Trigger warning for brief mentions of rape.
The kyriarchy is like the Matrix.
(This was totally my metaphor first, and then Sinfest stole it and made it into a comic, and now hopefully it has been long enough that everyone forgot. Except, uh, I just mentioned Sinfest. Oops.)
This is the source of one of the most common disagreements between social-justice-y people and non-social-justice-y people. Non-social-justice-y people notice social-justice-y people getting mad at all sorts of things they don’t get mad at, and assume that the social-justice-y people are just looking for stuff to get mad at, presumably because they enjoy getting angry a lot.
But from the social-justice-y person’s perspective, on the other hand, it’s the exact opposite. The world is full of things to get mad about. At this very moment, I’m typing on a computer with parts almost certainly made by slave labor, listening to a misogynistic punk band. My other tab is full of news about the deficit of good jobs even as the American economy recovers, the increase in world population to seven billion and riots at Occupy Oakland. In a bit I’m going to go call my mom, who doesn’t want to hear about my girlfriend because she thinks polyamory is morally wrong.
I… can’t get mad at all that.
I can’t.
I mean, I could say it’s about activist burnout and self-care and all that jazz, but honestly? It’s because I don’t want to. I don’t want to spend all my time thinking about injustice and making the world a better place; I’m not that good a utilitarian. I want to write my Nano novel and eat bagels with guacamole and snuggle with my girlfriend. I don’t even want to give up all offensive media. I like the Lonely Island, and even if their songs sometimes make me cringe, a life without ever getting to sing “the boat engine make NOISE motherfucker” ever again is a life I do not want.
So I cheat. I shut up when someone I’m gaming with says something horrifically racist. I don’t look up the human rights records of the companies that make the shit I buy. I claim to be vegan but still eat sushi and Auntie Anne’s cinnamon-sugar pretzels. Because I can’t fight everything that deserves to be fought as hard as it deserves to be fought.
I don’t think anyone can. Everyone is complicit in this dirty rotten system.
If you aren’t a hypocrite, your moral standards aren’t high enough.
But that’s okay. Because we merry band of hypocrites and whiners are winning.
If you look at it, at the wide span of history– since the Enlightenment, we have ended every century freer and more equal than we started out. It used to be that poor people couldn’t vote. It used to be that people of color couldn’t sit in the same train car as white people in the South. It used to be that the Roman Catholic Church Church was allowed to ban books by Descartes and Defoe, Galileo and Voltaire. It used to be that it was legal to rape your wife in most of the world. It used to be that disabled people were regularly exhibited in freakshows, and neuroatypicals placed in lunatic asylums. It used to be that being queer was always a crime.
This isn’t saying that classism and racism and sexism and ableism and all the rest don’t exist anymore. God no. And it’s not saying that we can just sit back and allow the grand scheme of history to carry us forward into utopia. All of these victories were the responsibility of millions of men and women who sacrificed their prestige, their friendships, their free time, their jobs, their physical safety, even their lives. If a better world is going to happen, it is only going to happen because lots of people work their asses off for it.
But I think it’s good to look at the past and realize that victory is possible. Victory has happened. Is happening.
Not everyone can do everything. If you left me in charge of organizing a march, I would vomit from fear; if you told me to write about racism, the taste of feet would never manage to get itself out of my mouth. But I can blog about masculism (and sex-positivity) okay, and I flatter myself that I’ve done a little bit to make the lives of some men and the sex lives of some people better.
So… educate yourself about the oppressions you’re less familar with. Stop doing really awful privileged shit, as much as you can (I am talking to you, Pocahottie). Question your assumptions. Give money to a highly leveraged charity (GiveWell can help you decide which). Write letters to your congresspeople. Wave signs at marches. Organize marches. Volunteer– at a homeless shelter, a crisis hotline, a political campaign. Hell, run for office. Create media that shows voices that are rarely shown. Provide health care without shaming people for their sexualities, genders or body types. Find ways to make your job more inclusive, if you can. Point out to people if they say kyriarchal shit that they’re saying kyriarchal shit. Raise awesome children. Support and accept your friends.
And love yourself. Loving yourself is, I think, a radical act. The kyriarchy is doing its best to make sure that everyone hates themselves– or at least, everyone who isn’t that conventionally attractive, able-bodied, neurotypical, from-a-functional-family, rich, white, vanilla, monogamous, cis, straight, Protestant couple from Ohio. Therefore, by accepting yourself and working to be the best you you can be– not what the kyriarchy thinks you ought to be, but what would actually make you happiest– you are saying a giant “fuck off” to the Matrix.
