Brute Reason

"It’s not just the internet. And we can’t push the problem aside with a wave of our hands and an..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 15:25:54 -0500

“It’s not just the internet. And we can’t push the problem aside with a wave of our hands and an offhand comment of “Oh, that’s just how the internet is. Don’t you know better than to go to reddit?” For many women, reddit is not an isolated internet thing. It’s the community that we have to deal with face to face, day in and day out. So yes, we need to change online culture, but we also need to change the culture of which the internet is a mirror image. Only then will our online community reflect the community we want to be a part of.”

- It’s Not Just the Internet. It Never Has Been. | This View of Life

"I am one of the lucky ones. I managed to turn my history of science and philosophy degree into..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 13:43:42 -0500

“I am one of the lucky ones. I managed to turn my history of science and philosophy degree into graduate education in a semi-practical field. I’m not too worried about my employment opportunities once I finish my PhD. But I have friends who are suffering. They are being bounced around between unpaid internships, or desperately sending out resumes, or stuck working in underpaid fast-food jobs when they have master’s degrees. It’s nasty out there, and for baby boomers with secure pensions to shrug their shoulders and say that we should have been more shrewd with our career planning when we were seventeen and there was no recession and everybody was telling us to follow our passions is not just wrong; it’s also insulting. It’s a deliberate attack on unemployed and underemployed young people, aimed at implicating us in our own misfortune and diverting attention away from political choices that are needlessly exacerbating the recession. That this wrong and hurtful narrative has been accepted by the media and political elites is a big, big problem.”

- Why The Practicality Trolls are Wrong | Earnest and Jest

"The big deal comes in when homeless people are being exploited to prove a point. Many homeless..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:24:47 -0500

“The big deal comes in when homeless people are being exploited to prove a point. Many homeless people are already widely disenfranchised and lacking a platform to be heard or to get access to the resources they need. By attempting to make a brand look bad by associating it with homelessness, the message is that homeless people are so gross, dirty, shameful (insert negative attribute here) that by associating the brand with these types of people, we are really making the brand look shitty, because these people are so shitty! get it? It’s all such a laugh! This type of “activism” is a farce. It contributes to and propagates a culture wherein homeless people can be used as props to further an agenda.”

- Why Fitch the Homeless is a Really Bad Idea

"What can I say? Northwestern, with all its issues with diversity and inclusion, has led me to be..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 22:50:19 -0500

“What can I say? Northwestern, with all its issues with diversity and inclusion, has led me to be more thoughtful in my own words and actions. It’s made me more aware of the way we put each other down and perpetuate stereotypes without even realizing. I know that I can’t change that aspect of the world or even that aspect of Northwestern overnight. But I can change the way I talk and the way I act, and I’m so grateful that this school opened my eyes to that.

That’s what I love about Northwestern: That here I have been able to forge my own path. I’ve been able prove my own strength. Having a meaningful experience at this school requires you to be self-aware, or to learn to be. You have to in order to navigate the fragmented social scene, the sea of academic options, the frustrating bureaucracy and your own overwhelming heart.

That’s hard and not always fair. There are a lot of people Northwestern could do a better job of taking care of. We could all do a better job taking care of each other. But I also think we could do a better job of looking at ourselves and saying, “Okay. Only I really know myself. Can I do this? How can I do this? Do I want to do this? Do I need help doing this?”

In the end, I can only control my own actions. I can extend a hand to someone in pain. I can study hard, or party harder. I can join a club, or not join it. I can ask for help. I can decide to make my experience at Northwestern worth something. I can try to make someone else’s experience better, too, and even if I don’t succeed, at least I did what I could.”

- How to be really confused about Northwestern | North by Northwestern

My feels about college, basically. Though I wouldn’t really say I love it.

"As long as conservatives are inclined to think that Mr Richwine was “bullied” and..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 13:43:41 -0500

“As long as conservatives are inclined to think that Mr Richwine was “bullied” and “lynched” for his brave empiricism, instead of having been sunk by the repugnant prejudice exposed by the shoddiness of his work, non-white voters will continue to flock to a party less enthusiastically receptive to the possibility of their inferiority.”

- Racism and immigration policy: The Richwine affair | The Economist

"The standard liberal feminist or egalitarian stance here is that it is patriarchy that genders war...."

