In Which Res Ipsa Abandons the Illusion of Control Over What People Post In a Thread f/k/a Thinking About ...

[Some Schmo]

I am having a difficult time understanding why someone would think that it is the woman's fault would when someone makes a sexist comment to her.

Clearly. I mean, that situation is impossible, isn't it?

[Lem]

I am having a difficult time understanding why someone would think that it is the woman's fault would when someone makes a sexist comment to her.

Clearly. I mean, that situation is impossible, isn't it?

Just wanted to quote this because I think it is an interesting insight into a mindset.

[Some Schmo]

The problem with remarks like "what's the point?" is that they are frequently used to convey the message "there's no point to your post." Face to face, we can read non-verbal cues to tell the difference. We don't have those on a message board. Using the phrasing from your last post, I think a fine question would have been something like: "Lem, I don't understand why you started this thread. Is the point to skewer Analytics or to talk about the pitfalls of patriarchal language?

I don't remember exactly how I phrased the question, but I asked it a few times in different ways, so who knows how it came off?

But to be frank, I highly doubt, given Lem's charged mood, that any wording would have sated her.

So let's talk about balance for a second. We exist in a context that isn't balanced to start with. In fact, if we're feminists or allies, we're trying to achieve more balance. If you choose to view sexism as a moral referendum on a person's character, and you feel the need to add "balance" by defending the person's character, then what's the effect? First, the discussion never gets to the harmful effect of the words themselves. Second, because we all understand that Analytics is just like us and is trying to be a good person, approaching the issue as a moral judgment on Analytics inevitably leads to the conclusion that Analytics is not "sexist" and Lem is "overreacting." That's not adding more balance. That's preventing us from getting to the balance that we're trying to work towards.

That's a fair point, although I'm not sure that's where we'd have ended were it not for the course of the conversation.

I don't know which comments of yours and Gunnar's you are talking about. Would you mind please linking them?

I'm not a fan of quote mining, but in the interest of this discussion:

It seems to me that there was a bit of "ovary-action" on both sides of this discussion. I'm pleased to see it was finally amicably resolved. It was, wasn't it? I would hate to see two of my favorite posters remain at odds with each other.

Bull-damned-crap. A woman disagreed with a man’s post. She used words, concepts, ideas.

The man posted
“Are you on your period or something?"

For you to define that as ” a bit of "ovary-action" on both sides of this discussion” is offensive and insensitive.

But thanks for weighing in. As I said before,

”Let’s be fair to men. Especially when a man isn’t fair to a woman.”

Perhaps it was insensitive of me to laugh at and quote canpakes' pun, but I don't apologize for thinking there was at least a bit of overreaction on both sides. Can we just forgive each other and move on?

Overreaction seems to be a theme here.

The main problem with being male is that I'll never really know what it's like not to be male. I often find myself trying to walk in my daughter's shoes, but without her looks and presence, I'll never truly know what it's like to be her. I'll never know what it's like to be lusted after on sight, or touched inappropriately by a customer I'm serving. I'll never know what it's like to have someone 30 years older than I am make a pass at me. It seems there's an entire universe I am simply not privy to because I am not equipped to see it.

I think we all have these kinds of blindness to the experiences of others. The only way into these other worlds is through the view of friends and loved ones; at least, those are the worlds we're motivated to see.

Thankfully, that's a pretty easily solved problem. Start by reading through this thread. In particular, posts by Res Ipsa, Chap, and the exchanges between Doc Cam and Moksha are very helpful. They are all male also, so that will help you ease into it. When you are ready, posts by Jersey Girl and myself are there, but we are women, so I suggest deep breathing and calmness before venturing off into the unknown. Then, if you really want a trip, try the rest of the posts by people who--well, let's just say I don't even know their genders! Crazy, huh?!

This was an idiotic response to my post, and showed exactly how much care Lem has been putting into understanding others' points of view.

[Some Schmo]

Clearly. I mean, that situation is impossible, isn't it?

Just wanted to quote this because I think it is an interesting insight into a mindset.

Everything you post is an interesting insight into your mindset. It looks like Clockwork Orange in there.

[Res Ipsa]

One more thing to add: I honestly saw myself in that thread as a kind of outside consultant advising on strategy. A consultant can by hired by a football team, for instance, who has a losing record. The consultant might take the job because he's a fan of the team, and then go about criticizing their strategy. He's not trying to bring them down or tell them they can't win; he's trying to change their strategy so they win going forward.