And that’s way cooler than not being allowed to listen to the Lonely Island.
Yaaay! I’m bookmarking this, and if I should ever succeed at raising kids to the age where they care about this stuff it might help make them more awesome!
Bear in mind, BlackHumor, that I define ‘bitterness’ the same way it appears to be defined in society when it comes to men: Any sort of unfriendly feeling, attitude, or action towards the opposite gender. In fact, on one of the 101 faqs, I pretty much saw it outright stated, from a male writer or something, that ‘it hurts when you hear women say ‘I hate men’ but they really just mean ‘I hate male privilege” or some bullshit like that. Now, if I said outright ‘I hate women,’ would I be shown such tolerance? Now if you are going… Read more »
@balcony: But women DON’T get to be bitter against you. That’s exactly the sense in which the checklist doesn’t mean what you think it means.
If there’s too much bitterness in the discourse, why not add a little sweetness? I’ll bet it’ll taste better.
I have to be right, otherwise women get to be bitter against me while I’m not allowed even the least bitterness towards women.
I was referring to the privilege checklist and the full issue is the context. It’s a whole checklist of essentially why women get to feel oh so put upon because men apparently men have it oh so much better, with that at the end as if to say ‘Denial is proof. I win. Accept your guilt.’
There, am I not a worthless simpleton now? :p
It’s a whole checklist of essentially why women get to feel oh so put upon because men apparently men have it oh so much better, with that at the end as if to say ‘Denial is proof. I win. Accept your guilt.’ No, it really isn’t. Like, at all. Your description of it is wholly inaccurate. As I say, I think your inability to understand the difference is what’s keeping you from, to reference the OP, seeing the Matrix. It begins with this: Your idea of what the privilege checklist says is not at all what it says. Let go… Read more »
“I think a lot of people get annoyed at social justice-y people because, let’s face it, we do see a significant proportion of them employing the guilt trip tactic.” This, so much. When I’m not being told how horrible I am for being born male (i.e. ‘you have the privilege to be unaware of your privilege’) and how I’m such a huge part of the problem just for not being a ‘perfect’ ‘ally’ (as though I am merely a helper to the protagonist) and how I have no right to be upset about anything because I’m a white male, I’m… Read more »
When I’m not being told how horrible I am for being born male (i.e. ‘you have the privilege to be unaware of your privilege’)
balconyscene, the day you understand that your parenthetical example does not, in any way, mean what you claim it does, you will have taken your first step into a larger world.
@ dungone Ah, so the crime isn’t fanatacism, but self-ignorant and/or self-agrandizing fantacism? I agree with that. Self-reflection and honesty is usually a good thing. I still think that, once we get rid of the objetively horreendous child killing chemical tho’, it is in poor taste to go to every Puppy Saver convention and mention the time they used said chemicals. Also when discussing the dangers of using said chemicals, it would be best to blame a general ignorance and poor R&D methods that allowed their use rather than build a false correlation between chemical use and puppy saving. Take… Read more »
@Ozy: wonderful, refreshing post, and @Vejuz: “do what you can” is going to become a new catchphrase for me, I think. I think a lot of people get annoyed at social justice-y people because, let’s face it, we do see a significant proportion of them employing the guilt trip tactic. It seems to be a way of assuaging their own guilt (“yeah, but at least I’m doing more than… than HE is!”). It’s tiresome, it’s unhelpful, and it’s turned me away from so many movements in the past. This post reminds us that there is another way to do things,… Read more »
Remember: if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate! 😉
Leo Sallum – I don’t want to continue that argument here, but if you email me at [email protected], I’ll happily continue there.
@Jay, did you read my example of the role that Suffragists played in the White Feather Campaign? See, what you’re doing here is misconstruing the reason for my concern. Consider a hypothetical scenarios for just a minute. Let’s say that there’s a bunch of people sitting around saving puppies, but the use some sort of toxic chemical that later kills a bunch of children who play on the same spot. In other words, contributing to cause A is directly detrimental to cause B. It’s sort of like the way Abolition was an incredibly important movement, but it did have the… Read more »
@Daisy
Thanks. 🙂 My example’s not completely random. My wife’s trying to earn her PhD as a vet and there’s still a long road ahead of her, but if that’s too subtle a clue she works with rescue animals a lot. Her big thing right now is the asssiting in the spaying of wild strays. Anyway, everybody loves animals right? Well, dang you’d be surprised (well, maybe *you* specifically wouldn’t) what a punching bag animal rescue, control, readoption, and assistance can be for some folks. It seems to go right up their nose.