Wed, 15 May 2013 11:29:01 -0500

“The standard liberal feminist or egalitarian stance here is that it is patriarchy that genders war. Sexism decrees that women are too weak, too delicate for the battlefield so it must be left to the bigger, stronger, braver men. The solution, they argue, is for equal combat roles, equal conscription, equal numbers of women and men doing the killing and dying. I find that obscene. In what moral universe is it a better to have as many women slaughtered on the front line as men? As a culture we have always tended towards casual indifference to the deaths of ordinary men, and been comparatively sensitive to the loss of ‘innocent’ women and children. It’s the first value that needs changing, not the second.”

- We don’t call this sexism, we call it, err… » Heteronormative Patriarchy for Men

RNC Director Of Hispanic Outreach Quits Party And Registers As A Democrat | ThinkProgress

Tue, 14 May 2013 23:42:51 -0500

RNC Director Of Hispanic Outreach Quits Party And Registers As A Democrat | ThinkProgress:

This is especially great in light of all the speculation about how the GOP will regain votes by “appealing” to Hispanic/Latino voters. Miiiiight wanna tone down the racism first.

"When we come upon a piece of social science that is weakly researched and poorly argued, it’s..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 23:39:07 -0500

“When we come upon a piece of social science that is weakly researched and poorly argued, it’s reasonable to suppose that the “conclusion” is actually a fixed point, a presupposition, and that the main body of the work had been contrived to support it. In this light, it’s important to remember why Mr Richwine’s dissertation became a subject of controversy. Mr Richwine had co-authored an abysmally rigged study with then-colleague Robert Rector that cast Hispanic immigrants as welfare leeches draining the lifeblood from the body politic.”

- Racism and immigration policy: The Richwine affair | The Economist

"But I'm a man and I don't feel like I have any privilege."

Tue, 14 May 2013 09:40:33 -0500

"But I'm a man and I don't feel like I have any privilege.":

The hardest thing about explaining privilege to members of dominant groups is that, usually, the fact that you’re advantaged in certain ways doesn’t mean you’re not disadvantaged in many other ways. So when we’re talking about gender and a man is told that he’s privileged–or when we’re talking about race and a white person is told that they’re privileged, or whatever–their immediate response is often, “What privilege? Look at all the ways my life has been unfair!”

To be clear, this argument is not always made in good faith*. However, for the sake of this post, I’m going to pretend that it is, because there are important points to be made about this.

Privilege is best understood as a system of interacting benefits (or disadvantages). When people in a feminist space talk about “privilege,” they often just mean male privilege. All other things being equal–this is the important part–if you are a man, you are at an advantage relative to a woman.

Of course, that’s only useful theoretically. In practice, gender isn’t the only thing that matters. Race, sexual orientation, gender expression, gender identity, (dis)ability, religion, skin color (within race), class, weight, attractiveness, immigration status–all these things make a difference. (This is what feminists refer to as “intersectionality.”)

Say you’re a man but you lack privilege in another area–say you’re a man of color. Are you more privileged than a white, upper-class, straight, able-bodied, Christian woman? Probably not. Are you more privileged than a lower-middle-class, queer Latina woman? Probably. And your being male is only one of many ways in which you are more privileged than this hypothetical woman.

Many men have trouble understanding or accepting the concept of privilege because they do not feel that they have much of it. On one hand, this is true–men can be poor, men can be disabled, men can be non-white, men can be queer. On the other hand, privilege often remains unchallenged because it is invisible. If you are white, you don’t spend much time thinking about the fact that you never (or almost never) get stopped by the cops for absolutely no reason, searched, and subjected to harsh questions. If you are a man of color, this is something that’s almost certainly happened to you, and a problem of which you are very much aware. Likewise, if you’re a man–unless you’re very visibly gender-nonconforming–you don’t have to worry every time you go out alone at night that someone will harass you, that someone will rub up against you on the subway platform and make disgusting sounds, that someone will follow you down the street yelling at you to come back to him. All of these things have happened to me and most other women.

But this probably isn’t something you think about all the time. It’s natural that you’d think more about the ways your life can be challenging, not about how lucky you are to not get followed down the street by strange men all the time. The injustices in your life are probably more salient to you than all the myriad ways in which things work as they should. So it would make sense that, overall, you feel like you lack privilege rather than feeling like you have it.

Another way of looking at it is that a man can very much have a really difficult life that’s almost devoid of any privileges. But if, hypothetically, this same man with these same circumstances had instead been born a woman, her life would be even more difficult and even more devoid of privilege.