I think you have to consider the context before choosing a role in the conversation. A common problem that women express is the way men treat them in conversations. If I had to pick a general term, I'd say "devalue." (To avoid the whole #not all men distraction, when I mean "all men" I'll say "all men." When I describe what men or women do without the "all," I'm talking about general tendencies, not each and every person on the planet.) And one of them is they assume that they know more than women, and so they dominate the conversation and tell the women what to do. So, think for a minute about what you are presuming when you assume the role of "outside consultant." First, as shown by the level of anger and scorn you showed on thread, you are an interested party, not an outside consultant. More importantly, the message you send is that Lem or any other woman needs a male "expert consultant" in a conversation about sexism. If you take the concept of privilege seriously, then we known that you and me don't see the harm. We don't see the daily crap women put up with just because they are women. If we're talking about reducing or avoiding harm, then an expert who is blind to the harm really isn't an expert at all.

To understand what I'm saying, I think you have to seriously look at how discussion of the type on the other thread work. As they typically play out, it's a game rigged against women who point out sexist speech and behavior. If we choose to portray sexism as a moral defect, then the discussion becomes all about identifying the "good guy" and the "bad guy" in the conversation. If we approach the issue by asking the question: is the man a good person, then the woman loses. Every, single, time. The man is not sexist because he's a good person (insert rationalization here), and so the woman can be dismissed as the "bad guy." I don't think it's and intentional strategy for the vast majority of men, but what they do in these kinds of discussions, just like clockwork, is frame the issue as being about whether the man is a good guy, they derail the discussion away from the harmful effect of the words themselves and what we might to avoid that. So, as soon as you weighed in as a consultant, you effective decided the end result by choosing to approach the issue as a moral one.

[Some Schmo]

I think you have to consider the context before choosing a role in the conversation. A common problem that women express is the way men treat them in conversations. If I had to pick a general term, I'd say "devalue." (To avoid the whole #not all men distraction, when I mean "all men" I'll say "all men." When I describe what men or women do without the "all," I'm talking about general tendencies, not each and every person on the planet.) And one of them is they assume that they know more than women, and so they dominate the conversation and tell the women what to do. So, think for a minute about what you are presuming when you assume the role of "outside consultant." First, as shown by the level of anger and scorn you showed on thread, you are an interested party, not an outside consultant. More importantly, the message you send is that Lem or any other woman needs a male "expert consultant" in a conversation about sexism. If you take the concept of privilege seriously, then we known that you and me don't see the harm. We don't see the daily crap women put up with just because they are women. If we're talking about reducing or avoiding harm, then an expert who is blind to the harm really isn't an expert at all.

This is overstating my perspective. My initial advice was to everyone, not just women. And I don't think it's conveying the message "I know more than you do" when you say things that remind them maybe their strategy isn't working. I never once thought to myself, "I need to educate Lem." It was more like, "How can I make what I'm trying to say more clear?" (at least at first; obviously, I gave up after a time).

"Consultant" certainly wasn't the right word, it was just the best one I could think of for what I was trying to say.

To understand what I'm saying, I think you have to seriously look at how discussion of the type on the other thread work. As they typically play out, it's a game rigged against women who point out sexist speech and behavior. If we choose to portray sexism as a moral defect, then the discussion becomes all about identifying the "good guy" and the "bad guy" in the conversation. If we approach the issue by asking the question: is the man a good person, then the woman loses. Every, single, time. The man is not sexist because he's a good person (insert rationalization here), and so the woman can be dismissed as the "bad guy." I don't think it's and intentional strategy for the vast majority of men, but what they do in these kinds of discussions, just like clockwork, is frame the issue as being about whether the man is a good guy, they derail the discussion away from the harmful effect of the words themselves and what we might to avoid that. So, as soon as you weighed in as a consultant, you effective decided the end result by choosing to approach the issue as a moral one.

See, I guess I have a bit of an issue with the framing "good guy or bad guy." To me, it's more about, "Was he guilty or innocent of the charged offense?" Now, to your point, if we say, "He's guilty," then we advise him to apologize (as what happened in the thread). If we say, "No, I don't think he's guilty," then we would likely feel like the accusation was unfair. I'm not sure I see the problem with either assessment.

