So this is basically just a roundup of common mistakes people make while out Social-Justice-ing, which I am listing out in the hopes that people will avoid doing that shit.
The Lipstick Argument. I call this the “lipstick argument” because the first time I ever saw it was in a radical feminist essay about lipstick. (Sadly, it was an Internet essay, and I’ve since lost the link.) The radical feminist in question explained in great detail that lipstick was self-objectification that led men to think of women as only important for their beauty and encouraged the sexualization of women’s bodies. For the sake of the sisterhood, the essay concluded, it was necessary to give up lipstick; if a woman wore it, she was clearly colluding with the patriarchy.
It left me wondering… but what about the women who like wearing lipstick?
It is shitty to make people do things they don’t want to do because of their identity. That is literally the whole point of social justice. It is equally shitty to make people wear lipstick if they don’t want to and not wear lipstick if they do.
Let me be clear. It’s okay to critique masculinity and femininity. There’s nothing wrong with “high heels cause damage to women’s feet” or “football causes dangerous concussions in young men”; there’s not even anything wrong with “high heels encourage the equation of femininity with weakness and sexualization” or “football culture links masculinity and violence.” There is a problem when you say “therefore no one should wear high heels or watch football,” because the goal of all these critiques is not a world free of football or high heels (how crappy would that be?). The goal is a world where people can play football or wear high heels as they please, without anyone giving them shit about it because of their gender identity.
Subversivism. That’s saying that genders which fuck the patriarchy are better than genders that don’t fuck the patriarchy: genderqueers are better than binary trans people, who are better than gender-non-conforming cis people, who are better than gender-conforming cis people. I hope I don’t have to explain why this sucks, right? This sucks.
When I was in Catholic high school, I got into quite a lot of arguments with my theology teachers. They absolutely hated me, because I was young and angry and fresh off a Richard Dawkins/Sam Harris/PZ Myers/Greta Christina kick, and thus prone to writing twenty-page papers about how God didn’t exist. However! My school also organized regular food drives for migrant farmworkers.
You could say, as a principled atheist, that I should refuse to be involved in any charity drives run by the Roman Catholic Church. But here’s the problem: if I took that point of view, it would have no appreciable difference on the views of my theology teachers, and the migrant farmworkers still wouldn’t get fed. I don’t know about you, but I care more about farmworkers having full bellies than I do about ideological purity.
In Internet Social Justice Land there’s this habit of balkanizing ourselves into these little groups that all agree with each other about everything, and then anyone who disagrees is stupid and oppressive and probably a Nazi. In the real world, people who agree with you about everything are rare and hard to locate, and people tend to be fairly attached to their ideas and don’t want to be argued out of them. Only wanting to do stuff with people who agree with you, a lot of times, means not doing anything at all.
Note: this post is about beliefs, not actions. If my school was requiring people to pray before giving them the food, I’d be quite right to oppose that. But as long as they’re only doing things I support, I should support them.
People Can Say Bad Things And Not Be THE WORST PEOPLE EVER.
Humans have particular difficulty with this concept– it’s called the “halo effect” in psychology. In general, if you see someone who tells a rape joke, you’re going to assume they’re stupid and sexist and mean and probably smell funny; it’s just how brains work.
However, in the real world, someone can tell a rape joke because they honestly don’t know that it’s problematic, and yelling at him that he’s stupid and sexist and mean and probably smells funny will leave him still telling rape jokes and convinced you are a man-hating feminist. This is a non-optimal solution.
Now, there’s no moral duty to call out kyriarchal shit. If you can’t deal with it without screaming… you don’t have to. It doesn’t make you a bad person. But if you decide to call someone out, take a deep breath and call them out without calling them a sexist bastard.
The same “says bad things, not the worst person ever” principle also applies to social-justice-y writers. With the possible exception of bell hooks, there is not a single feminist writer who hasn’t ever said a fucked-up thing; some of the most fucked-up people are the ones who come up with the most important theory (Dworkin was hugely inspirational to Susie Bright, among other early sex-positive feminists). Take the bits that are useful, discard the bits that are not useful.
Call-outs. That whole “people can say bad things and not be THE WORST PEOPLE EVER?” thing? It applies to you too. In fact, I can 100% guarantee that as a member of the Social Justice League you will say something problematic about twelve times a week. I certainly do. (Hey, guys, my class privilege was totally showing in the World AIDS Day post. Turns out not everyone can afford retrovirals! Oops.)
The important thing is to learn to respond to callouts with grace. Your first reaction, at least if you’re anything like me, will be to explain in a fit of righteous rage that you are not wrong, in fact you are the best ally Group X has ever had, they are getting offended at nothing, and how were you supposed to know that anyway? This is not productive. Take a deep breath, thank the person for bringing it to your attention and stop doing the shitty thing. Or read up on it and, after carefully considering the other person’s point of view, decide that actually the person was mistaken. That’s okay too. The keyword here is polite.
