[Content Note: Misogyny.]
Dear Men:
Stop telling me how I should feel or what I should be doing about Trump.
Now, just to be clear, right up front: What I'm not talking about is respectful, good-faith discussions among colleagues and peers about big-picture strategy or even minutiae like the efficacy of calling a Senator's office versus emailing.
What I am talking about is the steady drumbeat, day after grim day, of men telling women that our feelings or priorities are wrong.
Men who insert and assert themselves to tell us that our responses to Trump aren't the "right" responses, or that we shouldn't be writing about, or protesting, or tweeting this but instead should be dedicating our time and energy to that.
I don't want to hear your opinions of how I should be feeling, or how I should be spending my time resisting, or on what you think I should be focused. I don't want to hear your condescending lectures about how I should be feeling or interacting with Trump supporters. I don't want a single syllable of your unsolicited advice.
It doesn't matter if you're Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times or some rando on Twitter. Keep that shit to yourself.
If you want to use "I" language to talk about how you feel or what you are doing in this moment of rising fascism or what you believe is the best approach or primary area of focus, have at it. Set an example, in your own space, if believe your strategy is better. But don't get up in my grill to audit me.
I didn't ask you, and I don't care.
I am not new. More than 20 years ago, I dived into activism by protesting my university using student funds to bring Ralph Reed to campus as a speaker. (We won, by the way.) There are 13 years of public archives of my written work. I'm a 42-year-old fat feminist woman whose body has been politicized her entire life.
And yet you talk to me like I'm a ninnybrained noob who's never thought about this stuff before.
Trust this: I have.
Now I would like you to think about this: Telling women what to do is one of the most pernicious and inescapable aspects of institutional misogyny. It doesn't matter how independent, how smart, how tough, how educated, how successful, how financially independent, how close to bearing the highly subjective cultural markers of "respect-deserving" a woman is. It doesn't matter how determined we are to persist. It doesn't matter if we have reached a certain age, or journeyed well beyond.
There are still men, not deterred by an urge for decency nor by their own intellectual mediocrity, who think they have the right to tell us how we should feel and how we should behave.
It is, though they would surely bitterly resist acknowledging it, evidence of their intractable belief that they own us. And that they are further obliged, by virtue of said ownership, to instruct us; to insert themselves uninvited into the lives and spaces of women they don't even know, in order to tell us what we should be feeling and thinking and doing.
You don't own women.
And if you're a man who reflexively agrees with that—maybe even feels his hackles slightly raising that I would even presume to say it, the mere statement itself an offense with its implication there are men who don't agree—yet you're also a man who feels it's his right to tell a woman she is not complying with his ideas about the way she feels and spends her time, then you need to have a long think about what it is that you think confers that right upon you.
Because guess what? It's a feeling of entitlement, which is rooted in cultural narratives of ownership.
And that thing you insist is "disagreement" is actually auditing. You are positioning yourself as an auditor when you cannot abide silently a woman doing something in a way you would not do it, but instead must interlope to try to "correct" her.
Even before you try listening, to see if maybe it's not that you disagree but that you don't understand.
You are, of course, welcome to disagree with my priorities all the fuck you want. But you are not welcome to tell me about it and expect me to give a shit.
And if, for whatever contemptible reasons, you cannot keep your auditing to yourselves, and you come into my space or orbit with a patronizing lecture or admonishments to follow your roadmap rather than my own, then don't be surprised when I push back.
You can tell me, in response to my defending my own boundaries and right not to be audited by every dude who happens across my timeline or blog, that I'm a fucking cunt, and that I'm the reason that we can't have unity, but understand this: It is you who are the barrier to unity. You and your shitty entitlement and your asserted "right" to audit women.
I never want to hear again some dude who's come at me with what I should be feeling or how I should be responding to Trump, positioning his opinion as the objective truth, and then respond to my lack of gratitude by scolding me for not appreciating that he's "on my side."
If you are lecturing me instead of listening to me, you're not on my side.
And if you cannot contain yourselves from pestering me about how I should be spending my time out of a sense of basic decency, then do it to avoid looking unfathomably stupid. Because no matter how I'm spending my time, I can guarantee it's more productive than spending it telling other people how they should feel.
Sincerely,
Liss
I Write Letters
Donald Trump and the Validity Prism
[Content Note: Privilege.]
I just finished watching the latest of the rambling monologues that Donald Trump calls speeches. (Hey, somebody has to do it.) He was off-Teleprompter, so it was the usual impenetrable amalgam of insults, garbage words, and waving his arms around like he's a windmill fashioned from gummi worms.
There was nothing new to report, really—unless you believe that his saying one thing ("I'm all for free trade!") and then immediately saying the diametrical opposite ("Our trade policies are killing us!") is newsworthy. Which I guess it might be if you haven't been paying attention at all for the last year.
As I was listening to the same word salad as usual, I noted once again how often he spins yarns about the many, many people who have told him many, many different things about how tremendous his campaign is; how impressive his crowds are; how he's the most popular, the best, the greatest, the smartest, the only one who is saying this thing and the only one who has the intelligence or strength or bravery to do that thing.
It is well-observed that his superlative-laden tales are evidence of a man who is, in truth, deeply insecure. Not widely noted, however, is that fact that his being allowed to get away with this self-serving and unsubstantiable arglebargle in his every turn at the podium is a function of his male privilege.
He is held to a completely different standard from that to which women are held. I don't just mean Hillary Clinton; I mean all women.
Reports of our lived experiences are treated as something on which any man can be an arbiter; upon hearing the details of our lives, men are invited by their privilege to scrutinize those details through the prism of their own experiences. If it fails to perfectly align with their perception of the world, then we are denied our claim.
Trump, on the other hand, gets to say whatever he wants—about the world, and the news, and the media who produce the news—and, as long as he couches it in "people have told me" or "many people say," he gets away with it. Even with the entire world watching.
And, at this point, we're so inured to his vainglorious braggadocio framed as the observations of unidentified strangers, no one even bothers to call it out. He isn't called a liar, or a serial exaggerator, or a candidate with a dubious relationship to the truth. Not regarding his recitations of compliments, anyway. Sure, he's called a braggart, but he's not called dishonest.
No one ever makes a serious attempt to hold him accountable for these fairy tales. No one ever asks: "Who said that, exactly? Can you give us one name of the many, many people who told you that thing?"
The self-aggrandizing anecdotes with which he peppers his speeches are manifestly absurd on their face, and most of them are completely unverifiable. The standard of evidence is nil.
If, however, I tweet something about my own lived experiences as a woman, it is immediately subjected to rigorous evaluation by people whose identities give them no possible insight into my personal experiences of the world. I am denied the right to be an authority on my own life. I am asked to provide evidence of my own perception. I am asked for scientific studies that verify my claims.
This dynamic is so routine that when I coined a term for it—validity prism—most women (and other marginalized people) who saw it reflexively understood precisely what I meant. After all, we've all spent our lives being audited by people whose privilege we don't share, who find our perceptions of the world wanting.
But Trump. Well. Trump gets to say whatever he pleases about his perception of the world—and his place in it—without his integrity being questioned. If he proclaims that many people have told him that he's the most popular Republican presidential candidate ever, there is no clamoring demand for proof of these "many people."
To the contrary, if someone happens to have the temerity to suggest that maybe he's just making up a bunch of self-flattering crap and attributing it to other people, the reflexive pushback is: Well, someone probably told him that.
His outrageous claims are never in question. He is always given the benefit of the doubt.