This is why privilege is best used as a theoretical concept and not taken too literally. It’s impossible to “measure” it. It’s impossible to know, for instance, whether a hypothetical man necessarily has more total privilege than me, or whether I have more than him.

This is also why, when discussing privilege with folks who aren’t very familiar with intersectionality, it’s best to be as specific as possible. “You just don’t get this because you’re privileged” or “Check your privilege” is never going to work if the person you’re talking to actually lacks privilege along every axis other than the one you’re talking about (well, or if they don’t know what the hell privilege even means). If I–a white, able-bodied, cisgender, middle-class woman–yell at a poor, queer man of color to “check his privilege” because he said something sexist, he would (and should) laugh in my face. Because he’ll probably immediately think of his class, race, and sexual orientation and wonder how, exactly, he’s so privileged.

When this comes up, it’s vital to remind people that the disadvantages they face in life are not a product of the fact that they’re male (or white, or whatever). If I tell you that being a woman means I have to worry about people harassing me on the street and you tell me that, well, being a queer man means you get harassed on the street too, you’re missing the point a little. It’s not being a man that gets you harassed. It’s being queer, because we have a society that’s unjust toward queer people.

Some have tried to get around this hurdle when educating about privilege by creating metaphors in which you get a certain number of “points” in different domains. If you’re white, you get more “points” than if you’re not white. If you’re male, you get more points than if you’re not male. If you’re straight…you get the idea. Then the total points you have is your privilege, and you can see that getting few points in one category doesn’t mean you can’t get many points in another category. (John Scalzi made a similar metaphor brilliantly here.)

Such metaphors are fraught with complications (should being male give you more points than being white?), they’re useful for showing that you can’t just look at one axis. It’s not just about being male. It’s not just about being white. It’s everything.

Privilege is a theory, a framework that can be used to explain how our social world works. Like all theories, it has weaknesses and blind spots. Some try to make up for these by continually inventing new forms of privilege–vanilla privilege and couple privilege are a few that I’ve heard relatively recently–but in reality, the problem with taking privilege too literally is that there are just too damn many variables that shape our circumstances and what we are able to achieve. It is completely possible to be a straight white cis able-bodied middle-class Christian mentally/physically healthy English-speaking American plain-ol-vanilla-white-bread man and still have your life completely destroyed and fucked over by circumstances beyond your control.

That does not mean that you do not have privilege.

