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The views I am about to express are not very fashionable. They are certainly not politically correct. But I believe what I am about to say must be expressed to protect the institution of marriage.
Too often in the media, currency is given to the theory that everyone should be allowed to marry regardless of gender, outlook and whether the two people are creating a suitable family environment in which to bring up children.
Well, it is time to ask some hard questions about this attitude. The only way we will save marriage is to reclaim the institution for the mainstream. Marriage is for normal people who want to raise children in a healthy and secure environment. This is why we should ban religious fundamentalists from marrying.
Read the rest of There’s a fundamental wrong in letting some people marry. It’s the best done satire I’ve read in a while.
Via Ragnell.
Brian Crecente of Kotaku has tried to take credit for the inception of The IRIS Network. I’m not even joking:
In my caveman like attempts at prodding talented, strong-voiced women into writing more vocally about gaming I have stirred the ire of several feminist gaming writers who recently banded together to launch the IRIS Network a group, which will strive to bring women’s perspectives into the mainstream.
And if you don’t think that’s an obvious enough attempt to steal credit, then please review this exchange in which Crecente uses second-hand information in order to rebut Brinstar for saying that TIN wasn’t a direct response to Crecente’s post.
First, Brinstar says this:
However, Kotaku’s reporting isn’t completely accurate. The creation of the IRIS Network wasn’t in direct response to Crecente’s blogging. From what I understand, it has been in the works for a while now. This just seemed to be the opportune moment for the creator to launch.
To which Crecente responds:
@brinstar: To quote the Guilded Lillies post:
Their resolve to make this happen was fueled in part by a recent post on Kotaku which asked the question - Why aren’t there more female gaming bloggers? - written by editor Brian Crecente.
To which Guilded Lily responds that he was misconstruing what she said. Which, really, isn’t surprising given the amount of lazy journalism on Kotaku. Crecente not only puts GL’s banner up to promote TIN (ignoring the button that is being used elsewhere for that purpose), but then he also quotes someone who wasn’t even one of the founders of the group in order to “prove” that he deserves the credit for the inspiration of the organization. Even after his mistakes were pointed out to him several times he has not taken the time to correct his post.
Mia from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney has something to say about that (thanks, Revena!). As do the awesome bloggers at Feminist Gamers.
If you want to know the real story behind how TIN was launched and conceived, go here.
If you’ve been wondering about my silence for the past couple of weeks, I have a deep, dark secret to confess: Along with Revena I’ve been building and launching The IRIS Network, a new gaming site focused on helping to give women in the community a bigger voice. Two weeks from zero to launch is a pain in the butt, I tell you, and the layouts for everything but the forum are slapped together from default templates. But it’s done, it’s launched, and the next person who bleats about there not being enough women in gaming who are “out” there will get hit over the head with this site repeatedly.
From the site news:
After yet another bout of the “where are all the women gamers?†on the internet gaming communities, The IRIS Network (TIN) was finally born. Though there are many individual women gamers who write about their experiences, and many sites for women who game to connect and play with each other, none of these sites are there for the express purpose of highlighting gamers (both in the industry and outside of it) and bringing women’s perspectives into the mainstream. Though it may be a lofty goal, that’s exactly what we here at The IRIS Network aim to do.
So, if you are a gamer, or just like games, and want to be part of it, go sign up for the forums. If you are a woman gamer who wants more exposure for her blog, go to the directory and check if your site is listed (if so, please flesh it out, if not please list it). If you’re a writer (female or male) and are interested in submitting works for our gaming magazine, please visit Cerise and check out our submission guidelines.
A community is only as good as its members, and so I look forward to forging a strong voice for gender-inclusive game design with you all.
[Happy one two year birthday to the Official Shrub.com Blog! I’m very grateful that Andrea gave me the opportunity to join her site, and I’m glad she’s here doing all the work that she does. Here’s to many more years.]
As I mentioned in my previous post, I recently took a class on racism and white privilege. My professor was unflinching in his recognition that some things about anti-oppression work are “impossible.” And while this sounds like a pessimistic view of things, I think it was very important that he acknowledged this concept and repeatedly brought it to our attention.