This is invisible gender bias. He benefits from this good will, despite having done absolutely nothing to deserve it, in a way that no woman—including and perhaps especially Hillary Clinton—ever would.
It's dismissed as "Trump just being Trump," but it's more than that. It's Trump being the beneficiary of a privilege that is denied to half the population, who is instead asked to provide scientific evidence to justify our own observations about our own lives.
Deep Breaths. Deep Breaths.
[Content Note: Misogyny.]
Last night, Bernie Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver accused Senator Barbara Boxer of lying about having felt threatened at the Nevada Caucus when a bunch of angry Sanders supporters were screaming at her.
Yes. Really.
I had some thoughts about that. Ahem.
Stop. Just Stop.
[Content Note: Racism; privilege; entitlement; auditing.]
If you need a good primer on what's been happening at the University of Missouri (Mizzou) and why, this piece by Nicole Garner is pretty good. It is not comprehensive, because the scope and duration of events leading up to this moment is vast, but it provides a more than decent snapshot.
And if you haven't yet read the piece by Terrell Jermaine Starr I linked yesterday, that's important background, too.
Important background before you read this garbage by New York Times Self-Appointed White Male Liberal Auditor of Women of All Colors and Men of Color, Nicholas Kristof.
Kristof is, naturally, Very Concerned about free speech and liberal intolerance, because of course he is. "Moral voices," he says, "can also become sanctimonious bullies." And the actions born of defending inclusion and safety of marginalized people, he warns, "is sensitivity but also intolerance, and it is disproportionately an instinct on the left."
He details (and misrepresents) student action at Mizzou and Yale, arguing that the photographer, Tim Tai, who was disallowed into the safe space created by black Mizzou students, "represented the other noble force in these upheavals—free expression." As though insisting on accessing a space created by people who do not consent to your documenting their lives is the same as "free expression." As though one is entitled to access, and to draw a boundary is limiting expression. Bullshit.
For the record, no one is stopping me from writing these words, even if black students at Mizzou might quite reasonably have told me, had I inquired, that I was not allowed to insert myself into a safe space they created for themselves. I have free expression. What I don't have is the right to own the space, time, lives, experiences of other people.
Kristof filters all of this through his Validity Prism and declares: "I suggest we all take a deep breath."
Oh okay. I will take you up on that suggestion, sir. I will take a deep breath to fill my lungs with all the air I will need to shout the following: To argue that "both sides" of every issue are owed equal respect and tolerance of their positions is abject trash.
It flattens the power imbalance between racists and people of color, misogynists and women, anti-choicers and pro-choicers, MRAs and feminists, homophobes and transphobes and the LGBTQIA community, disablists and people with disabilities, anti-immigrationists and immigrants/refugees, etc., and further renders those power imbalances invisible when one makes the contemptible argument that "both sides" need to be heard to protect free expression, and that people who are defending themselves against grave harm are the real intolerant ones.
In a decent country, in which marginalized people's safety was prioritized over privileged people's "free speech," and in which incitement weren't a concern generally until after someone is already fucking dead, no one would be making this despicably hostile and implicitly privilege-upholding argument.
But in this country, with our reflexive reverence for a policy of "free expression," as if speech exists in a void, we're more worried about the supposed "intolerance" expressed by marginalized people who draw boundaries in defense of their own safety, because a minor restriction on a privileged person's unfettered right to engage in hate speech, or assert their "right" to access to marginalized people's spaces and lives, is considered a more burdensome encroachment on freedom than the right of people at whom hate speech is directed to live a life free of rhetorical terror.
And actual terror, given the preponderance of evidence across cultures that violent hate speech in the public square begets actual violence within the square.
Anyone who understands my oft-cited turns of phrase "This Shit Doesn't Happen in a Void" and "My Rights End Where Yours Begin" ought to be able to understand why protecting speech that attacks marginalized people is in practice a wildly irresponsible policy, particularly in a culture with deep institutional biases that confer more weight upon privileged voices and the messages they carry.
The US's "absolutist" free speech laws are routinely defended on the basis that if some speech is limited, it's a slippery slope until your speech is limited—but that's demonstrably manifest horseshit. There are other countries which don't have absolutist free speech laws—they have mature free speech policies in which mature people acknowledge the fundamental difference between "unpopular speech with a purpose" and "wanton hate speech with no purpose except hate," even if that hate speech is dressed up in a tuxedo to masquerade as Thoughtful Dissenting Dialogue. And there's no slippery slope, because the difference is easily discernible.
The irony, of course, is that the US already doesn't have absolutist free speech laws, anyway—which is why we're not allowed to yell "Fire!" in the proverbial crowded movie theater. (Or at a crowded book-burning, ahem.) The damnable lie that makes restrictions on hate speech so difficult to find support for even among US progressives is that we have absolutist free speech. We don't.
We're just eminently more willing, in continuation of our grand history of giving the finger to marginalized people, to turn an indifferent eye to the patently fucking obvious relationship between uncensored hate speech and hate crimes. And we're dishonest enough to slap a "free speech" sticker on it.
This, too, is part of the culture of violent entitlement. It isn't just men who feel entitled to women's bodies; it's privileged people of all classes feeling entitled to say whatever they want to say, irrespective of the harm it may cause, and feeling entitled to inhabit every space created by marginalized people, irrespective of how that may violate marginalized people's right of consent.
And when I say "harm," I do not mean, as Kristof and so many others have mischaracterized the harm being experienced by black students on campuses across the US, "hurt fee-fees." I mean the incessant drumbeat of reminders that one is less than, that one's safety and esteem is valued less than the right of a privileged person to demean you, that you don't have the right to draw boundaries and protest and expect more, that your citizenship is second-class, that your life doesn't matter, that your voice doesn't matter, that you don't matter.
#BlackLivesMatter cannot be and is not just about ending police killings. It's also about making black lives matter in every aspect across our culture. That necessarily includes treating with the undiluted contempt it deserves anyone in a position of power on university campuses who would engage in or tolerate racism.
And anyone who uses his platform at the paper of record to argue that black students fighting for air need to "take a breath."
Without a trace of fucking irony.
Ethics and Auditing
[Content Note: Violence; disablism; medical malfeasance; auditing.]
Dr. Ben Carson is now the Republican front runner. Which means that his propensity for saying weird shit is being scrutinized in a way it hasn't previously. So, too, is the fact that he is a plagiarist and a fantasist.
Carson claims that he is being scrutinized in a way that Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton never were (lol) and that the media digging into his past is an attempt to attack and discredit him. But what the media is doing right now is treating him like a front runner.
He's enjoyed a few years of saying whatever the fuck he wanted and not being subjected to much scrutiny because he was primarily being covered by conservative media, who were busily turning him into a celebrity without any due diligence. (See also: Sarah Palin.) So he could get away with tall tales like an imaginary West Point scholarship and invented stories that turn him into a hero and being the spokesperson for snake oil and a biography that includes possibly fake anecdotes from his youth about how he tried to stab a friend and assault his mother with a hammer, because he had a personality disorder that he prayed away.
His credibility and integrity didn't matter when he was just a conservative circuit star, which is an indictment on the conservative movement, but they matter now that he is the leading Republican contender for the US presidency.
