I don’t know how I feel about this. One the one hand, this kind of bullshit is certainly a thing I have experienced, but I don’t experience it often enough to feel truly outraged about it. I recently argued with some guy on the internet about chivalry and why I think it’s sexist bullshit, but about halfway through the argument I realized I really don’t care that much in every day life. It’s not like I flip my shit when a man pulls out a chair for me or anything. But for some reason, in this intellectualized context, it seemed important enough to argue about.
One theory maybe is that when you’ve had shitty things happen to you because you’re a minority, you tend to lump everything together. Any perceived instance of injustice, no matter how small, forms this overall emotional impression that is hard to shake. Like in my mind I’m linking chivalry with these genuinely traumatic experiences I have had, because what microagressions do is remind you about all those other shitty experiences. It just feels like being kicked while you’re down. And that’s maybe where the disconnect is for more privileged groups – we all get what it’s like to be dissed, we know it’s annoying but we think of it as no big deal, because we can’t empathize with all the baggage that comes with it if you are a minority. It’s all about context.
I tend to have very radical SJW friends, so they post a lot about this on Facebook and such. And on the one hand, I readily acknowledge that I cannot know another’s experience and I wouldn’t presume to tell someone their experiences of racism, sexism, or whatever aren’t important. On the other hand, I am feeling increasingly alienated by this culture… and I couldn’t put my finger on it until an internet commenter made it clear. He was a gay man who had been a long-time social justice activist and he saw the recent actions on campus as misguided, namely because social justice these days has become an intellectualized experience for many people, to the point where we’ve confused lecturing at people with real social activism. And in my experience, lecturing only alienates people who really cannot get it on an empathetic level.
I am genuinely conflicted. And I don’t feel I have a lot of room to talk on issues of race because I am a white person. But as a woman, I am genuinely unhappy with a lot of the mainstream feminist narrative because it seems so fundamentally alienating to men. That just seems like bad strategy. I’ve heard all the arguments in favor, the statements that men cannot truly be feminists because they lack the experience of being a woman, and I think it’s bullshit. We need allies, and I don’t think you can yell people into understanding you.
The SJW crowd would call this ‘‘tone policing’’ and I get the criticism, but on the other hand, I’m a woman, I know sexism is a thing, and I still think we’re getting it wrong. Those articles about how women are justified in their mistrust of men really piss me off. I would hope that we all understand the concept of confirmation bias and also that, as feminists, we’re well aware most sexual assaults aren’t committed by strangers. Can’t rationality step in at a certain point and trump personal experience? It just seems intellectually lazy to me, and not at all productive.
A recent example is an article I saw that said something along the lines of ‘‘3 Ways ‘For Her Pleasure’ Sex can actually be misogynistic.’’ For fuck’s sake. Sure, I guess an argument can be made, and I can think of a lot of academic, intellectual reasons someone might think this matters. But I recently started working at a DV and sexual assault shelter. There was a recent FBI report that found 20% of women in my state reported being raped in their lifetime, and 60% had experienced sexual assault. 1 in 3 families in my state experience domestic violence, and, according to FBI statistics, 98% of reported domestic violence cases were women. We have to turn away thousands of women every year in our county alone.
Do we really want to plant our flag on the ‘holding the door open’ hill?