I chose to write about this subject for the one two-year anniversary of the Official Shrub.com Blog because of that importance, despite the fact that it also sounds pretty dreary. I mean, it is a bit disheartening to commemorate the birth of an anti-oppression blog by talking about everything it can’t do.
But recognizing difficulties can always do two different things: it can bring you down, and it can also help you clarify your path to better accomplish your goals. As you can guess, I hope to do the latter.
Read the rest…
My partner recently alerted me to a recent study which examines attribution theory; the effect of what we see as the cause of our successes or failures. As Moore indicates in his summary, the short version is that if we see our success or failure as the result of innate attributes, we’re less likely to improve.
My immediate response to this was to apply it to part of how privilege works, and the tendency of people to get defensive when their behaviour is pointed out at sexist/racist/etc. I think many of us have faced the “But I’m not a sexist/racist/etc.” response, and the often difficult task of clarifying to someone that telling them that something they did was sexist/racist/etc. is not calling them a KKK member. I’ve seen some interesting discussions as to whether the separation of calling someone’s behaviour sexist/racist/etc. and calling them sexist/racist/etc. is a useful one. This research suggests to me that it may well be, from a practical perspective.
What I suspect, drawing from Dweck’s findings, is that someone who considers sexism/racism/etc to be an innate attribute is less likely to believe anti-oppression work is either necessary or useful. As made clearer in Guy Kawasaki’s discussion, such a person would be considered by the research as possessing a ‘fixed’ mindset; wherein they believe they are ’set’ as either good or bad, in this case, not sexist or sexist. Assuming ‘not sexist = good’ for the moment, since this is likely the majority case, what the research suggests is that someone who believes they are ’set’ as ‘not sexist’ will not believe they have to work at being non-sexist, whilst someone who believes that they are ’set’ as ’sexist’ will believe that any work they do towards being non-sexist won’t make much difference.
Perhaps the key indicator of the applicability of Dweck’s model comes from some of her own efforts to apply the model in areas other than her original area of schooling ability:
Many kids believe they’re invariably good or bad; other kids think they can get better at being good. Dweck has already found that preschoolers with this growth mind-set feel okay about themselves after they’ve messed up and are less judgmental of others; they’re also more likely than kids with a fixed view of goodness to try to set things right and to learn from their mistakes. They understand that spilling juice or throwing toys, for example, doesn’t damn a kid as bad, so long as the child cleans up and resolves to do better next time.
Dweck believes in the importance of encouraging the growth mindset. I tend to agree. I don’t always engage with people at this level. Sometimes I just really don’t need to be dealing with people who are going to be defensive in this way. Plus, that experience can be pretty harrowing if you take it on for too long without giving yourself some room to just not have to do that for a while. However, when I do engage at this level, I can already recall those who would fit quite clearly into these two mindsets. I can also recall that those who fit in the growth mindset were much more able to get past defensive behaviour and take a look at their privilege.
I suspect a copy of Dweck’s book, Mindset will eventually make its way onto my bookshelf.
Well, it’s official, Kotaku blogger Crecente has done his homework and decided that women just don’t blog about video games! This, of course, on the wake of Kotaku link blogging Guilded Lily’s post on covers she wants to see without giving any sort of nod to the meme that inspired it, or the other female video game bloggers who participated. Guilded Lily was not one of the women video game bloggers mentioned, by the way.
Of course, when Kotaku regularly inserts sexist turns of phrase into their posts, especially in ones that have little or nothing to do with gender, I am not exactly at a loss for an explanation as to why they would overlook resources like Women Gamers (the first hit when you google “women gamers”, just so you know) or Killer Betties. But, I mean, it’s us “gamer chicks” who have the “treat me better because I am a girl gamer attitude” according to one Kotaku commenter.
Let me put it another way. When bloggers like Faith, who put up with a lot of sexist shit being flung at them every time they post, say you’ve gone too far, your chances for getting a woman to blog for you, even if you find them with your severely lacking internet searching skills, is probably pretty low.
You want diversity at Kotaku? You want to add a woman to your staff? Then take down your damn “White Boys Only” sign and, at the very least, stop shoving your contempt for women down our throats in any post that even remotely can relate to women.