At least I think so.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders disagrees:
"I think it might be a better idea – I know it's a crazy idea – but maybe we focus on the issues impacting the American people and what candidates are saying, rather than just spending so much time exploring their lives of 30 or 40 years ago," Sanders said on NBC's "Meet the Press."While I understand why Senator Sanders isn't keen for the media to explore candidates' early lives, I take strong issue with his implication that Carson's habit of being dishonest and unethical is irrelevant in terms of his presidential qualifications. We're not talking about whether a candidate smoked a joint in college, which is the sort of bullshit discredit-digging that does indeed happen a lot in presidential politics. We're talking about basic issues of honesty and ethics. That's not separate from "the issues." That is an issue, all its own.
The Vermont senator, who's running for the Democratic presidential nomination, said there is plenty of room to criticize Carson on the issues.
"When you look at Dr. Carson, to the best of my knowledge, this man does not believe that climate change is caused by human activity," Sanders said. "This man wants to abolish Medicare, impacting tens of millions of seniors. And this man wants to give huge tax breaks to the rich."
Sanders said the American people have become turned off from politics because of how the media cover elections.
"The people want to know why the middle class of this country is disappearing," Sanders said. "Why we have 47 million people living in poverty. Why we have massive income and wealth inequality."
And surely Sanders knows, surely he knows, that part of the reason that the middle class of this country is disappearing, that part of the reason we have 47 million people living in poverty, part of the reason we have massive income and wealth inequality, is because of politicians who are dishonest and unethical, who sell voters a bill of goods and get elected on false promises, who use wedge politics and scapegoating and dogwhistling, who exploit social fears and prejudices to usher in exploitative economic policies, who straight-up lie.
The entirety of modern conservative politics is based on the mendacious promise to protect tradition for god-fearing straight white conservatives, despite the fact that its primary objective is wealth redistribtion upward, which entails obliterating the jobs and wealth and benefits of the very people it promises to protect.
Of course Carson's dishonesty matters. Of course it does. And it is not separate from the policy he advocates. Because dishonesty is central to conservative political advocacy.
It's a strange position coming from Sanders, who is one of the most honest, straightforward, and forthcoming politicians in the country. Lots of politicians have claimed the "straight shooter" mantle, but most of them have (without a trace of irony) done so dishonestly. (I'm looking at you, John McCain.) Sanders actually earns it, and he would do better to use this opportunity to distinguish himself from Carson by highlighting his own practice of rigorous earnestness.
That he isn't is because he's positioned himself as arbiter of What We Should Be Talking About. The same article quoted above reminds us: "Sanders also defended Hillary Clinton at the first Democratic primary debate last month amid media scrutiny surrounding her use of a private email server while secretary of State."
Sanders, a white man, has now publicly audited what we should be discussing regarding a female candidate and a black candidate.
That isn't a good look.
Not if you understand the cultural context in which white men often insert themselves into discussions centered around marginalized people and filter those discussions through their own validity prisms and then pronounce whether the discussions are worth having.
And, regarding Carson particularly, I think Sanders is wrong. It does matter what Carson has said in the past, and it does matter what he says about it now.
Presidents who lie hurt citizens with those lies. They prioritize their own legacies over people's lives with those lies. They take us to war with those lies.
If someone running for president is an inveterate, unapologetic liar, I want to know.
It is one of the many, many reasons I do not want Ben Carson to be my president.
An Observation
[Content Note: Reproductive policing.]
When I was in my 20s—and even earlier, as I started saying I didn't want children in my teens—I was told by people who had chosen to parent that I would change my mind.
Now that I am in my 40s, and it's becoming pretty damn clear that I am not going to change my mind, instead of those same people apologizing for having asserted for two decades that they know my mind better than I do, they are now warning me that I will regret not having changed my mind. That my old age will be filled with regret for not having children.
Okay, players. See you in 20 years.
When I will certainly be just as devoid of regret as I am devoid of a desire to parent now.
[Related Reading: Childfree 101: Cultural Reproductive Coercion.]
Occam's Big Paisley Tie
[Content Note: Privilege; auditing; gaslighting.]
I am rerunning this piece because there is so much Occam's Big Paisley Tie-ing going in defense of the 2016 Democratic presidential candidates' various race-centered failures, and also in defense of the misogyny being unleashed against Hillary Clinton, that I'm going to have cause to reference this concept a lot over the coming months.
Once upon a time, in the comments of Hallelujah_Hippo's post about "not seeing" prejudice, I said:
The correlated urge to ask me, "Well, are you sure [the incident of rank misogyny you just pointed out to me] isn't REALLY [something else]?" makes me ragefrustrated like whoa.This is something men do to women, white people do to people of color, straight people do to queer people, cis people do to trans*/intersex/genderqueer people, able-bodied people do to people with disabilities, thin people do to fat people, religious people do to atheists, etc.
Yeah, I don't actually need to consider every other conceivable possible explanation for something I know is rank misogyny from a lifetime of experience in order to satisfy you, Helpful Ally.
Around every axis of privilege/marginalization, there are marginalized people saying, "I just experienced this heinous bit of hatred because of my marginalized identity," and privileged people saying, "Hang on, now. How can you be sure that it was because of your marginalized identity, and not just a misunderstanding, or a mistake, or a misspeak, or this thing or that thing or this other thing over here, because there's surely a perfectly logical explanation for why this behavior that looks exactly like a million other bits of behavior that you and other people in this marginalized population have experienced is actually something TOTALLY DIFFERENT. Have you considered that maybe it's just that you're too sensitive?"
If Occam's Razor is the principle by which the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, this urge to exhaust every possible explanation—no matter how convoluted, remote, unlikely, or totally fucking absurd—is Occam's Big Paisley Tie.
A swirling vortex of elaborate designs when a simple pinstripe just won't do.
Are you sure that salesperson didn't ignore you because zie just didn't see you? SWIRL! Well, maybe zie was just having a bad day. SWOOP! Are you certain zie heard you? SWIRL! Did you really try to get hir attention? SWOOP! Maybe zie didn't realize you needed help. SWIRL! I'm sure it's not that zie was being purposefully rude. SWOOP! Maybe zie is hard of hearing. SWIRL! Have you considered that maybe you had an unfriendly look on your face? SWOOP! You know how your face gets when you're not smiling. SWIRL! I don't know—there has to be some explanation you just didn't notice. SWOOOOOOOOP!
Certainly, there are people who engage in these critical investigations out of a misguided sense of protectiveness. They don't want their marginalized friend/relation/colleague to have been treated badly because of rank prejudice, and so their instinct is to try to find some other explanation, any other explanation, an explanation that might be more fixable than ancient and deeply entrenched bias.
But, you know, intent ain't magic. So it's just as infuriating, and functions in the same way as intentional gaslighting and emotional policing done by privileged people who put marginalized people's lived experiences through their Validity Prism with an agenda.
That is: Hearing prejudice described as prejudice and then filtering it through one's Validity Prism, because one has mistaken privilege for objectivity; and auditing that lived experience for veracity as measured against one's own personal experience, because one has mistaken privilege for default humanity.
Naturally, people with privilege (who want to defend that privilege) have a vested interest in pretending that evidence of the oppression which is the ugly underbelly of any privilege is attributable to Something Totally Different. It's harder to justify coasting by on your unexamined privilege when faced with evidence of its harm.
And so out comes Occam's Big Paisley Tie, to try to find the Something Totally Different on which to pin the blame for the prejudice that Occam's Razor—and a minimal commitment to integrity and decency—would rightfully identify.
The swirls and swoops on the tie conspire to create a pattern of distraction. But maybe this tie is really a razor! And when all else fails, comes Occam's Big Paisley's Tie Windsor Knot of Bullshit: "Have you considered that maybe you're just looking for things to get mad about?"