All it means is that privilege is just a theory, useful for explaining many but not all things, and that you, my friend, were really unlucky and that legitimately sucks.

~~~

*Examples: “Male privilege? But women never answer my OkCupid messages!” and “White privilege? But [insert story about how you got rejected from a job/college because some Totally Unqualified Black Person got it instead].”

"A vested interest in general human welfare is an implicit goal of feminism. If you’re helping women,..."

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:43:34 -0500

“A vested interest in general human welfare is an implicit goal of feminism. If you’re helping women, you’re helping people. Some might prefer to call this humanitarianism, humanism, or being-a-decent-human-being-ism, but many of us are content to call it feminism. And there’s nothing exclusionary about that.”

- Why Not Say Everyday Humanism Instead of Everyday Feminism? — Everyday Feminism

"Saying that we can’t have feminism because we should only focus on general human rights is like..."

Mon, 13 May 2013 10:43:00 -0500

“Saying that we can’t have feminism because we should only focus on general human rights is like saying we can’t have oncologists because some doctors are general practitioners.”

- Why Not Say Everyday Humanism Instead of Everyday Feminism? — Everyday Feminism

"The fact that some African Americans have experienced great success in recent years does not mean..."

Sun, 12 May 2013 20:34:00 -0500

“The fact that some African Americans have experienced great success in recent years does not mean that something akin to a racial caste system no longer exists. No caste system in the United States has ever governed all black people; there have always been “free blacks” and black success stories, even during slavery and Jim Crow. The superlative nature of individual black achievement today in formerly white domains is a good indicator that the old Jim Crow is dead, but it does not necessarily mean the end of racial caste. If history is any guide, it may have simply taken a different form.”

- Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow

"Many will wonder how a nation that has just elected its first black president could possibly have a..."

Sun, 12 May 2013 19:41:31 -0500

“Many will wonder how a nation that has just elected its first black president could possibly have a racial caste system. It’s a fair question. But…there is no inconsistency whatsoever between the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land and the existence of a racial caste system in the era of colorblindness. The current system of control depends on black exceptionalism; it is not disproved or undermined by it. Others may wonder how a racial caste system could exist when most Americans—of all colors—oppose race discrimination and endorse colorblindness. Yet as we shall see in the pages that follow, racial caste systems do not require racial hostility or overt bigotry to thrive. They need only racial indifference, as Martin Luther King, Jr. warned more than forty-five years ago.”

- Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow

"The impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than thirty years, the U.S. penal population..."

Sun, 12 May 2013 19:22:42 -0500

“The impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than thirty years, the U.S. penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran. In Germany, 93 people are in prison for every 100,000 adults and children. In the United States, the rate is roughly eight times that, or 750 per 100,000.”

- Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow

bostonprep21: This is perfect! Its an info-graphic from Sen....

Sun, 12 May 2013 18:52:07 -0500

bostonprep21:

This is perfect! Its an info-graphic from Sen. Elizabeth Warren comparing government interest rates between student loans and banks. Awesome to see where our nations priorities are! I am so proud that Sen. Warren was the first I ever voted for! Proud to be her constituent!

Capitalism, folks

iamayoungfeminist: SO ACCURATE OMG So over millennial hate....

Sun, 12 May 2013 17:09:06 -0500

iamayoungfeminist:

SO ACCURATE OMG

So over millennial hate. Fuck off. I love my generation.

Top general blames military’s sexual assault on “hookup culture.”

Sun, 12 May 2013 15:25:58 -0500

Top general blames military’s sexual assault on “hookup culture.”:

So THAT happened…

From the Patriarchy Hurts Men Too™ Files:

Sun, 12 May 2013 14:46:56 -0500

“These results make clear that men, as well as women, are penalized when they are successful in gender inconsistent domains. But they also indicate that men and women do not pay the same price for gender norm violation. When successful at a female gender-typed job, men were characterized as more ineffectual and considered less deserving of respect than women successful at the same job or than men successful in a position considered to be more gender-appropriate. There results, together with the replication of findings showing women successful in male domains to be derogated and disliked, support the idea that penalties for success take the form of characterizations that are antithetical to how men and women are ‘supposed to be.’ Interestingly, regardless of the nature of these characterizations, both men and women whose success violated gender norms were judged to be similarly undesirable as bosses, suggesting that different reactions to counter-normative men and women can lead to the same negative consequences.”

M. E. Heilman & A. S. Wallen, “Wimpy and undeserving of respect: Penalties for men’s gender-inconsistent success” (2010)

In other words, IF YOU KEEP TELLING ME THAT SEXISM DOES NOT OCCUR ANY LONGER AND/OR THAT RESEARCH ON SEXISM IGNORES ITS IMPACT ON MEN THEN I WILL PRINT OUT ALL OF THESE STUDIES, ROLL THEM UP INTO A TUBE, AND RAM THEM DOWN YOUR THROAT UNTIL YOU LEARN THEIR CONTENTS

The Stunning Difference Between Treatment of Men & Women on Reddit

Sun, 12 May 2013 13:43:28 -0500

The Stunning Difference Between Treatment of Men & Women on Reddit

thegoddamazon: maymay: “Repeat Rape: How do they get away with...

Sun, 12 May 2013 12:39:59 -0500

It turns out that if you ask the right questions in just the right way, some men will actually tell you that they're rapists. They'll just…admit it.

The key is, don't use the word rape. Just ask them what they've done.

Researchers asked 1,882 men: "Have you ever tried to have oral sex with someone by using (or threatening to use) physical force—twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.—if they did not cooperate?"

and: "Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they didn't want to, because they were too intoxicated to resist your advances?"

120 answered yes.

(That's rape.)

1,882 men…

120 rapists.

They admitted to a total of 483 rapes and attempted rapes. 483!

Whoa.

thegoddamazon:

maymay:

“Repeat Rape: How do they get away with it?”, Part 1 of 2. (link to Part 2)

Sources:

College Men: Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists,Lisak and Miller, 2002 [PDF, 12 pages]

Navy Men: Lisak and Miller’s results were essentially duplicated in an even larger study (2,925 men): Reports of Rape Reperpetration by Newly Enlisted Male Navy Personnel, McWhorter, 2009 [PDF, 16 pages]

By dark-side-of-the-room, who writes:

These infogifs are provided RIGHTS-FREE for noncommercial purposes. Repost them anywhere. In fact, repost them EVERYWHERE. No need to credit. Link to the L&M study if possible.

Knowledge is a seed; sow it.

Pretty much.