We are not your “whores”.
We are not your “bitches”.
And we are not going to sit down and kiss your feet for your half-assed attempts at including us.
Today’s PiA post comes from the Girl Wonder forums. It is, in part, a reaction to my privilege list, which the poster in question was linked to among other posts.
I have lived my life bullied and dismissed and marginalized and aloof; if there’s a “white male heterosexual privilege”, no one ever told me how to cash it in.
Gerard’s statement clearly illustrates that privilege isn’t a binary thing. A person does not either have privilege or not, but rather that we all simultaneously benefit from privilege and are the victims of it because of our various circumstances. Gerard here benefits from privileges such as being white, male, and heterosexual (you can add to that ones like being cisgendered and able-bodied), but one of the ways in which he is non-privileged is class. He is neither rich nor middle-class, but rather makes it known that he has never been able to get above the poverty line.
He clearly has seen the discrimination he has faced because of power imbalances such as the one in his class status. In this way I think he’s like most of us: it’s much easier to see the imbalance when we’re the ones getting the short end of the stick. I think it seems so obvious because we’re the ones who are hurt, we’re the ones who are having to overcome hurdles others don’t, and we’re the ones who see others dismiss us without a thought.
And, you know what? That’s exactly what his post did to me. I mean, he may have done it on the Girl Wonder forums and not on this blog, but he basically dismissed the real experiences of myself and many, many others like me (not just women, but all varieties of anti-oppression workers) by calling concepts that I tried very hard to carefully and non-offensively explain “delusional”. I have another comment waiting in moderation that won’t be published because it breaks the golden rule of politeness, not to mention condescension. So, yeah, it really frigging hurts to be dismissed when all it would take is an extra two minutes of thought on how your criticism is worded to change your argument from being a high-class flame to being a critical one that may open up discussion and broaden the knowledge of both parties. You’d better believe that I remember almost all of these instances — everything from, “this chick needs some dick” to long rebuttals which engage with certain points while using turns of phrase that diminish me as an equal member in the discussion — because, well, being dismissed really hurts.
But instances where I benefit from privilege are much harder for me to remember, mostly because I count these things as normal. I am not excluded, therefore I am not hurt or unsatisfied. I will never, say, have a problem going to a public restroom if they are gender segregated. “But,” you may be thinking, “that’s not benefiting from privilege, that’s just using common sense. I mean, you wouldn’t want to share a bathroom with a man, right?” Therein lies the rub: it’s common sense to you and me because we’re cisgendered — meaning our gender identity (our belief that we are male or female) is the same as our expressed sex. What about a transwoman who looks too feminine to go into the man’s washroom without fear of having violence done to her, but looks too masculine to go into the women’s washroom without fear of having security called on her? Such incidents happen, but cisgendered people like you or I take it for granted that we’ll never be barred access or otherwise given trouble for using the bathroom of the gender we identify with.
And that’s just one example of how I, personally, benefit from something in society being made to fit my situation that is exclusive and hurtful to another kind of person. Going back to the original example of Patrick Gerard’s post, Gerard hasn’t ever “cash[ed] in” on privilege because that’s not how privilege works. Cashing in implies that the benefits are waiting there for the right people to take them, but the reality is that privilege is being the beneficiary of unseen benefits that are obscured because they are portrayed as common sense and/or just the way things are done.
How to Get Your Girlfriend to Play Video Games is one of the better lists out there. I am still not, and will never be, a fan of these lists, but if I had to put together a list of GF lists that I don’t think encourage misogyny, this would be on it.
The list author takes a lighthearted tone, reminds the reader that the woman in question may already have experience in games, and focuses on tailoring the experience towards the individual woman’s personal tastes and treating her as a partner rather than something you need to shut up between sexual exploits.
I am still unhappy with the frame of “girlfriend” — not all gamers looking to avail themselves on this kind of advice are heterosexual men; what about the guys with boyfriends, the girls with boyfriends, and the girls with girlfriends? Nothing on this list is inherently gender or sexual orientation specific. A little neutral language could go a long way in making it widely accessible to all. That, and if you want to emphasize certain messages for certain audiences, you can start the article off as neutral and mix up the terms of address to be explicitly inclusive of all gamers who want to share their hobby with their non-gaming SO’s.