Fuck that tie.
Listen to Women
[Content Note: Misogynist terrorism; misogyny; transphobia; privilege; reference to child sex abuse.]
On Sunday night, John Oliver aired one of his long-form segments on the subject of online harassment of women. (The segment is available for viewing on YouTube, if you want to see it, and please note the video autoplays at the link.) Now, I am generally a fan of Oliver's show, even though I don't think he gets everything right, but this segment was a pretty major letdown, for a few reasons.
It was white-centric, it erased trans* women, it included a Photoshopped graphic of an infant girl getting her genitals tattooed which served as the punchline of a joke about owning women's bodies, it focused on legislation to criminalize revenge porn with no exploration of how such laws are only as useful as they are likely to be enforced, it never addressed male harassers' personal accountability, and, unlike most of Oliver's long-form segments, it did not culminate in any sort of call to action. No hashtag, no pledges to refrain from harassment, no admonishment to contact legislators to support the aforementioned legislation, nothing.
Which is a difference in tone that is easy to dispute, when cited as evidence of inequality, but stood out very starkly to me.
Knowing I would immediately get emails and tweets about how TOTES AWESOME it was, I did a little preemptive tweeting on Sunday night immediately following the airing of the episode to register my disappointment with it.
Then, yesterday, I tweeted about it some more, with Andrea Grimes and Parker Molloy, which then led to further discussion of another problematic element of the segment, not unique to this piece nor even John Oliver's show, which is men who use linking to pieces such as this one as the sum total of their Feminist Ally Activism, and how fucked up it is that there are so many progressive men who exclusively get their news about women from men.
And just presume that those men have gotten it right.
Anyway. In case you're not on Twitter, or in case you missed any of the above, here is a Storify of those tweets. Andrea's and Parker's tweets have been included with their permission.
Oliver's segment, misogynist terrorism broadly, and the habit of getting news about women's lives filtered through men are all on-topic for this thread.
Authority on Her Own Life
[Content Note: Misogynoir.]
Yesterday I mentioned that President and First Lady Obama had sat down with People magazine to talk about some of their experiences with racism. The one example I quoted was Michelle Obama's experience at Target:
"I tell this story—I mean, even as the first lady—during that wonderfully publicized trip I took to Target, not highly disguised, the only person who came up to me in the store was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf. Because she didn't see me as the first lady, she saw me as someone who could help her. Those kinds of things happen in life. So it isn't anything new."Now, this didn't happen here, but in a bunch of other spaces, I saw non-black people protesting that the woman in Target probably just asked for the First Lady's help because she's tall. "It wasn't necessarily racism," was a phrase I saw a lot.
These are not mutually exclusive possibilities, of course: It is possible that the woman who asked for the First Lady's help was asking her both because she is tall and because of racism, either because she assumed a black woman at Target was an employee or because she felt entitled to a black woman's assistance.
But that's really neither here nor there, because, for one thing, Michelle Obama's point is not just that this lady asked her for help; it was that no one else spoke to her except a woman asking for help. That context is not irrelevant.
Secondly, Michelle Obama was sharing her perception of the incident. Her perception of her lived experience seen through the prism of a lifetime of being a black woman moving through a racist and misogynist world. I trust her perception of that incident, because I believe her to be an authority on her own life.
I fully trust that Michelle Obama knows the difference between someone asking her to reach something because she is tall, and someone who is the only person who notices her at all asking her to reach something because she's a (tall) black woman in a store where employees are routinely expected to assist customers.
A lifetime of experiences teaches all of us in marginalized populations to discern between innocuous motivations and microaggressions.
And here's the thing: If someone with privilege behaves in a clueless way toward someone who does not share their privilege, in a way that is virtually indistinguishable from an expression of that privilege, that's on them. What's the meaningful difference to a person who perceives that they are being slighted—because that behavior looks exactly like a thousand other deliberate slights they've experienced—that someone is merely unaware of marginalizing behavior instead of actively practicing it? The result is the same either way.
Marginalized people aren't mind-readers who can magically discern someone's intent.
I'm a short white woman who often has to ask for help reaching things. It's my responsibility to understand that people of color are often mistaken as employees by white people, and to be aware of how my behavior might play into that existing dynamic. It's not incumbent on people of color to afford me the benefit of good intentions if I just randomly ask for them to help me reach shit, even if it is just because they're tall. (Tall people don't owe me their free labor, anyway.)
But, back to the main point: All of these apologetics, all the auditing of Michelle Obama's perception of her own lived experience, really distracts from the primary issue. She is telling a story about being the First Lady of the United States of America visiting a Target, and the only person who approached her was someone asking for help.
You really think that's about her being tall? It isn't.
And Then This Happened
[Content Note: Privilege; oppression; appropriation; misogyny; homophobia; racism.]
Oh good grief: "Atheists Don't Owe Your Social Justice Agenda a Damn Thing."
There's a weird trend that's been slinking its way through the social justice community, whereby so-called New Atheists are being denounced for supposedly failing to embrace liberal causes such as diversity and equality. Apparently, atheism has a "race problem," or maybe it should be called a "white male problem." Whichever the case, it appears atheism also has a "shocking woman problem."1. It's neat how Michael Luciano casually elides the difference between "atheism" and "movement atheism," which are absolutely not the same thing. One is indeed merely the lack of a belief in deities. The other is an ideology, which extends beyond that basic belief. It's cool how movement atheism wants to be a movement when it's convenient, and only wants to be a group of people who share a belief when it's convenient.
...Did I sleep through some radical redefining of the word 'atheist'? It's always been my understanding that an 'atheist' is someone who simply lacks belief in deities. That's it. Somehow, though, it's suddenly incumbent on atheists to take up certain social and political causes, and that's just silly.
It's silly not because equality and diversity aren't worthy causes, but because there's no inherent connection between not believing in god and liberal politics.
2. Here's the thing: Movement atheists—especially but not exclusively straight white male movement atheists—routinely invoke the lives of marginalized people in defense of their anti-religionism.
I cannot count the number of times I've seen womanhood, and hostility toward it in many religious traditions, invoked by male atheists, even at the expense of the reported lived experiences of religious women. I cannot count the number of times I've seen women, or gay/bi men, told outright by straight male movement atheists that they're stupid or self-loathing or deserving of harm for being religious. I cannot count the number of times I've seen a black US Christian told they're practicing the religion imposed on them by slavery.
Movement atheists can't continually invoke our identities and lives (as they see them, viewed through the filter of their Validity Prisms) in order to condemn religion and then reject criticisms on the basis that they don't have a social justice agenda.
It's evidently true that people who are, for example, willing to shame a Muslim woman for wearing a headscarf without listening to that woman about why she might find safety and identity and profound personal meaning in wearing a headscarf, don't actually give a fuck about her. We're all familiar with men who will use the ostensible concern for women to advance agendas that have fuck-all to do with real women's needs and lives.
But as long as movement atheists are going to use marginalized people as justification for their crusade against religion, then they don't get to claim they have nothing to do with social justice. After all, they're pretending to be interested in social justice.
As long as they want to be cultural colonialists and straight white male saviors, then they had better expect there are going to be people—including atheists from marginalized communities—who tell them in no uncertain terms that we don't want to be "saved."
Who call them on their compassion bluff and demand meaningful inclusion instead of rescue.
Privilege Gives Us Bad Instincts, By Design
[Content Note: Privilege; auditing.]