And of course, both things can be true at the same time. He could have said something sexist with the intention to aggravate (not because he actually feels superior to the woman and is trying to dress her down, but to defend himself when he feels he's being unfairly attacked), and it can be construed as a direct attack on the target's femininity (because the target isn't aware her chain is being yanked, and thinks she knows the source of the malicious intent in the "attacker's" heart).

The main problem I see here is that if sexist comments cause harm (which they do), then it really is a moral issue (depending, I suppose, on how you define morality - I define being morality as trying to not cause harm to other conscious beings). You said earlier, "You can choose to view the issue of sexism as a moral referendum on individuals or you can choose to view it as an opportunity to try and figure out how we can our fellow humans better. So, why choose the former rather than the latter." I'm not clear on how you tease out the latter from the former. They are related.

[Res Ipsa]

I don’t think our discussion has anything to do with whether Analytics is a good person or a bad person. As I understand it, he made the comment about Lem’s menstrual cycle because he was angry and he chose to use sexist language to piss her off. Does that say anything about whether he is a good person or a bad person? Hell no! Good people get mad and good people say hurtful things when they are angry. So, from my perspective, arguing about whether Analytics’ use of a sexist trope makes him a bad person is a waste of time. It prevents us from discussing the effect of the use of that particular sexist trope and why, if we want to reduce harm to our fellow humans, we shouldn’t use that trope. Expand the scope of the discussion, and you get to the more fundamental issue of how we treat fellow humans when we’re angry.

For the record, I think you understand what happened correctly, and I agree with everything you say here.

As another case study, Schmo said on that thread, "Men who can avoid [tropes such as my infamous 7 words] are certainly more evolved. It's certainly past time to leave those in the rhetorical toolbox." That seems to be exactly your point here, Res Ipsa, right? That people shouldn't say what I said? Despite this excellent advice, Lem found reason to be offended by what he said and it quickly devolved into her declaring, "this un-damned-believable. . Did you even READ the stupid title of this thread? Did you read the OP? Did you read anything posted here? Did you not get the point of Doc's post?!!!!!!"

Could anybody have done anything better in that branch of the conversation to more effectively promote the cause of feminism?

As a final case study, consider Lem's righteous indignation at my use of the term "full-time missionaries." When I used the term "full-time missionaries", Lem wrongly assumed I was deliberately referring only to male full-time missionaries, and proceeded to lecture me about how sexist, irritating, and offensive that is.

Toon read my words in a more accurate and charitable way, and kindly tried to explain my point. Lem reacted by doubling down on her original reading, declared that Toon "exacerbated" her point, and decried it as being sexist.

For my part, it was ineffective to allow myself to be triggered by her hostile misunderstanding of what I was saying, and my specific reaction was especially egregious. I own that.

Are there any other lessons we can learn from this? If we rewind the timeline to before I wrote those infamous seven words, could anybody have done anything differently to more effectively promoted the cause of feminism?

No, Analytics, that's not my point at all. My point is that shifting one's perspective changes how one thinks about the entire issue. Treating sexism as a moral defect that only bad people have has the effect of blocking change in two important ways. First, it allows us to assure ourselves that we aren't bad people and that the solution is fixing the bad people. That allows sexist attitudes and tropes to persist in speech and behavior, because we can always excuse ourselves because we're good people who intended no harm. That's the frustration that the woman in the article Lem posted is expressing.

If, instead, we approach the issue with the assumption that sexism is a thing people do, whether intended or inadvertent, we focus on the harm and ways we could prevent it. So, if one is interested in minimizing harm, which perspective should one choose?

I'm not going to parse people's interactions for the purpose of determine who was the good guy and who was the bad guy. I think you're all good guys. I would describe the initial incident as miscommunication. You wanted to communicate an idea, you put it into words, and Lem understood your words differently than you intended. That's a garden variety problem that happens on this board dozens of times a day. And, yours truly included, we tend to react by derailing the entire conversation into an argument about what the words "meant."

If I'm trying to communicate an idea, and someone receives something that I was not trying to communicate, it seems to me the most important thing is to get my idea across clearly. So, if I remind myself "eyes on the prize," I say something like "Hmm. That's not what I was trying to say. Let me rephrase." Sometimes I might say something like "I could have worded that better. Let me try again." That will avoid a derail, and the truth is that it's not important enough to me to argue about whose fault the miscommunication was. It happened. It's a very common thing. Let's keep our eyes on the prize.