There is also one part of it that made me cringe. The “shoe-shopping” reference. Up until then the article had been completely without reliance on stereotypes — indeed it would often start with the stereotypical advice and then turn it on its head in order to remind the reader that his girlfriend was a human being not a caricature of feminine ideals.
And then we get to the wonderful point of, “if you want to introduce your partner into a hobby, be prepared to reciprocate the experience”. Women have a wide variety of hobbies — even if we limit ourselves to the stereotypically feminine, there is sewing/knitting, doing something creative (ceramics, drawing, painting, writing, etc), reading and discussing novels, etc — so why, oh why, does it always come down to, “omg women r teh shop-a-holics!!!11eleven”? Seriously. Women != shopping.
Furthermore, liking shopping doesn’t equal seeing it as a hobby, or that every list directed at guys about women needs to point out how much we women love shopping. Presenting shopping as a hobby, rather than something women need to do and therefore find ways to enjoy, isn’t just unrealistic (yes, these women do exist, but I would dare say they aren’t representative of the majority of women and therefore shouldn’t be used to represent women as a whole in every damn list), it’s downright insulting when that’s always the stereotype these guys are being spoon fed.
Okay, I have spent the majority of this short post expounding on the issues I have with the list. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s one of the better ones: I obviously do. Two bad points out of the entire list ain’t bad. But “ain’t bad” doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be better, and it’s up to us as readers to exercise our critical thinking skills on everything we read, especially the ones that we’re inclined to give a pass to because they are overall good.
Today, for the last meeting of my class on racism and white privilege, we had a panel of guest speakers who do anti-racist work from within the university. One was a white man, one a white woman, and one an African American man, so the issue was raised about allies. Allies, in the context of anti-oppression work, are members of a privileged group who work against that privilege: white people in anti-racism, men in feminism, etc.
Allies have a very different place in anti-oppression work than members of the non-privileged group. They don’t have the firsthand experience of oppression, and so their knowledge of it is incomplete. They constantly risk perpetuating the oppression themselves - which, of course, all of us do, privileged or not - but with the added risk that, when they slip up, they hurt others rather than hurting themselves. However, allies are also powerful and helpful because of their very privilege, because they can use the social power that they have been arbitrarily and unfairly granted in order to work against the power structure.
Being an ally (and staying one) is also difficult and complicated. The panelists’ discussions on what it means to be allies and to have allies (each of them was in a position to address both questions, due to their respective places in various social hierarchies) brought up several helpful points, which can help us as we think about creating and maintaining alliances in our work.
Read the rest…
While I agree with him that it’s not fair that women are expected to remove all of that hair while men are not expected to. Whatever way you look at it, is unnecessary and well just not fair. Why is it gross on a woman but not a man? While I understand this inequality, I am so socially conditioned that I can’t break through with leaving hair because I hate the idea of someone thinking of me as ‘gross’ and well I have heard those terms too often in response to female underarm or leg hair. Don’t get me wrong when I see other women with underarm hair or whatever I am not grossed out instead I want to say ‘good on you’. I just can’t seem to do it myself.
I’ve been on-again/off-again with things like shaving and bra-wearing. For the shaving, I faced intense pressure from some members of my family, mainly my father (who, of course, does not shave anything but his beard), and was called “gross” the few times I went out with hairy legs until I actually had it out with him and told him that he was not allowed to say that shit to me. He still does sometimes make niggling remarks, though the more I point out that those kinds of remarks are exactly why he and I aren’t close, the more he at least seems to try to stop.
I haven’t shaved for almost a year now. The last time was in summer because I got annoyed at my hair. Although I actually stopped shaving my pits completely in the summer because I kept getting painful ingrown hairs. I do trim them occasionally, because I don’t like the way it feels if it’s really long and I’m sweaty.