Here is something that has never happened to me: I've said or written something about some piece of misogyny, either directed at me or elsewhere, had a man tell me, "I don't see it," been 'splained at by that man about how I'm wrong, and then changed my mind because I am so wowed by his insight.
That has never happened. I don't believe it ever will.
And yet, on a nearly daily basis, I am confronted by men who are keen to tell me that they don't view something as misogyny, that there is some other explanation, that I am mistaken. They talk to me like I am very stupid, and very naive, and they will Occam's Big Paisley Tie at me with reason after absurd reason why something isn't misogyny. Why I am wrong.
Many times, these men purport to be my ally.
And the men who purport to be my ally will readily concede they have male privilege, even as they fail utterly to understand or examine how that privilege acts on them, and how much work it really takes to work through it; how much vigilance not wielding it demands.
We cannot merely be aware of having privilege; we have to understand how it works, and what it does to our humanity.
Resocializing ourselves out of the toxic oppressions with which we were indoctrinated is work. It doesn't happen by magic, and it sure doesn't happen merely by declaring ourselves aware of our privilege.
Human beings are designed to be sponges, and we sponges are socialized every day of our entire lives by a bombardment of messaging exhorting us to privilege some people and treat others as less than. It is absurd to imagine that we can overcome this aggressive socialization without serious effort.
A socialization that tells people of privilege: You are superior. You are worth more than the people who lack your privilege. You are a better person.
It's not true. In every way, privilege erodes our ability to connect to other people. It subverts our empathy, and diminishes our humanity.
Privilege gives us bad instincts, by design.
It tells us lies. So many lies.
And the most harmful lie it tells us is that we are objective, by virtue of our privilege.
What I mean is: It assures us that our perception of the world is right. That we understand how the world works, and why things happen, better than marginalized people, who naturally benefit from our insightful explanations. Ahem.
Every time you hear a white person explain at a black woman that some other white person didn't touch her hair because of racist entitlement, but because of innocent curiosity; every time you hear a straight person explain at a gay person that some other straight person didn't mean gay like that, heavens no; every time you hear a man defend another man to a woman by proclaiming he's no misogynist, for god's sake, he loves women! (which means: "he loves fucking women"); every time you hear a cis person tell a trans* person that they weren't overlooked for a promotion for the third time in a row because of transphobia, they couldnt' have been, it must've been something else, there's got to be some other explanation...
Every time you hear these tortured explanations, that's privilege. Privilege telling us that we have the right—and the responsibility!—to audit marginalized people's reports of harm and tell them that they're wrong.
Privilege tells us the lie that being oppressed by prejudice makes a person an unreliable witness to hir own life, but benefiting from prejudice makes a person an objective observer of that life.
That's a nifty little trick, isn't it? Being victimized compromises you. Only people in a position to victimize can be trusted to define what constitutes harm.
As if people in a position to victimize don't have a vested interest in explaining away harm.
When I talk publicly about my lived experiences as a fat woman—the harassment, the body shaming, the food policing, the armchair diagnosing, the hostility of healthcare providers, the jokes, the sneers, the looks, the shouts from passing cars—there are always thin people who will jump in to tell me that this or that didn't happen because I am fat, but because…insert here any other rationale, no matter how ludicrous.
And a thin person's voice, auditing my lived experience, telling me that my oppression is not what I think it is, is valued more highly than my own. A lifetime of living in a fat body, experiencing the world as a fat person, learning—by necessity—the patterns and practices of systemic fat hatred, still does not qualify me to be an expert on my own life.
That's how privilege works. That is the lie that it tells—I can't know my own life as well as any thin person who decides they want to comment on it.
This happens to people from all marginalized classes. Every woman can probably think of countless examples of having reported some instance of sexism, only to have a man try to explain it away. Every person of color can think of examples of white people trying to explain racism away. Every person with a disability can think of examples of able-bodied people (or people with a different disability) trying to explain disablism away as some other reason one just didn't see.
Or perhaps by simply saying: "I don't see it."
"I don't see it" is a favorite rhetorical flourish of privileged people, relying on the objectivity and authority that privilege assures us we have. On the right we believe we have to haughtily sniff at another human being who's been harmed by prejudice, "I don't see it." With an implied, "Then it can't be so."
And this is only one manner in which privileged people act as arbiters on the lives and choices of marginalized people. We deny marginalized people the right of authority on even their own lives in any number of even crueler ways.
Like accusing someone of being too sensitive, instead of examining how privilege erodes our capacity to be sensitive enough.
Privilege tells us the lie that we know other people's lives better than they know their own, that they couldn't possibly understand their own lives without the benefit of our superior objectivity. Privilege assures us that our role is to audit; rather than to empathize.
Privilege tells us the lie that everyone else is just like us, or should be. That universalizing our own experiences—and preferences and needs and choices—is not only okay, but the "Golden Rule." That kindness is projecting one's own perspective onto everyone else, rather than listening to individual people about how they would like to be treated, and then treating them that way.
Privilege tells us the lie that we shouldn't challenge this sort of conventional wisdom—or challenge anything, really, instead endeavoring to maintain the status quo. That we should not bother to challenge the way things are, because this is the natural order of things and thus the way they will ever be. That we should not expect more—of the world, of one another, of ourselves. That expecting more is an unreasonable expectation.
Privilege lulls us into easy complacency, and entrains us to behave in ways that burn bridges, rather than build them.
A crucial part of understanding how privilege works is understanding that privileged voices are louder, carry further, can drown out other voices. The presence of a privileged person can change the dynamic in a room, or an online space, otherwise filled with people who don't share that privilege.
We need to just be okay with the radical notion, contrary to everything that privilege teaches us, that sometimes we have nothing to add.
We have to just get okay with the radical idea, contrary to everything that privilege teaches us, that sometimes the only thing we have of value to offer to marginalized people is LISTENING, VALIDATING, and BELIEVING.
Sometimes, there just isn't anything we can do except mitigate harm. Which is not a small thing.
Sometimes, the only thing we can offer is just not behaving like every other white person, or man, or cis person, or any other person of privilege, who has failed to LISTEN, VALIDATE, and BELIEVE.
Sometimes, the best thing you can do is just shut the fuck up.
Privilege gives us bad instincts. One of those instincts is to talk and talk and talk. To explain at marginalized people about their own lives. To "educate" them.
That is not helpful. That is harmful. Just shut the fuck up.
I promise you: If you stop acting like you have nothing to learn from marginalized people, you will start "seeing it."
More on "Evidence"
[Content Note: Auditing; silencing.]
Last week, Jessica Luther published a Storify about the ubiquitous habit of privileged people demanding that marginalized people provide objective "evidence" of their claims of oppression, alienation, and/or harm, and I followed that up with this piece.
This morning, we were talking about the subject some more, and I noted that demands for "evidence" is not merely silencing, but a way of justifying one's own indifference. Jess said, "Tweet that!" and so I did, and here are the tweets for those who aren't on Twitter and/or missed them.
The next time I am met with a demand for "evidence" when I report incidents of harm as a result of oppression, this is going to be my script: "I am giving you evidence in the form of my lived experience. In so doing, I am asking you to care. About me and about the other people to whom these things are also done. If you care, you will listen. If you don't, I am politely requesting you be honest enough to simply say that you do not care, instead of obliging me to engage with you in a mendacious argument designed to publicly justify why you won't."
I am tired of wasting my time in "debates" that have no purpose but to task me with the responsibility for the luxury of indifference conferred by privilege. And I am calling that shit out, every time I see it, starting now.