I see a lot of the “Tone Fallacy,” because I consider the people on my side doing harm to be a bigger problem than the people on the other side doing just about anything. Which is to say, I get jumped a lot for telling people they’re making things worse rather than better. It’s amazing how defensive people are about their right to be offensive. (Or just plain wrong.) If Sun Tsu’s strategies can be summed up as anything, it would be “Defeat yourself first, all else will follow.” The primary target of transformation a moral campaign needs is itself.… Read more »
What, nothing about “the Tone Argument”? The one where you tell people any offense they take at the way you make your Social Justice argument is wrong because they’re clearly just trying to shut you down, while they will complain about your tone at the drop of a hat? The problem I have with this is that I believe that if you are presenting your message in a manner that hampers its positive reception, then you change the way you present it. Saying that it is right and one has a right to offend people is saying you’re inherently more… Read more »
What about people that victim blame? Are they bad people? What about people that rape, yet don’t identify themselves as rapists?
Martha Joy, I can’t tell you how many elderly southerners have said the same exact things to me, that black people were expected to use the back door, sit in the back (not just on buses, but many other places too, if they were even allowed in at all) and so on, and they just accepted this. They had never seen otherwise. When the freedom riders and others came south and suggested that things could be different, they were flabbergasted. One older friend of mine (now in his 70s) said he went on a field trip to DC when he… Read more »
I saw this TEDtalk yesterday, it’s called “The danger of a single story” and is held by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie. She doesn’t talk about privilege, per se, but it’s very strong, moving and to the point. I strongly encourage you to have a look. A paraphrase, that made me laugh: “I have read your book, and, you know, it’s so sad that Nigerian men beat up their wives.” “I just read American Psycho. It’s so sad that American teenagers are mass murderers.” I spent six years in Cameroon as a child/teenager, so I got a lot of experiences… Read more »
@chrislittlesun: Your comment and example of recognizing privilege and acting on it was thoughtful and well said. Our collective little actions ever-so-slowly shift the norms over time. My own awareness of and action in regards to privilege is more centered on class than gender, race, etc. I see lots of divisions and obstacles in place that are class-based and those divisions and obstacles seem to be growing, at least in North America. Having come very recently from very poor ancestors, I do my best to advocate for people who are trying to work their way up and lend a hand… Read more »
On the subject of this: “Subversivism. That’s saying that genders which fuck the patriarchy are better than genders that don’t fuck the patriarchy: genderqueers are better than binary trans people, who are better than gender-non-conforming cis people, who are better than gender-conforming cis people. I hope I don’t have to explain why this sucks, right? This sucks.” I’ve had quite a bit of experiance of this. A while ago I was in a relationship with a trans woman, who was involved with a regular queer clubnight in London. She passed extreamly well, but every now and then she’d let her… Read more »
“We’re all wrong about something” is an important thing to learn.
@Ozy: In Internet Social Justice Land there’s this habit of balkanizing ourselves into these little groups that all agree with each other about everything, and then anyone who disagrees is stupid and oppressive and probably a Nazi. In the real world, people who agree with you about everything are rare and hard to locate, and people tend to be fairly attached to their ideas and don’t want to be argued out of them. Only wanting to do stuff with people who agree with you, a lot of times, means not doing anything at all. I find this article to be… Read more »
Daisy, we always tend to judge the past on the standards of the now. Even amongst feminists it is common to judge past values with the morality and standards we have as a society now. Taking a subject like voting we judge early 20th century culture to be behind – only rich land owners could vote however really that links back to the feudal system whereby the land owner was responsible for the protection of the people under them and they represented upwards. In a society with low literacy and no easy mode of transport it makes some sense. Similarly… Read more »
Some of the rest of the problem with call-outs as a shiny red nuclear switch is the whole “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” thing. When you’ve got your finger on the switch all the time, of course you come off as hair-trigger and reactionary. And that’s not to say that there’s not a reason for that attitude in general, because there are a lot of hateful asshats out there trolling the ‘Tubes. On the other hand, there’s all sorts of collateral damage and innocent civilians caught in the blast radius. Have I milked… Read more »
“Able-bodied privielege – CLS, this takes care of itself with age – trust me. You don’t have to develop a disability to notice how what used to be easy hurts a little now, what used take no thought now requires some planning, and the list goes on.”
Totally, and I never said any different! What I said counts for all people who are not as able bodied as is generally expected by society. And it was just one example to illustrate my point.