For anyone who wants to try to stop shaving, I would suggest starting off slow. For about two years I would shave in summer (where people could see my hair from my short sleeves and occasional skirts) but leave it long in winter, where the only one who was looking at it was my boyfriend at the time. And, well, I knew he didn’t care and furthermore if he did, I wouldn’t have been with him.
The hardest thing for me was taking the step from secretly growing my hair to publicly doing so. Like kristy, I was terrified of being seen and called “gross” — after all, hadn’t I heard that same rhetoric from my father? Hadn’t I heard my friends and family say the same things about other women who didn’t conform properly to the beauty standard? Hadn’t I, myself, once both said and believed the same things?
I was terrified. I was defensive about it. But I did it. I made my point. Right there in Miami, one of the most image-conscious cities in the USA, I put on my short skirt — in the full heat of summer, I was not going to stick to jeans, let me tell you! — leaving my legs in all their hairy glory for all to see, and marched right out of my house.
I had to go to the supermarket. I was with my best friend at the time and, believe me, I was paranoid. “Everybody’s staring at me! They’re judging me! I know what they’re saying, ‘Gawd, look at her. Doesn’t she care enough about herself to try and look good?’ I just want to die!”
But, then, because my feminism had given me the vocabulary to deal with and understand my situation, I told that part of me, “Why is it that going out as your natural self makes you want to die of embarrassment? Why is it that being proud of what you look like by nature must mean that you aren’t taking proper care of yourself? Men are allowed to grow any part of their hair that they please without these comments. That’s holding women to an unfair beauty standard. That’s inequality in action, and it’s your duty to fight it. This is why you’re a feminist. Because women aren’t allowed to feel comfortable with ourselves just the way we are.”
And so the next day, without shaving, I put on another short skirt. And the next day. And the next. I had to have it out with my father a couple of times. I was defensive to my friends and family if they asked about it. But I did it. Every day it got a little bit easier, I got a little bit less defensive, and my family started to accept it as just another quirk from the one in the family who has always marched to her own drummer.
Is there any day where I slap on my skirt in my hairy-legged glory that I don’t feel any anxiety, or any shame? No. I will most likely live and die with those feelings, thanks to the way we are socialized from young girls to feel that our natural bodies aren’t good enough. But I can’t let shame or fear run my life. I won’t let it.
So, World? My name is Andrea. I do not shave or wear makeup on a regular basis. And, you know what? I am a strong, beautiful woman who is perfect just the way she is.
For International Women’s Day, kristy has put up a wonderful and thought-provoking post. So thought-provoking, in fact, that my comment turned into a post which turned into a series. This is the introduction of that series.
First off, let’s look at what kristy said:
Mr T and I got into a kind of unusual argument the other day. He was arguing that he doesn’t understand why I bother with traditional hair removal (I shave my underarms, legs, and pluck my eyebrows). While I agree with him that it’s not fair that women are expected to remove all of that hair while men are not expected to. Whatever way you look at it, is unnecessary and well just not fair. Why is it gross on a woman but not a man? While I understand this inequality, I am so socially conditioned that I can’t break through with leaving hair because I hate the idea of someone thinking of me as ‘gross’ and well I have heard those terms too often in response to female underarm or leg hair. Don’t get me wrong when I see other women with underarm hair or whatever I am not grossed out instead I want to say ‘good on you’. I just can’t seem to do it myself. Mr T said ‘if he was a female he simply wouldn’t remove the hair’ to which I was quite annoyed with because it is simply unfair for him to make that remark as a man. […] It’s very easy to sit there from another side and argue ‘if….’ but let’s face it you really don’t know what it’s like til you have experienced it and dominant culture is quite powerful.
This resonated with me first and foremost on a personal level, because I have faced the same struggles that kristy is describing. It also resonated on another level because of some of the most persistent and annoying criticism my Equality List about how it’s all “frivolous” and “petty shit” (of course, one of the best responses was a woman named Janis who boiled that language down to what it really means: “You can vote. What more do you want? Now show me your tits!”). And then, of course, there’s Mr T’s reaction, which is (as kristy points out in her post) the standard one for people with privilege. I intend to discuss all of those, though I’m not sure if the last one will be a Privilege in Action post, part of this series, or if I’ll try for both.
