>
Well, discussions about my second Scott Adams piece over on Feministe (which was basically identical to my post here) have now been completely derailed by a number of commenters who’ve decided I’m “ableist” because I used the word … “idiot.” That word, they have decided, is offensive to the “cognitively impaired.” If you want to wade into the mess, here’s the comment that, while polite in itself, started the long slide down this particular rabbit hole. You can see my responses in blue further down in the comments.
I consider this kind of language policing to the EXTREME! to be bad for feminism (and frankly insulting to people with disabilities), and I’m glad a number of others have stood up against it in the comments there. I don’t think that the language police are in the majority at Feministe, much less in feminism at large. But these debates are so frustrating that many feminists who disagree with the language police end up biting their tongues and/or just walking away. At some point I may post more about this fraught topic here.
In the meantime, I’m am conducting a little poll about cats. Please click the appropriate button in the graphic above. Clicking it won’t actually do anything, but I’m pretty sure what the results are going to be anyway. Go kitties!
—
If you enjoyed this post, would you kindly* use the “Share This” or one of the other buttons below to share it on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or wherever else you want. I appreciate it.
*Yes, that was a Bioshock reference.
>I was the person who mentioned Godwin's Law, and it wasn't directed at you, Ginmar – it was referencing Kave's Holocaust metaphor. By using the term 'Godwin's Law', I was conveying that I thought that bring up the Holocaust REALLY wasn't helping his greater point.
>Kave, I have lost rack of what I said to whom, but I believe I was talking generally about the general idea of anyone being able to claim victimhood. Which is true, anyone can, and endless pissing contests over just who is the biggest victim may not be very constructive. But at the same time I think that we do need to keep in mind that some groups really are victimized more than others, and that some people really do have privilege.
>Kave, actually, I think what happened here is that you mistook the spam-filtered comment from Sally that I pasted into one of my comments above as being from me.
>And Kave's true colors come out. God, how guys do love to whip out the crazy label when their argument sucks and they've been hoist by their own petard.
>Kave pointed out that even his fairly privileged situation wasn't enough to insulate him from grief and sadness, that's all. Love is universal, which means that the suffering which comes when that love is lost is also universal. He's not the enemy. Being rich, white and male doesn't mean that someone is automatically the enemy. It's possible to be all three and be for feminism and for equality. I won't defend Kave's Holocaust metaphor, because I think that was ill-chosen. But it's not enough of a faux pas to roundly condemn him as lacking empathy. Come on, flip through the archives and read his comments. He's not our enemy.
>Trip you have to come out and meet the real world. Standing in line in the grocery store if you turn to your side you will find dozens of tabloids which deal exclusively with knocking down the rich and/or famous. Picking on me , my wife, my family, etc is a national pastime.You have got to be kidding me. For starters, there are multiple facets to this public attention that the famous receive. Sure, the tabloid media can be seen to delight in the misfortunes of the rich to some extent. But what a middle- or lower-class person really sees when s/he looks at the cover of People or a tabloid is that the problems of rich people are way more important than the problems of other people. People who aren't rich and famous don't get headlines plastered across People Magazine when they get cancer.
>But whatever the nature of this public attention, you're trying to tell me that it's as bad as the issues faced by poor people, and that is complete and utter bullshit.In fact, for the sake of contrast, consider what happens when lower-class people do get national attention. It ain't pretty.You're the one who's detached from reality. The disadvantages of being rich are that you get your face on tabloids and you have a lot of shit from the IRS to deal with? You poor thing. I feel so sorry for how hard it is to manage the MASSIVE FUCKING WEALTH you possess. And then, in the finest tradition of conservative pundits, you any calling you out on your privilege denial as class envy. You're ridiculous.
>He's not the enemy. Being rich, white and male doesn't mean that someone is automatically the enemy.Not automatically, no. But it is incredibly difficult for upper-class people to sympathize ingenuously with people of lower classes. We've seen this pattern repeated many times. Kave isn't the first rich liberal who turned out to be blind to much of his own privilege.It's possible to be all three and be for feminism and for equality.Certainly. In the same sense that it's possible for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.Jesus was pretty clear and unambiguous when he said, multiple times, that owning a lot of wealth and being a good person aren't compatible. I'm not Christian but I have to agree with Jesus on that point.