Improbable Joe: I feel like the existence of “call outs” as a thing is a problem by itself. I don’t think its the call that’s the problem but the way people use them at times. I have no problem with “Recognize that your experience as _________ isn’t the only valid experience”. However I do have a problem with “Recognize that your experience as _______ means anything you say is irrelevant”. I’m about the same way with privilege. Its a useful tool of measurement to see how things are. But too often people take it too far and use it, as… Read more »
@Ozy: Totally going to try a block quote… Call outs are, admittedly, not ideal. However, if you think about it, the other option is having people continue to do fucked-up things that make other people feel bad– quite often out of ignorance. The idea is sound, even if a lot of people are bad at doing it in an effective manner. Well… there’s a difference between suggesting that someone is using language in a way that’s hurtful, and even calling people out occasionally, and the “call-out” that seems to be a hobby of some people. There are some folks who… Read more »
On the point of privilege, I think the problem comes when people try to speak for others and project their white/cis/het/abled/etc. feelings onto others. Telling people to check their privilege can be useless, I agree with other commenters to an extent there, but I don’t see anything wrong with reminding people to stop assuming their experiences are universal or that they’re entitled to speak for someone whose social category they do not belong to. We need a less vulgar way to say “your ass is showing”, methinks.
Call outs – these don’t have to be hurtful. I have appreciated all the ones I have ever gotten because 1. they were accurate and 2. tone matters when it comes to actually communicating and these call were actually intended to communicate something rahter than just demonstrate the call-out-er’s personal moral superiority. Subversivism – What Ozy said. That is all. BTW this is at the root of all that “Is he black enough” stuff that will not die. It plagues any kind of movement for social change. Privilege – I think the term is sloppy to the point of uselessness… Read more »
Chris, your insight is what was missing in the thread I was talking about. When I said there were things we could do in the here and now, I was told I wanted everyone to go back to living in huts. (?) In other words, all or nothing.
No, just wanted a little awareness of the kind you have thoughtfully shown here. 🙂 Thank you for sharing your experience.
“chris: I know. My point is that that is entirely internal. Hence it doesn’t actually effect anything out there in the real world, where the inside of my head or yours couldn’t matter less.” This is the complete opposite of what I was saying. If you read it again you’ll see I was making the point that these changes *do* affect things in the outside world. Being aware that there are things you take for granted that other people can’t do or find difficult means that you can then take this into account when you’re planning/organising things and generally interacting… Read more »
@StillInverted: chris: I know. My point is that that is entirely internal. Hence it doesn’t actually effect anything out there in the real world, where the inside of my head or yours couldn’t matter less. I think the point is that it has to start somewhere. Most of us will be in a position to affect someone of a different demographic than ourself over the course of our lives, and realising where your experiences differ from other’s is likely to make you better at using that influence, and make it more likely that collective action is taken to right certain… Read more »
chris: I know. My point is that that is entirely internal. Hence it doesn’t actually effect anything out there in the real world, where the inside of my head or yours couldn’t matter less.
“I can recognize all the damn privilege I have, and check it in all the discussions I have, make as sure as I can not to step on anyone’s toes–yet I’m still not morally obligated to *do* anything about said privilege. There’s a world of difference between “you need to notice these things about yourself to have a certain standard of politeness” (ok, but not useful) and “you need to hamper yourself to cancel out benefits you have” (useful, but not in any way ok, nor what anyone here is arguing, I think.)” I tend to think that one of… Read more »
Oscar Romero was never excommunicated but Meister Eckhart certainly was. 🙁 It upsets me a lot to think that this brilliant man died thinking he was outside the church. I hope he was also brilliant enough to know that such designations are meaningless, and his words and ideas were far more important than the excommunication.
They reversed it after his death, of course. (scowls in disapproval) Assholes!
Ozy: There is a long history of the Powers That Be in the Catholic Church actively discouraging social justice work (and then retroactively sainting the people once they’re safely dead).
St Cyril of Jerusalem organized the first food giveaway back in 350-something AD, by selling church items to pay for it. Then they exiled him for it. He only came back to Jerusalem after the Emperor who exiled him had died.
As you see by the name, he’s a saint now. And of course, my cat’s name, which is far more important. http://daisysdeadair.blogspot.com/2011/05/cyrils-post.html
Valerie: A trans-positive radical feminist in the 1970s?
Kate Millett, Audre Lorde, Florynce Kennedy
Note on OP: Could it be that the trouble folks have with the “Halo Effect” is that they want to believe they have a consistent System of Ideas that Makes Sense and Everything Works in such a way that they’ve neatly categorized principles as Inside the System (and therefore right) or Outside the System (and therefore wrong?) In other words, that someone can’t disagree with you one one point, agree with you on another, and still be consistent/coherent themselves? I know I get awfully jumpy when that happens to me; I’d rather think my belief system is integrated. The world… Read more »