Anyway, this will, I think, be one of my shorter series but I think it will be a powerful one, too. The more we women band together and discuss the issues, both similar and different, that we’ve experienced in our lives, the more we can understand that we’re not alone and share strategies to improve our lives and possibly pave the way for the girls and women who come after us.
Over at his newly created blog, Crimitism, Richie writes an Analysis of MySpace responses that he received on his own blog. It’s the same subject of opinions that I discussed in my last post, but in a different context.
Here’s an excerpt:
See, here’s the thing about equality: If you’re in the dominant position, you have to be willing to give things up, and a depressingly large number of people who pay lip service to it immediately begin backpeddling when they realise this. This guy was willing to accept everything I said, until I suggested that men are not doing enough to combat rape, at which point I’m being completely unreasonable and man-hating. Because… Well, because I suggested he stop being complacent and actually do something, basically. He repeatedly called for “the genders to meet each other half way” on the issue of rape, yet failed to realise that women lack the power to meet men half way on anything, and the only way this could possibly work is if men made a point of giving up power over women. Ah! But placing the burden on the the shoulders of men, well, that’s just sexist. Did you know that most rape allegations aren’t even proven, and it just drags men through the courts and is responsible for damaging the careers of promising young footballers? Misandry! It’s everywhere
Definitely worth a read, especially since it illustrates how the principles of privilege I talk about this series come up in a variety of different contexts.
If I tell myself, “this will be a short PiA post” will that make it true? Anyway, this post is halfway between real life and internet, as it happened to me while I was playing Final Fantasy XI last night. I don’t have the chatlog, though if I hadn’t been tired and cranky I probably would have screencapped it. Definitely should have. Oh well, live and learn.
Now, before I got back into this game I specifically looked for a queer-friendly linkshell because I wanted to be as far removed from the casual bigotry of “that’s so gay!” and “get into the kitchen and synth me some pie!” comments. Everything was going really well until one of our members shared a story about how, on her show, Tyra had on some parents who are allowing their child to live as the male he clearly feels himself to be. The woman who shared it thought that it was heartwarming, as did I.
One member, however, didn’t agree and called it “creepy”. But the more he was called on his opinion, the worse it got. First he used the “tomboy” excuse. I and another member told him that it was sexist and, furthermore, that gender identity and gender roles were two separate things. Then he pulled out the question, “Was the kid ugly?” and continued to protest that, because kids were cruel, that it was a completely relevant and appropriate question. At which point I basically told him that a queer-friendly linkshell was not the appropriate forum to express his uninformed opinions about subjects he admittedly has no knowledge about.
He continued by asserting that the transgendered child in question probably was emotionally damaged rather than trans. Another person told him that being transgendered did not make one emotionally damaged, and I tried to counter yet another assertion that there was “nothing wrong” with saying that the whole thing was creepy by asking him to consider how any transpeople on the LJ chat channel might feel hearing that he found them to be “creepy”. At which point one of the pearlsack holders shut us down with an “agree to disagree” line (which pisses me off because, as a moderator, he is one of the people responsible for maintaining the space, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish).
The player in question felt that he was perfectly entitled to air his opinions — nevermind that they weren’t grounded in reality, that they were offensive to those on the linkshell who are against transphobia, and hurtful to any trans-members even if they weren’t on the shell at that time — without regard to whether or not they were appropriate for the space he was in. Even though that space is specifically there so that we can have someplace in which to escape from the bigotry in the greater game community. Privilege is not having to understand why opinions you share should have a factual basis, and furthermore that the opinions you choose to share should be appropriate to the space you’re in.
This player was allowed to get away with disrespecting the fundamental rules of our chat space. His belief that his opinion is valid no matter where and when he shares it overshadowed any questions of appropriateness, and he felt no need to consider how his words made others feel. In the end, because of the mod’s words, even after I tried to get him to make the connection, he probably walked away from the encounter feeling that he was perfectly right in what he had said — after all, by saying that we should “agree to disagree” the moderator in question validated the player’s actions by framing them as having equal weight to what I, and the others protesting his actions, were saying.