I'm persuaded that women experience harm by behaviors that are embedded in our culture. If reducing that harm is important to me, then I don't care how an individual woman interacts with me in a conversation. Why should I change my mind about an issue like harm just because a woman was mean to me and hurt my feelings? "You weren't nice to me, so I'm not going to support feminists anymore" is a form of a BS argument you can observe in all kinds of contexts. Folks on the right use it to troll folks on the left all the time.

And what's really odd to me about these conversations, is that the men commonly describe the women as too emotional or flipping out or overreacting. But if you step back and remove yourself from the conversation and observe, it's the men who are flipping out, being overemotional, and overreacting.

We can look at the same thing in a different context that may be easier to see: white woman's tears. You can google the term and read lots of stuff about it. If a co-worker or a presenter at a diversity seminar points out something a white woman says or does as being racist, the response is generally that the white woman bursts into tears, claims she's being bullied, and claims that she's the victim. People react by consoling and comforting their friend and co-worker, and the racism issue is never discussed. It's the same dynamic, although leveraged by the crying.

I leave it to you and Lem, who are both adults, to reflect on the lessons of hindsight. I can only add that after listening to the experiences of women and observing how, no matter how polite they are, when a woman points out a sexist comment or behavior, the discussing always goes the same way, I'd be as furious as the woman in the article. Lem gets to decide how to interact with people, and so do you. And, given my assessment of the overall context, the last thing I'm going to do is tone police the woman in a conversation about sexism.

[Res Ipsa]

I am having a difficult time understanding why someone would think that it is the woman's fault would when someone makes a sexist comment to her.

Clearly. I mean, that situation is impossible, isn't it?

I would go a little further and say I have a difficult time understanding why the emphasis is on fault when the important issue is harm.

[Lem]

[The problem with remarks like "what's the point?" is that they are frequently used to convey the message "there's no point to your post." Face to face, we can read non-verbal cues to tell the difference. We don't have those on a message board. Using the phrasing from your last post, I think a fine question would have been something like: "Lem, I don't understand why you started this thread. Is the point to skewer Analytics or to talk about the pitfalls of patriarchal language?

That's an interesting question. My first response would have been to be deeply hurt that one option was "Is the point to skewer Analytics...?" Now I understand you are simply rephrasing what happened at the board, and not suggesting it as a reason yourself, but in the context of how it came up on the board, so let me answer specifically.

I was the one who was on the receiving end of a disgusting, sexist and public slur. Why would me talking about it on this board generate even the thought that I did it to "skewer" the one who made the comment? How is it even possible that the victim here would be asked, repeatedly, and with increasingly rude comments about her character: 'are you talking about this because you want to hurt the perpetrator?'

Are there any other circumstances where a person would be asked: are you commenting on this because you want to 'hurt' the perpetrator?

Think about that. Seriously, please.

He hurt me. There is absolutely no question that his comment was inappropriate. Why would a woman be guilted with such comments as 'are you reporting this because you want to hurt the perpetrator,' when it is clear the perpetrator hurt her? It boggles the mind.

A side issue might be "is the point to skewer him publicly?"

So let's consider that. This person posted his comment publicly. He publicly used an extremely sexist and inappropriate phrase to try to shut down a female participant. Publicly. Why would the question in the thread focus on the attributes of the victim that apparently lead her to decide to comment about it? Or, in the minds of some, to "publicly" shame the perpetrator. The "public" nature of the sexist slur came first. Deciding that the problem here is the public reporting of the slur, while the public nature of the slur is ignored sends the message that the only thing wrong with the slur is that the woman spoke up about it.

Or worse yet, caused it. Please see several posts above where it is suggested that the woman should 'take responsibility' for the sexist comment, because she may have 'caused' it.

No. There is no situation wherein a woman can be held responsible for the sexist slur a man chooses to say.

People are responsible for their own words. I am in no way responsible for a man saying to me, "are you on your period, or something?"

I'll address the second part of your initial question in a future post.

(ETA: I see once again you beat me to the topic by already discussing some of the context of what I mentioned above! consider my contribution an object lesson, then, or something. )

[Some Schmo]

I never thought you were specifically trying to skewer Analytics until you reacted what I thought was inappropriately to posts made by Gunnar, Moksha, and me. All of a sudden, Analytics explanation made perfect sense. I don't think I'd have made the same choice he made, but I can certainly relate to the frustration of dealing with someone who doesn't seem to want to listen to you.

You want to be heard. So does everyone else.