>I'm going to say it's really hard for people who were born wealthy to realize what it's like to be poor or even middle class, and that people who WEREN'T born rich but BECAME rich might forget what it was like. I'm sure there are some fabulously wealthy people who try to be as good as possible. And there are plenty of Dick Assmans of various socioeconomic levels. Also, what if you liquefied the camel and squirted it in very small water jets through the eye of a needle?? What then??? I mean, it wasn't EASY but if all a rich man needs to get into heaven is a blender and some kind of tiny hose …
>If Kave were living in Nazi Germany, he would be complaining about how Aryan Germans had things hard too so the Jews, Roma, communists, etc. shouldn't be complaining so much (okay, so I Godwined, but he went there first).
>Recent studies have shown that as wealth inequality increases, the degree of empathy rich people feel for the less-rich decreases.
>Kave, again, you're missing nuances of the conversation because of your privileged position in society. Guess what? When women talk about problems we encounter specifically because we are women, and how we’d like to change society so that merely being a woman doesn’t mean having ton of extra, unnecessary problems, we’re accused of playing the victim card. When POC talk about experiencing racism, racist discrimination, and racist stereotypes, and how that causes problems for them in their lives, they are accused of playing the victim card. See, if you weren’t wealthy, white, and male, you’d be aware of this trend. I was mocking that silly trend by saying that when you stated that, “Hey I have problems too,” you were “playing the victim card.” Also, when you compared the problems you faced just for being rich to the problems Jews in Germany faced just for being Jews, you really were playing the Victim Card, in the truly negative sense that the haters mean by it when they deploy the phrase against social justice advocates, and in a really despicable way. You should really own up to that.
>(okay, so I Godwined, but he went there first).Yeah, you didn't commit a Godwin when the discussion has already been Godwinned. Can of worms is already open.Recent studies have shown that as wealth inequality increases, the degree of empathy rich people feel for the less-rich decreases.That makes sense. Not sure which way the causation flows, but the correlation does make sense.And as most of us here probably know, income inequality in the US hit its highest point in 95 years in 2007.
>Standing in line in the grocery store if you turn to your side you will find dozens of tabloids which deal exclusively with knocking down the rich and/or famous. Picking on me , my wife, my family, etc is a national pastime.Seriously, I can't get over this. Our ENTIRE SOCIETY is built to the advantage of the wealthy, and you think you're being oppressed by tabloid coverage.I could write an entire book about all the levels on which that statement is incredibly awful.
>The title of this post made me spew coffee out my nose I laughed so hard. Nicely done.
>Captain Bathrobe said… " This issue, like so many, is complicated. There are people who are genuinely offended by what they consider to be ableist language and/or contemptuous of those who use it. There is definitely a value to examining the words we use. It is naive, however, to suggest that the motivations of everyone who calls out other people's language are pure as the driven snow. There are very definitely those in the left/liberal/feminist movement who engage in oneupmanship (sorry, no gender neutral term came to mind) for its own sake. Often, these are people who are fairly privileged themselves and, feeling insecure about it, take it upon themselves to pile on anyone perceived as being more privileged any chance they get as a way of burnishing their street cred. Thus, we get the 200+ post pile-ons we saw on Feministe. "I'd just like to second this. And add that another issue I see is that too often, people take a name and a handful of sentences posted on a blog like Feministe and make extremely broad generalizations about the person behind them. Furthermore, from those generalizations, they decide focus their comments to reflect those generalizations in a personalized manner and use that as an opportunity to brandish a string of insults and accusations. Meanwhile, unless the person offers a narrative about their background in detail, there's no way to know what social status and experience any given commenter has. And even if you get the narrative, there's still the chance that it's all bullshit. And so conversations – including a lot of this one over the past day – go from discussing and debating actual issues to things like "You're a feminazi cunt supporter!" and "You're an evil, privileged dipshit oppressor." And members of audience chime in on whether said commenters are "angry" or "violent," or if they are "justified" in insulting others because of their "status." As far as I'm concerned, it makes any discussion about the careful use of language totally laughable.
>It comes down to He jests at scars that never felt a wound. Yeah, and Nathan, sometimes it is possible to tell what a person's status is. Maybe you're just not paying attention or don't want to see what it is. Kave's a good example. His sufferings, let him show them to you. Just like Nazi Germany. I see he didn't take me up on my kind offer to make things easier for him in the way he claimed he desired. And I'm really curious—where are these death camps for rich white guys in America?