Now that I’ve started this series, I seem to be drowning in examples. Every time I go to finish a post I’ve started, I come across something new that I want to post for Privilege in Action. In addition to this one, I have two more that I want to write.. not to mention the non-related posts I need to finish. Anyway, this PiA post came to my attention via ilyka, who posted a critique of a critique of the newest Dove commercial.
Reading her post, and especially the parts she highlighted from the original article by Slate’s Seth Stevenson, I was struck by the fact that, while trying to call out the Dove ads for not being feminist enough, he used language that belittled and objectified women.
A quick scan of his article turns up these terms and phrases: “[a] woman cavorts in her shower”, “plus-sized hottie”, “average-looking woman”, “I’m told that even bargain-basement porn features flashier production values and more compelling actresses”, “simpering coed”, “extremely angry ladies”, “women have strong emotional attachments”, “nonemaciated women”, “righteous sisterhood”, “in which nearly every woman shown is a skinny, fashion-model-gorgeous nymphomaniac”, “the Dove girls”, “skinnier, hotter women”, “woman’s charming smile”, “lovely Sara Ramirez”, “nude older babes”, “[w]omen of a certain age will aspire to look like the fit, attractive senior citizens featured in the ad”.
One or two of the ones I pulled were the right words to use for the context, but are still part of a disturbing pattern when the article is looked at as a whole. Behind the jump I examine some of the language in context and talk about how privilege allows us not to see how the language we use in defending non-privileged groups reinforces exactly what we’re arguing against.
Read the rest…
Usually I stick to online examples of Privilege in Action because I can link and quote and let the people who read it see the full context firsthand. But today I’d like to make a short PiA post that is from my very own life. You see, for the past year I’ve been attending a language school in Japan and working my butt off to learn Japanese (not there yet, but getting better). For a non-safe space I would say that my school is pretty good — the teachers are what I’d consider liberal and, perhaps partly due to the diverse student body, are pretty cool about things.
But over the terms at least once, usually more, I see practice sentences that make me upset. Everything from questions like, “What would you do if you found out your girlfriend was really a man?” to an example conversation where one of the male students in our class was propositioned by a bartender in a gay bar, and, most recently, an example conversation in which a boyfriend commanding his girlfriend to become thinner was supposed to be explained away in a positive way using the grammar we just learned.
I like my teachers, and I have to say that I probably know more than half of them in my program and have been taught by at least one third of them. As with all the others who get highlighted in these posts, I think that they are not trying to be bigoted and, indeed, when these matters are pointed out to them they are overall apologetic. But, even if they apologize for a particular example, it happens again with another non-privileged group of which they typically aren’t a part of. Or another teacher does the same thing and the cycle starts over.
Privilege is not needing to consider how non-privileged groups feel about the way you paint them.
My teachers don’t create these hurtful things because they want to keep non-privileged groups down. They don’t create them with any intent to do harm or to upset the students. They create them because they assume that everyone else is like them and thinks like them and because their group has created the dominant (and therefore default) discourse which says that it’s perfectly okay and normal to say those kinds of things.
No, I didn’t delete it! But in preparation for an upcoming overhaul (I want to see if I can’t make it more newbie friendly, right now it’s only useful mostly for intermediate and advanced users), I’ve updated the name to reflect the actual content: “Check my what?” On privilege and what we can do about it.
Maybe now people will stop complaining about how it’s aimed at men… Of course it’s my own darn fault for going into it trying to write one post, coming out with a completely different one, and not bothering to think of a new name.
Don’t forget to update your bookmarks!
In the past week, I have been alerted to two very different posts in two very different spheres of the online world. The similarity? They both deal with a privileged group taking an argument made by a non-privileged group and making it look irrational in order to make their own indefensible argument look rational. While this tactic is by no means limited only to privileged groups, it is one that I do see often employed by privileged groups in order to stop discussion on a bigoted remark that they have made.
Although I prefer to keep these posts short and punchy, this one got a little long, so I’m putting it behind a cut. Below I deconstruct the two examples I spoke of and then explain in my conclusion why I believe that this tactic is, in fact, privilege in action.
Read the rest…
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