Evidence
[Content Note: Privilege; auditing; fat hatred; racism; rape culture; violence.]
Last week, my friend Jessica Luther published a Storify on "The Subjectivity of 'Evidence'" and the ubiquitous habit of privileged people demanding that marginalized people provide objective "evidence" of their claims of oppression, alienation, and/or harm.
The very next day after she published it, I tweeted this example of pushback I got in response to my assertion that dehumanizing images of fat people are harmful:
Jess, fresh off deconstructing this very flavor of bullshit, challenged him to explain, exactly, what sort of "evidence" he required, quickly revealing, as always, that there is an impossibly unattainable threshold for "proof" to convince any person who needs "science" to confirm widely reported lived experiences of a marginalized population.
Because demanding "evidence" is not about ascertaining whether people are being harmed; it's about denying that they are.
After all, denying people the right to be authorities on their own lives is itself harmful. No one who participates in that harm gives a fuck about not hurting people. Their entire objective is to hurt people.
Though that's never the explicitly stated intent.
This fellow was so intent on discrediting the value of my own reports of harm as a result of dehumanizing images of fat people that he compared my lived experiences to people who report having been abducted by aliens:
Again, the thing about the demand for "evidence" is not just that it's derailing, not just that it's the reddest of all red herrings—although it is certainly those things, too—but it is actively harmful. It is saying that people who observe and document their own oppression cannot be considered reliable witnesses.
I want to draw a very clear line between this extremely common silencing and discrediting behavior and the rape culture: In crimes of sexual violence, survivors' accounts are often not considered evidence of a crime, which fundamentally sets them apart from crimes like robbery and non-sexual assault.
It is not a coincidence that there is a cultural habit of silencing and discrediting the voices of marginalized people who experience harm on the basis of their identities, when those are the people also most likely to be targeted by sexual violence.
I also want to draw a very clear line between this behavior and the way self-defense "crimes" are prosecuted. It is not a coincidence that men like George Zimmerman and Michael Dunn are given enormous amounts of latitude and sympathy as people actively urge them to make excuses for murdering black children and urge us to listen to their justifications, while women like Marissa Alexander and CeCe McDonald and the Jersey Four, black women who were not predators and clearly acted in self-defense, are persecuted, prosecuted, and silenced.
Where's the evidence that you were harmed, beyond your own claims which we are not obliged to believe?
Challenging these demands for "evidence," in a way that suggests marginalized people's testimony about our own lived experiences is not sufficient "evidence" of harm, is a crucial social justice issue.
To address the inevitable complaint, I am not suggesting that any marginalized person who makes a legal claim of harm be believed without investigation. I am, however, suggesting that such legal claims of harm be investigated with equal vigor and seriousness, instead of routinely being dismissed out of hand with abdicating turns of phrase like "he said she said."
And I am absolutely and unapologetically suggesting that people who are sharing their personal experiences of marginalization and abuse in the process of advocating for sensitivity and decency be heard and believed. Be regarded as experts on their own lives. Be free from reprehensible demands for scientific, peer-reviewed, published, blahblahfart "evidence."
If one genuinely cares about harm done to marginalized people, one's primary instinct should be to listen to them when they speak of it. And believe them.
There is perhaps nothing more basely dehumanizing than purporting to know someone's life better than zie knows it hirself.
The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck
I am republishing this piece again by request.
[Content Note: Misogyny; rape culture; bullying.]
Despite feminists' reputation, and contra my own individual reputation cultivated over five years of public opinion-making, I am not a man-hater.
If I played by misogynists' rules, specifically the one that dictates it only takes one woman doing one Mean or Duplicitous or Disrespectful or Unlawful or otherwise Bad Thing to justify hatred of all women, I would have plenty of justification for hating men, if I were inclined to do that sort of thing.
Most of my threatening hate mail comes from men. The most unrelentingly trouble-making trolls have always been men. I've been cat-called and cow-called from moving vehicles countless times, and subjected to other forms of street harassment, and sexually harassed at work, always by men. I have been sexually assaulted—if one includes rape, attempted rape, unsolicited touching of breasts, buttocks, and/or genitals, nonconsensual frottage on public transportation, and flashing—by dozens of people during my lifetime, some known to me, some strangers, all men.
But I don't hate men, because I play by different rules. In fact, there are men in this world whom I love quite a lot.
There are also individual men in this world I would say I probably hate, or something close, men who I hold in unfathomable contempt, but it is not because they are men.
No, I don't hate men.
It would, however, be fair to say that I don't easily trust them.
My mistrust is not, as one might expect, primarily a result of the violent acts done on my body, nor the vicious humiliations done to my dignity. It is, instead, born of the multitude of mundane betrayals that mark my every relationship with a man—the casual rape joke, the use of a female slur, the careless demonization of the feminine in everyday conversation, the accusations of overreaction, the eyerolling and exasperated sighs in response to polite requests to please not use misogynist epithets in my presence or to please use non-gendered language ("humankind").
There are the insidious assumptions guiding our interactions—the supposition that I will regard being exceptionalized as a compliment ("you're not like those other women"), and the presumption that I am an ally against certain kinds of women. Surely, we're all in agreement that Britney Spears is a dirty slut who deserves nothing but a steady stream of misogynist vitriol whenever her name is mentioned, right? Always the subtle pressure to abandon my principles to trash this woman or that woman, as if I'll never twig to the reality that there's always a justification for unleashing the misogyny, for hating a woman in ways reserved only for women. I am exhorted to join in the cruel revelry, and when I refuse, suddenly the target is on my back. And so it goes.
There are the jokes about women, about wives, about mothers, about raising daughters, about female bosses. They are told in my presence by men who are meant to care about me, just to get a rise out of me, as though I am meant to find funny a reminder of my second-class status. I am meant to ignore that this is a bullying tactic, that the men telling these jokes derive their amusement specifically from knowing they upset me, piss me off, hurt me. They tell them and I can laugh, and they can thus feel superior, or I can not laugh, and they can thus feel superior. Heads they win, tails I lose. I am used as a prop in an ongoing game of patriarchal posturing, and then I am meant to believe it is true when some of the men who enjoy this sport, in which I am their pawn, tell me, "I love you." I love you, my daughter. I love you, my niece. I love you, my friend. I am meant to trust these words.
There are the occasions that men—intellectual men, clever men, engaged men—insist on playing devil's advocate, desirous of a debate on some aspect of feminist theory or reproductive rights or some other subject generally filed under the heading: Women's Issues. These intellectual, clever, engaged men want to endlessly probe my argument for weaknesses, want to wrestle over details, want to argue just for fun—and they wonder, these intellectual, clever, engaged men, why my voice keeps raising and why my face is flushed and why, after an hour of fighting my corner, hot tears burn the corners of my eyes. Why do you have to take this stuff so personally? ask the intellectual, clever, and engaged men, who have never considered that the content of the abstract exercise that's so much fun for them is the stuff of my life.
There is the perplexity at my fury that my life experience is not considered more relevant than the opinionated pronouncements of men who make a pastime of informal observation, like womanhood is an exotic locale which provides magnificent fodder for the amateur ethnographer. And there is the haughty dismissal of my assertion that being on the outside looking in doesn't make one more objective; it merely provides a different perspective.