>ginmar – What's the point in pushing a whole discussion in the direction of a guy like kave?I find it amazing how often people will derail discussions about issues of social justice, oppression, sexism, and all the rest in order to "virtually" – i.e. online) tear some guy a new asshole. Taking Kave down a peg does absolutely nothing to address the systemic issues that land us in conversations like this in the first place. In fact, even if the goal is to perhaps educate someone, it's more likely the case that a person with piles of privilege is simply going to walk off and ignore every last word that was said. Except the insults and personal attacks. They'll remember how those righteous fucks online said such and such, and that's about it.
>I was going to write a letter to Feministe to say that they've shot themselves in the foot with their commenting policy. It is truly awful, and moderator Cara reminds me of a Chinese village enforcer during the cultural revolution, policing every word for ideological purity. It does silence voices, and certainly deters me from commenting, or even reading, on their site. I looked up Cara in their "about" section. She does a lot of writing, including the anthology for "Yes Means Yes", which I highly admire. And the first word in the their comment policy is "safe". So, what they're doing is fully supported, and I even understand why they're doing it. I just completely disagree with the final results.And really, the women who agreed with David got called "cheerleaders"? And that wasn't called out for the rampant sexism that it is? Not ok.So, I won't write to them to say they've lost a feminist reader, but I'll say David, keep up the good work. This is a tough blog to run, and tough sometimes to read. But an eyeopener, and highly enjoyable if I'm up for the fight.Also, Diane K., I heart you.
>@ NathanYour concern is noted.
>Gee, Nathan, I notice you're implying that I'm the righteous asshole for taking Kave down a peg, while he devoted paragraphs and paragraphs to whining about how hard he had it as proof that rich people don't have it so great. It's always fascinating to me how men stand up to men and don't like it when the uppity women don't tolerate the bullshit.
>God mother fucking damnit, I had the best comment ever just eaten by the internets.
>Yeah ginmar, didn't you know that the only way to move the cause forward is to be unfailingly nice to anyone who doesn't get it? I mean, being NICE has worked so well for women for the past 2,000 years… wait…
>I'm going to try this again, but the shorter, less thoughtful version. Humor me by imagining that whatever I say was going to be much more brilliant than it is.Personally, the "safe space" ideal is one that doesn't make sense online. Safe spaces are very useful when you need a therapeutic atmosphere and can control the level of discourse and manage conflict directly. Blogs, especially political blogs, where the level of discourse is motivated by us vs. them outrage and snark, are terrible spaces to try to make safe. You just don't have the ability to create that type of atmosphere in an "unwalled garden".On top of that, triggers are very tricky things. It's difficult even with a lot of training to anticipate your own triggers (and I've had a lot of training). Fifteen-plus years of training still don't prevent me from reacting negatively to triggers, and oftentimes these are triggers I wasn't aware of. The world at large — hell, the internet at large — isn't responsible for my peace of mind. I am. It's my responsibility to manage my triggers and my depression as a part of my own mental health management plan. Which is to say that creating this expectation that blogs should serve as therapeutic spaces is wrong-headed and unfair to all involved, including PWD and the owners of said spaces who, unless they are trained therapists, have no business crafting group therapy for the rest of us. Also. In the comments at Feministe, nobody really got into how problematic it is, nor how arguably ableist it is, to try to protect PWD and women from potentially offensive language and/or experiences. I get the reaction to the language and feel like the disagreement should have died and everyone should agree to disagree. I get cranky about certain words and the nastiness implied, but I also recognize that the usage of that language says a lot of useful things about the speaker and his or her philosophies. I'm more interested in the meat of the argument than its presentation, and I am very wary of anyone who thinks that PWD/WWD are unable to handle difficult discourse without first yanking out a row of fainting couches.
>ginmar – You really proved some of my points far too easily. But hey, go ahead. Lump me in with him, and continue to focus on his whining (which I agree was mostly whining. I never defended the dude's arguments, and have zero interest in continuing to talk about them. Sally, I'm not talking about being nice. I'm talking about strategy. Name calling and personal attacks don't tend to get people to stop talking bullshit. In fact, it often just brings out more bullshit. And it's a sure fire way online to take any discussion away from the issues on the table. On another note, I forgot to vote. Cats. Yes. Gotta love 'em.