairly recently so they don’t even have the excuse of a long term incumbent)
Thinking back to living in the UK, I had 8 different MPs across 6 constituencies, 4 were women.
Yeah. 4. It’s Vermont that depresses me- They’re super progressive and right next door. They sent a self-proclaimed socialist to congress- It’s kind of shocking they haven’t managed a female.
Mississippi, on the other hand is… well… to be honest, I’m not sure there’s any regressive right-wing crazy that would actually surprise me if it came from there.
Yeah, I know the Buffy episode you’re talking about and I agree it makes the point really well.
As for not thinking of girls as people; I’m sure if you’d asked me at the time I’ve had said that of course girls were people. I don’t mean that I consciously thought of them as inhuman or less than men in any way - but at the time I had no real female friends and as a result girls seemed very distant and unknowable.
The way things seemed to me at the time was that you had to be popular and confident for girls to want to talk to you (or vice versa, that if girls wanted to talk to you, that meant you were popular), which almost made girls the definition of popularity - so how could a girl (especially an attractive one) be suffering or unpopular or bullied?
With that mindset, even if I’d thought to look up from what was happening to me, I don’t think I’d have noticed the problems the girls in my year were having - because it just wouldn’t have occurred to me to look for them. I’d be willing to bet that a lot of guys had a similar attitude to girls when they were at school, and I think some people have never really grown out of it.
Of course it should. That’s obvious. So obvious that it doesn’t even need to be stated. Where does she actually say that it’s all society’s fault, and that personal responsibility should not play a role in this?
I think you’re overreading the emphasis she places on social pressure. After all, she wouldn’t even bother to appeal via her writing to, you know, individual readers.
Parents aren’t the only “teachers” of individual children. Movies teach them, the Internet, social media, actual teachers, other kids, and on and on – you know, “society.” Those are all HUGE influences on children, and changing them for the better can change children for the better.
No, it’s not.
Why do you think it is? And to the extent that it is, what makes you think that language is unimportant?
I completely disagree, she dealt with him using kid gloves. I rarely see such an equivocated argument from someone with opposing views anymore. If Congress had arguments like this, I’d be really fucking happy.
Surely you’ve heard that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house?