Oh. Then obviously I misread you. my bad >.>
Paul,
Yes! If you cut the 10 pages I wrote down to a single sentence, that’s what I’d like to get across.
@davenj, agreed that “unrealistic” is a pretty bad definition. Also agreed that my issue is with fanaticism and/or hypocritical social justice activists and that I don’t have an issue with high moral standards per se. I certainly never claimed that high moral standards were a social disorder.. But then again, it’s easy to mix up “social justice goal” with “moral standard” because of the moral value that social-justice-y people place on their set of goals. It’s also a matter of morality vs guilt, which is another tactic that social-justice-y people often leverage – and I do consider excess guilt to… Read more »
Dungone, I think there’s a good point in your post, but I’m not sure it’s the one you’re making. I think the real hypocrisy is not people having their own causes and not caring as much about other causes. The real hypocrisy is people having their own causes, not caring as mch about other causes- but still expecting everybody else to prioritize /their/ cause first.
Jay, that comment was funny! I actually witnessed something perilously close to your last paragraph once! :O
I was the one with the animals, too, so it wasn’t a fun place to be.
It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re finding for, you can always find a worthier cause or something to do better. But if you spend all your energy bashing activists for not focussing on the things you want them to focus on, while leaving non-activists alone, you can do more harm than good. There’s always a balance to be struck. I don’t think it’s unfair if you’re campaigning for someone’s rights to also expect them to show some degree of support for your rights, but working against people you agree with simply because they don’t have the same… Read more »
@ dungone “You practically wrote these people off derisively for perhaps saying that Abolition was “unrealistic” without weighing their concerns at all. But when Suffragists threatened to destroy or abandon the Abolitionist cause lest their personal demands were met, you’re saying they were right.” And again, this isn’t “missing the forest for the trees”. Rather, it’s another social justice problem that those activists failed to recognize, and potentially perpetuated. But yeah, “unrealistic” is a pretty bad definition. Conscripts have concerns. Slaves have concerns. All individuals have concerns, and the potential to oppress or be oppressed. Suffragists were right in the… Read more »
@ Dungone I can’t speak for other fanatics, but I actually *don’t* think gender issues are the most important issues in the world right now. I think classism, corporatism, and plutocratic oligarchies are much more dangerous -isms. And there’s always good old fashion racism, mental ablism, and anti-intellectualism. But I keep reading gender issue related websites. I keep consuming and creating gender bending media. I keep talking about it with my poor wife, ad nauseam. (I think I’m begining to make her reconsider her opinion on ball-gags.) So, whether or not my priorities are screwed, sexism and gender roles are,… Read more »
@Ozy, in my response to davenj, I feel that I have finally formulated my thoughts in a way where I can address a sneaking concern I suspect about your OP. Please note I’m not accusing of of this, just saying that there are two ways to understand certain views that are colored by personal experience with social-justice-y people. And please note, this is not a critique of feminists, but of some of the pitfalls of a social-justice-y point of view. Lest you think that I’m only being half-serious in my remarks about the Suffragists, I want to point you to… Read more »
Barry, I used to think it too. Because “people who disagree with me politically are miserable and burdened with horrible guilt, regardless of if they think they’re pretty happy” is a comforting thought in many ways. (This reminds me of the recent Onion headline about Dick Cheney: “New Cheney Memoir Reveals He’s Going To Live Full, Satisfied Life Without Ever Feeling Remorse And There’s Nothing We Can Do About It”) It’s hard to believe that certain people have no conscience, don’t care if they oppress people, and are perfectly content with that. But they are. I have to admit, they… Read more »
@The L o.O I totally missed the Hyperbole and a Half reference until you pointed it out. My wife and I use the expression so much I just sort of took it as a natural figure of speech. Sinfest and H&H references on a NSWATM post? Stop hat-tricking my favorites folder Ozy. 😀 Re: the Sinfest feminism thread, the closest thing I’ve seen to a gentle nose tweak are the facts that Little Bigwheel Feminist used some feminist lingo (e.g. mansplaining) to shout down Slick’s valid, but indolent and uninformed, comments down and that she is a mini like Slick,… Read more »
@davenj Suffragists were right. It’s a sad truth that abolition only conferred voting rights to half of the freed slave population. And I’d say you’re missing the forest for the trees, just as the Suffragists did then and just as feminists to this day continue to miss the point. The vast majority of men of all races who were conscripted to fight in the Civil War did not have the right to vote. So the Suffragist mindset, where they were missing the forest for the trees, was something like this (I paraphrase): So yeah let’s free all the slaves and… Read more »