There are the persistent, tiresome pronouncements of similitude between men's and women's experiences, the belligerent insistence that handsome men are objectified by women, too! that women pinch men's butts sometimes, too! that men are expected to look a certain way at work, too! that women rape, too! and other equivalencies that conveniently and stupidly ignore institutional inequities that mean X rarely equals Y. And there are the long-suffering groans that meet any attempt to contextualize sexism and refute the idea that such indignities, though grim they all may be, are not necessarily equally oppressive.
There are the stereotypes—oh, the abundant stereotypes!—about women, not me, of course, but other women, those women with their bad driving and their relentless shopping habits and their PMS and their disgusting vanity and their inability to stop talking and their disinterest in Important Things and their trying to trap men and their getting pregnant on purpose and their false rape accusations and their being bitches sluts whores cunts... And I am expected to nod in agreement, and I am nudged and admonished to agree. I am expected to say these things are not true of me, but are true of women (am I seceding from the union?); I am expected to put my stamp of token approval on the stereotypes. Yes, it's true. Between you and me, it's all true. That's what is wanted from me. Abdication of my principles and pride, in service to a patriarchal system that will only use my collusion to further subjugate me. This is a thing that is asked of me by men who purport to care for me.
There is the unwillingness to listen, a ferociously stubborn not getting it on so many things, so many important things. And the obdurate refusal to believe, to internalize, that my outrage is not manufactured and my injure not make-believe—an inflexible rejection of the possibility that my pain is authentic, in favor of the consolatory belief that I am angry because I'm a feminist (rather than the truth: that I'm a feminist because I'm angry).
And there is the denial about engaging in misogyny, even when it's evident, even when it's pointed out gently, softly, indulgently, carefully, with goodwill and the presumption that it was not intentional. There is the firm, fixed, unyielding denial—because it is better and easier to imply that I'm stupid or crazy, that I have imagined being insulted by someone about whom I care (just for the fun of it!), than it is to just admit a bloody mistake. Rather I am implied to be a hysteric than to say, simply, I'm sorry.
Not every man does all of these things, or even most of them, and certainly not all the time. But it only takes one, randomly and occasionally, exploding in a shower of cartoon stars like an unexpected punch in the nose, to send me staggering sideways, wondering what just happened.
Well. I certainly didn't see that coming...
These things, they are not the habits of deliberately, connivingly cruel men. They are, in fact, the habits of the men in this world I love quite a lot.
All of whom have given me reason to mistrust them, to use my distrust as a self-protection mechanism, as an essential tool to get through every day, because I never know when I might next get knocked off-kilter with something that puts me in the position, once again, of choosing between my dignity and the serenity of our relationship.
Swallow shit, or ruin the entire afternoon?
It can come out of nowhere, and usually does. Which leaves me mistrustful by both necessity and design. Not fearful; just resigned—and on my guard. More vulnerability than that allows for the possibility of wounds that do not heal. Wounds to our relationship, the sort of irreparable damage that leaves one unable to look in the eye someone that you loved once upon a time.
This, then, is the terrible bargain we have regretfully struck: Men are allowed the easy comfort of their unexamined privilege, but my regard will always be shot through with a steely, anxious bolt of caution.
A shitty bargain all around, really. But there it is.
There are men who will read this post and think, huffily, dismissively, that a person of color could write a post very much like this one about white people, about me. That's absolutely right. So could a lesbian, a gay man, a bisexual, an asexual. So could a trans or intersex person (which hardly makes a comprehensive list). I'm okay with that. I don't feel hated. I feel mistrusted—and I understand it; I respect it. It means, for me, I must be vigilant, must make myself trustworthy. Every day.
I hope those men will hear me when I say, again, I do not hate you. I mistrust you. You can tell yourselves that's a problem with me, some inherent flaw, some evidence that I am fucked up and broken and weird; you can choose to believe that the women in your lives are nothing like me.
Or you can be vigilant, can make yourselves trustworthy. Every day.
Just in case they're more like me than you think.
[This post was originally published August 14, 2009.]
Welp
[Content Note: Privilege; silencing. For background on "splaining," please read SKM's terrific post "It Looks Like We're Going to Have a Mansplainer Thread After All."]
Y'all, I think Kevin Drum just 'splained at us about 'splaining:
Hey there. Is there any chance that we could deep six the splaining meme? You know, mansplaining, straightsplaining, whitesplaining, and all their myriad offshoots. I get that it's a useful term, but it's gotten out of hand. Obviously we should all be careful when we talk about things outside our personal experience, and nobody gets a pass when they say something stupid. Still, we should all be allowed to talk about sensitive subjects as best we can without instantly being shot down as unfit to even hold an opinion.Shaker Mod Scott Madin dubbed this splainsplaining, and I have been humming "Splainsplaining" to Bowie's "The Jean Genie" ever since.
The splaining meme is quickly becoming the go-to ad hominem of the 2010s, basically just a snarky version of STFU that combines pseudosophisticated mockery and derision without any substance to back it up. Maybe it's time to give it a rest and engage instead with a little less smugness and narcissism.
Anyway!
There are a few things Drum gets wrong here. Like, for example, that splaining isn't a "meme," but a useful piece of language used in social justice spheres for succinctly describing the dynamic of a person of privilege condescendingly pontificating at a marginalized person about our own lives in direct contravention of our real lived experiences.
Also, "it's gotten out of hand" at least has the honesty of being a straightforward statement instead of a mendacious rhetorical, but it's still got the same problems as "Have we gone too far...?"
And, sure, there are probably people (it's a big universe!) who deploy "splaining" when it's not totally appropriate, but it's typically deployed not in response to someone merely "talk[ing] about sensitive subjects," but talking about a marginalized person's life having positioned themselves as an expert, while denying the marginalized person authority on their own lived experiences.
Usually, someone who objects to being accused of splaining thinks zie's just sharing "an opinion," in a way that suggests they believe having an opinion on what's the best place for Italian food in town is the same as having an opinion on whether a marginalized person's expressed experience of oppression is valid.
Splaining is about auditing other people's lived experiences. It's not just about having "an opinion" on a "sensitive subject."
What Drum identifies as "narcissism" is marginalized people's assertion that our perceptions matter. That we are the definitive authorities on our own lives. And what he identifies as "smugness" is our contempt for the idea that someone of privilege thinks they are qualified to educate us about our own lives.
And what Drum misses about the fact that, yeah, sometimes an accusation of splaining does shut down debate (such as it is) is that that's okay. It is really and truly okay for a marginalized person to communicate, without apology: "I don't want to listen to you tell me about my own life. Fuck off."
Quote of the Day
"One of the things that my training in liberal humanities has helped me to understand is that our social position determines a lot of what we actually know about the world. People of color understand racism far more than white people ever will because we have experienced it. We live with it. We must learn how to navigate it. Women understand sexism far more than men ever will. We have experienced it. We live with it. We must learn how to navigate it. So that means in my corner of the world, that when a person speaks out of their experience of marginalization we listen. We recognize the limitations of our epistemology, or knowledge system. We recognize that as much as we may have tried to learn about something, we don't know everything. Some things we simply can't know."—Brittney Cooper, in a must-read piece about #CancelColbert and the reactions to it.
[H/T to Amanda Levitt.]
This. Is. Validity Prism.
[Content Note: Auditing, homophobia, heteronormativity.]
The Validity Prism is a phrase I coined in order to simply describe the pervasive habit among people of privilege to filter marginalized people's lived experiences through their own perspectives shaped by their own lived experiences in order to establish authenticity.
In simpler language, it's the habit of measuring someone else's life against one's own while ignoring meaningful differences in those lives.
At its root, the Validity Prism is the practice of auditing, in place of the practice of empathy, done by privileged people who imagine their privilege makes them objective, as opposed to merely giving them a different perspective.
Privileged people who invoke the Validity Prism position themselves in the role of arbiter, who demand to see "proof" that marginalized people's lived experiences are really what they say they are. Marginalized people are not allowed to be experts on their own lives; instead, privileged self-appointed auditors demand evidence of all claims of oppression, which they will measure against their own lived experiences, which necessarily lack that very oppression, and then inevitably find that evidence wanting.
It is a deeply dysfunctional and abusive dynamic, explicitly designed to deny oppression and to deny marginalized people their agency and the right of authority on their own lived experiences.
This morning, at Right Wing Watch, I saw this incredible example of the Validity Prism: Republican Representative Steve King of Iowa says that "being gay is 'self-professed behavior' that can't be 'independently verified.'"
The congressman [implied] that LGBT people are making their identities known in order to entrap business owners into discriminating against them.Rep. Steve King wants "independent verification" of other people's sexual orientations. (Is he volunteering? Fnar fnar!) But not everyone's, of course—just people whose sexual orientations Rep. King considers transgressive by virtue of a heterocentric culture that treats different-sex attraction as the default and the norm.
"The one thing that I reference when I say 'self-professed,'" he said, "is how do you know who to discriminate against? They have to tell you. And are they then setting up a case? Is this about bringing a grievance or is it actually about a service that they'd like to have?"
He then implied that homosexuality cannot be "independently verified" and can be "willfully changed."
"If it's not specifically protected in the Constitution," he said of civil rights protections, "then it's got to be an immutable characteristic, that being a characteristic that can be independently verified and cannot be willfully changed."
People who have the "normal" sexual orientation don't need to provide "independent verification" of their sexuality.
Rinse and repeat for every privileged class, whose members are not obliged to submit their identities to auditors and who are empowered by their privilege to appoint themselves as auditors for people who don't share that privilege.
"I don't see it," they say, having filtered a report of oppression through their Validity Prism and found nothing similar in their own experiences. "I just don't see it."
So certain of their unassailable objectivity that they don't even realize they aren't meant to be looking, but listening.
An Observation
If there is one turn of phrase for which I'm known, well, it's probably Terrible Bargain. But if there's another phrase for which I'm known, it's: I'm not offended; I'm contemptuous.
For reasons that I probably don't need to explain to anyone who's been paying attention, I've lately been thinking about the ways in which accusations of anger (or fury, or rage, or whatever variations thereof) are used as discrediting strategies in the same way accusations of offense are.
And in the same way that marginalized people are accused of being offended, when what we are really are is contemptuous, marginalized people are frequently accused of being angry, when what we really are is frustrated.
Don't get me wrong: I have nothing against anger; to the contrary, I find anger can be useful, and necessary, and the root of progress.
But there are a lot of times I am accused of being angry (as if that's a bad thing) when I'm not actually angry—and I see that happening to a lot of marginalized people, especially women of every and any intersectional identity. We are dismissed out of hand as angry, when we are really frustrated—usually because we are being obliged to play games around having our lived experience audited with a validity prism being wielded by a privileged person who erroneously sees themselves as An Objective Arbiter, who is, in so doing, literally frustrating our ability to assert expertise on our own perceptions.
Frustration is not anger. (Although it certainly has the capacity to morph into anger, or coexist with it.) Frustration is "a feeling of dissatisfaction, often accompanied by anxiety or depression, resulting from unfulfilled needs or unresolved problems."
That is the thing I am feeling when I am most likely to be called angry. Overwhelming dissatisfaction as a result of the cyclical and systemic lack of being heard, respected, treated as an equal.
So, to the lexicon of useful phrases I add this: I'm not angry; I'm dissatisfied.
[Originally posted March 28, 2013.]
Occam's Big Paisley Tie
[Content Note: Privilege; auditing; gaslighting. I am rerunning this piece on behalf of a friend who is dealing with some major Occam's Big Paisley Tie-ing right now.]
Yesterday, in the comments of Hallelujah_Hippo's post about "not seeing" prejudice, I said:
The correlated urge to ask me, "Well, are you sure [the incident of rank misogyny you just pointed out to me] isn't REALLY [something else]?" makes me ragefrustrated like whoa.This is something men do to women, white people do to people of color, straight people do to queer people, cis people do to trans*/intersex/genderqueer people, able-bodied people do to people with disabilities, thin people do to fat people, religious people do to atheists, etc.
Yeah, I don't actually need to consider every other conceivable possible explanation for something I know is rank misogyny from a lifetime of experience in order to satisfy you, Helpful Ally.
Around every axis of privilege/marginalization, there are marginalized people saying, "I just experienced this heinous bit of hatred because of my marginalized identity," and privileged people saying, "Hang on, now. How can you be sure that it was because of your marginalized identity, and not just a misunderstanding, or a mistake, or a misspeak, or this thing or that thing or this other thing over here, because there's surely a perfectly logical explanation for why this behavior that looks exactly like a million other bits of behavior that you and other people in this marginalized population have experienced is actually something TOTALLY DIFFERENT. Have you considered that maybe it's just that you're too sensitive?"
If Occam's Razor is the principle by which the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, this urge to exhaust every possible explanation—no matter how convoluted, remote, unlikely, or totally fucking absurd—is Occam's Big Paisley Tie.
A swirling vortex of elaborate designs when a simple pinstripe just won't do.
Are you sure that salesperson didn't ignore you because zie just didn't see you? SWIRL! Well, maybe zie was just having a bad day. SWOOP! Are you certain zie heard you? SWIRL! Did you really try to get hir attention? SWOOP! Maybe zie didn't realize you needed help. SWIRL! I'm sure it's not that zie was being purposefully rude. SWOOP! Maybe zie is hard of hearing. SWIRL! Have you considered that maybe you had an unfriendly look on your face? SWOOP! You know how your face gets when you're not smiling. SWIRL! I don't know—there has to be some explanation you just didn't notice. SWOOOOOOOOP!
Certainly, there are people who engage in these critical investigations out of a misguided sense of protectiveness. They don't want their marginalized friend/relation/colleague to have been treated badly because of rank prejudice, and so their instinct is to try to find some other explanation, any other explanation, an explanation that might be more fixable than ancient and deeply entrenched bias.
But, you know, intent ain't magic. So it's just as infuriating, and functions in the same way as intentional gaslighting and emotional policing done by privileged people who put marginalized people's lived experiences through their Validity Prism with an agenda.
That is: Hearing prejudice described as prejudice and then filtering it through one's Validity Prism, because one has mistaken privilege for objectivity; and auditing that lived experience for veracity as measured against one's own personal experience, because one has mistaken privilege for default humanity.
Naturally, people with privilege (who want to defend that privilege) have a vested interest in pretending that evidence of the oppression which is the ugly underbelly of any privilege is attributable to Something Totally Different. It's harder to justify coasting by on your unexamined privilege when faced with evidence of its harm.
And so out comes Occam's Big Paisley Tie, to try to find the Something Totally Different on which to pin the blame for the prejudice that Occam's Razor—and a minimal commitment to integrity and decency—would rightfully identify.
The swirls and swoops on the tie conspire to create a pattern of distraction. But maybe this tie is really a razor! And when all else fails, comes Occam's Big Paisley's Tie Windsor Knot of Bullshit: "Have you considered that maybe you're just looking for things to get mad about?"
Fuck that tie.
